Posts

There’s no denying that we live in a digital world. For attorneys, the digital world has definitely provided some real conveniences. Digital projectors have replaced poster boards and easels, smartphones have revolutionized calendaring, digital filing is amazing, and the widespread adoption of email was absolutely game changing. But, along with the conveniences technology brings, some attorney jobs have gone the way of the dodo bird thanks to new developments. AI programs are starting to not only do the job that an attorney or paralegal would, the AI is doing it better, faster, and more efficiently than any human lawyer ever could....

A recent first circuit appeal is testing just how buried an arbitration clause can be in an employment or services agreement. The case involves a Lyft driver who is arguing that because the arbitration clause was buried in the fine print of the terms of service presented to him on his smartphone via the company’s app, it’s unconscionable to require him to arbitrate. And while that logic might be sound, courts have routinely dismissed this same sort of argument in favor of enforcing arbitration....

If there is a future for the law, lawyers may not be around to enjoy it. Technology is quickly turning them into dinosaurs. Smart robots are taking their jobs, and doing it a lot faster. That’s why attorneys need to future-proof their law practice. If they go extinct, at least their robots can keep billing. Future-Proofing The American Bar Association has foreseen it: technology is taking over law practice. The ABA Techshow, which begins Feb....

Two Boston College researchers caught a break on Wednesday when Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer extended a previous stay he had granted of a district court order demanding the researchers’ taped recordings with former Irish Republican Army members, reports the Boston Globe. The researchers, who have spent the last year trying to convince federal courts that they should be able to withhold oral history recordings from international authorities, now have until November 16 to ask the Supreme Court to review their case....

District court’s judgment upholding a school district’s proposed 2005-2006 individualized education program (IEP) addressing plaintiffs’ daughter’s special needs is affirmed as the plaintiffs’ daughter was afforded a free appropriate public education pursuant to the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) in the least restrictive environment. Read Lessard v. Wilton-Lyndeborough Coop. Sch. Dist., No. 08-2244 Appellate Information Appeal from the United States District Court for the District of New Hampshire Decided January 20, 2010...

Before a game, basketball players huddle up, touch fists, and let out a battle cry. Football, baseball, volleyball, soccer, and virtually all team players do the same. It is a ritual, perhaps born in a time when tribes assembled before going out to hunt or battle. So what’s that got to do with managing a law firm? Well, maybe it’s time to huddle up and motivate your team. It has to start on the inside because it’s a war out there....

Do you take meetings at local coffee shops? Do you like to step out of the office with colleagues, for a quick triple, venti, half sweet, non-fat, caramel macchiato break? At the same time, do you obsessively schedule out every aspect of your day? If you answered yes, you’re in luck. At Microsoft’s development conference in San Francisco today, Starbucks announced a new partnership with the tech giant: a Starbucks add-in for Office....

This is one of the more interesting jurisdictional and constitutional questions you’ll read about for a while: does the family of an unarmed Mexican national, shot across the border by a Border Patrol agent standing in the United States, have any cognizable claims whatsoever? The answer, for now, is yes: the Fifth Circuit held, earlier this week, that the family could bring a Fifth Amendment claim against the agent himself, but no claims against his supervisors, the agency, or the U....

When we last left Stingrays in January, the FBI insisted that they didn’t need a warrant to use them. The devices, which fool a cell phone into connecting with them as though they were a legitimate cell tower, are deployed from public spaces, where there’s no reasonable expectation of privacy, the FBI claimed. Everyone got a good chuckle out of that one, but the degree to which the FBI will go to keep Stingrays secret is no laughing matter, as we learned from new documents released by the New York Civil Liberties Union....

Money isn’t the only reason attorneys show up for work, but it’s at least one of the main motivators. You may have joined the legal profession out of a sense of justice, but few lawyers’ Atticus Finch dreams alone can pull them through another day of motion practice. That’s the job of cash. Compensation matters. But how you compensate your firm, or how your firm compensates you, can vary greatly from practice to practice....

When it comes to punctuation, few marks are as dreaded or confused as the semicolon. It’s more than comma, but less than period. Not surprisingly, even lawyers stumble over how and when to use them. Fortunately, if you’re one of those lawyers, here you can read about when you should be using semicolons. How to Use Semicolons in Legal Writing Generally, semicolons are used to connect two or more related, but independent, clauses in the same sentence....

Warning: The following may trigger law school exam or bar exam flashbacks. And while we all know that a legitimate contract can be executed on just about any medium, or even without a medium at all, a contract also requires more than just paper and ink. However, for one Alaska newsman, he was willing to sell his paper on a promise and signed promise to pay $1 million over a ten year period....

The Google-backed social network that seemed to flop from the beginning, Google+, has finally decided to just pack it up. There are a handful of people mourning, but they’ll at least have a few months to mourn together+. Unfortunately, the announcement of the platform’s demise was made all the worse due to a data breach exposing the data of 500,000 Google+ users. As noted in the reports, the platform was a complete and utter failure on the consumer-side, but the enterprise and business utilizations aren’t likely to go anywhere anytime soon....

There sure are a whole lot of legal tech apps out there these days. From being able to manage your entire practice from the palm of your hand to simply turning client docs into usable PDFs without a giant high-quality scanning machine, the smartphone has revolutionized the mobile and small firm lawyer’s life. And while lawyers may not have a reputation for being the most tech savvy bunch of professionals, legal consumers have certainly shown a willingness to dive right in to legal tech....

If you haven’t figured out the problem with open office space already, Harvard researchers did it for you. According to a new study, employees are more distracted and less productive in open office spaces. Not-so-academically-speaking, what they mean is open office space sucks. For tech types, it seemed like a good idea to have co-workers share space for collaboration. But it turns out they would rather interact with their computers....

It’s been awhile since our last FDA round-up, so there’s plenty to talk about. Selling genetics tests without prior FDA approval? That’s a paddlin’. And speaking of FDA approval, two drugs recently approved by the agency, one for Hepatitis C, and one for pain, are receiving opposite reactions from the public. And finally, antibiotic-free meat production may in our nation’s future. Maybe. Curious? Read on. The FDA came down hard on genetic-testing startup 23andMe this month, sending them a warning letter last month that accused them of marketing an unapproved medical device....

Last year, secure email provider Lavabit chose to shut down rather than sell out its customers by complying with a controversial court order. Today, it is challenging that court order in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. What’s at stake? It’s not just the company. It’s privacy rights and free speech. As with nearly every data collection controversy, the name at the center of the scandal is Edward Snowden. Shortly after he dropped a dime on his former employer, the National Security Agency, he used the Lavabit email service....

Whether you’re managing a solo practice or have a few or more lawyers below you, sometimes you just need to get some help. After all, what you don’t know can certainly end up hurting you. And even though half the time the advice you find online might not be custom cut to fit for your particular law practice, often enough, it can get you thinking about what you need to do to better manage your own practice....

We’ve all been there before. Caught, like a deer in headlights, with absolutely no knowledge whatsoever about a particular legal concept. So rather than diving into real legal research, we jump on Google to run a basic search. Then, viola! A Wikipedia.com page pops up. We read it over, surprised with how in-depth the wiki-page went, and how authoritatively it was footnoted. But, relying on Wikipedia for a legal citation, or as the authority for a legal issue, is like going to England for a beach vacation in January....

The Eleventh Circuit tossed a Miami woman’s life sentence in a high-profile witness-tampering case last week, finding that the woman had received ineffective counsel a decade ago during the plea bargaining process for her case. Based on the Supreme Court’s Missouri v. Frye and Lafler v. Cooper opinions, the Eleventh Circuit ordered that Yuby Ramirez be released from custody. Yuby Ramirez, Edward Lezcano, and Jairo Castro were involved in a conspiracy to murder various witnesses who were scheduled to testify against Salvador Magluta and Augusto Falcon, alleged drug kingpins in South Florida....