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When is a BigLaw partner not considered an “employee” under anti-discrimination laws? When he can’t prove he was a “partner” in name only, a New York justice held in a recent ruling. New York Supreme Court Justice Marcy Friedman dismissed an age-discrimination case brought by a former partner at Holland & Knight, a BigLaw firm in Manhattan with more than 1,000 employees. Former partner John Weir sued H&K in 2007, accusing the firm of age discrimination, The Wall Street Journal reports....

Waleska Garayalde-Rijos applied to be a firefighter in the Municipality of Carolina in Puerto Rico. She was the only woman to apply, and though she had the highest test score among all the applicants, she was not hired. Carolina hired seven men with lower test scores for the vacant positions. The EEOC Complaint Garayalde-Rijos filed a charge with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (“EEOC”). And only after the EEOC concluded that gender discrimination occurred in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Municipality of Carolina hired Garayalde-Rijos for the last vacant position....

In an analysis of moral turpitude crimes, the Fourth Circuit recently found that embezzlement is not tantamount to theft for purposes of the Immigration and Nationality Act. In the case at bar, it involved a man who was under threat of removal from the United States for having committed an “aggravated felony.” But it also shines a light on a rather peculiar question. Just when is embezzlement theft? Is all property from fraudulently-obtained consent a form of theft?...

What would we do if Facebook didn’t remind us of all those birthdays? That’s a 156 million-user, class-action question, at least in the United States. A proposed class action says the automatic text reminders violate the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. The plaintiff says the text messages sent to users’ cell phones are just like unsolicited robocalls outlawed by the TCPA. For now, a federal judge in San Francisco has put the case on hold while the appeals court decides whether to step into the debate....

I’m cheap. Or stingy. Or frugal. Whatever you want to call it, the idea of paying a monthly or annual fee for software irks me beyond belief. In the old days, you’d buy software on a floppy disk or a CD-Rom. You’d own it. Occasionally, you’d perhaps update it via the Internet. Every few years, when a “must have” feature was added, you’d pay for the upgrade. Now, software is moving into a perpetual update model where new features are added and updated sporadically, and where the software was once a one-time cost, companies are beginning to charge annual fees to cover that perpetual development....

Last year, Florida Judge William Thomas, who is well-regarded amongst those who have worked with him in the Miami-Dade Circuit, was nominated by President Barack Obama with Senator Marco Rubio’s support. Ten months later, Rubio, a Republican, has reversed course, and many are pointing the finger at the change of heart at politics, and the judge’s sexual orientation. Rubio’s representative instead blamed the change of heart on Judge Thomas’s “judicial temperament” and stated that the nomination was quashed because Sen....

Law isn’t considered an artistic profession, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t creative ways for lawyers to use an iPad. An iPad is a powerful tool for a law office if you know how to use it well. Instead of carrying around multiple tools to get the job done, many attorneys have discovered that most of the time you only need one, as the website iPhone J.D. recently explained. Maybe you’re looking for more ways to use your office iPad, or maybe you’ve been considering whether it’s worth the cost....

If you are constantly tweeting, you should at least know about your Twitter privacy rights. And let’s just say be careful what you tweet (and where you surf) if you plan on committing a crime. American law enforcement officials are turning to Twitter more and more for incriminating evidence against you. And the information they get is much more than just what you tweet. According to the company, U.S. law enforcement officials made 679 requests for information from the micro-blogging site in the first half of 2012, and the company granted the information 75% of the time, reports the Los Angeles Times....

In a conviction of defendant for being a felon in possession of a firearm, arising from a consensual search of a bedroom by police and the seizure of a pistol resulting from the search while the police were investigating a break-in and a shooting at the defendant’s residence, district court’s grant of defendant’s motion to suppress the pistol is reversed as, although the district court viewed the evidence through the lens of its later significance, the officers acted reasonably in seizing it based on what they knew at the time....

Last year, you may have gone an entire day without Wikipedia thanks to the SOPA blackout. In January 2012, thousands of websites went dark for a day to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA). And it worked. The bills died. It’s like the old saying: Give a man a bill summary, and he’ll promptly ignore it. Stand between a man and his access to crowd-sourced reference materials, and he’ll make a call to Congress....

The State of Indiana is getting flack for passing a “religious freedom restoration act” (RFRA) that critics say would allow businesses to legally discriminate against gays and lesbians. Indiana joined a significant minority of states (20 with laws actually on the books) in enacting such a law, including all three states in the Eleventh Circuit. Are these states’ laws significantly different? RFRAs take an on an innocuous form. They say merely that a state burden on religious practice must be limited to the “least restrictive means of furthering a compelling government interest,” which used to be the official Supreme Court test for burdens on free exercise of religion....

When Apple unveiled its ultra-thin, ultra-light, ultra-portable MacBook on Monday, onlookers noticed it was missing something besides a few extra pounds. Ports. The new MacBook has just one port, called “USB-C,” which Apple SVP Phil Schiller claimed was being adopted by more companies than just Apple. The USB-C will handle all your charging and peripheral needs – at least, those ones that aren’t already handled by wireless technology. Allegedly. USB-C actually dates from last August, when the USB Promoter Group, which is responsible for the USB specification, finalized the design....

Lawyers running small and boutique firms often have to wear many hats, playing the role of litigator, marketer and office manager. For many, this also means being your own do-it-yourself human resources department. Of course, no attorney has enough time to spend write out employee guidelines or flipping through new resumes all day. To keep from getting bogged down in administrative tasks, your small firm H.R. work can be made more efficient and more streamlined by focusing in on what matters....

Normally, a defense attorney’s strategy is to claim his client didn’t do it. But extraordinary cases call for extraordinary measures. On day one of the trial of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the alleged Boston Marathon bomber, the defense conceded that Tsarnaev helped plant the bomb that killed three and injured over 260 back in 2013. From the very beginning, though, the Tsarnaev team’s strategy has been to look ahead to the sentencing phase by planting the seeds of that argument here in the guilt phase....

A Texas man convicted for possession and distribution of child pornography won’t have his sentenced revisited, the Fifth Circuit ruled on Tuesday. Peter Groce had been convicted for receiving child pornography, with a sentencing enhancement for distributing child porn in a bartered exchange. Groce’s child porn crimes were committed through peer-to-peer file sharing programs – the kind that are often used to share bootlegged music or movies. Since those programs don’t involve direct communication, there was a question as to whether the “bargaining” enhancement could apply....

We all know attorneys can’t disclose confidential information gained in the course of representation. But what about public, potentially embarrassing information about a client? Can a lawyer forward an embarrassing blog post about a former client to her colleagues? Can an attorney publicly disapprove of a client’s behavior, years after finishing representation? Or would such actions violate a lawyer’s duty of confidentiality? These questions were addressed by a recent formal ethics opinion from the California Bar....

If you’re a technology-minded attorney, you probably anxiously awaited the release of Apple’s newest gadget: the iPhone 4S. And one of the biggest “upgrades” to this new phone? The Siri speech recognition software. Many attorneys may wonder if this new “assistant” is worth it. Certainly, the commercials look pretty awesome. But how does Siri really stack up? So far, reviews have been generally positive. Most find the software relatively easy to use....

A federals appeals court affirmed convictions against three defendants based in part on lay witness testimony about the meaning of slang words used in drug sales such as “tweezy.” “Tweezy” means crack cocaine, and “step up a yard” means turning powder into crack, the witness testified in United States of America v. Dunston. The U.S. First Circuit Court of Appeals said Timothy Boyle, a DEA agent who had reviewed hundreds of undercover recordings of crack cocaine deals, was well qualified to testify about the meaning of drug slang....

Summary judgments get called a lot of names – MSJ, summary adjudication, judgment as a matter of law. In the U.S. First Circuit Court of Appeals, the judges call it “the summary judgment ax.” At least that’s how they described it in Rivera-Rivera v. Medina & Medina, a hostile work environment case. The appeals court affirmed in part and reversed in part a decision on summary judgment. Basically, the trial judge should have used a scalpel instead of an ax....

In Re: Sherman, No. 09-1572, involved a challenge to the bankruptcy court’s denial of discharge of the $983,000 debt based on its finding that the debtor appropriated the victims’ property for his own benefit with fraudulent intent, thus finding the elements necessary to hold the debtor responsible as an embezzler. As stated in the decision: “Young is helpful again, in its example of embezzlement by using entrusted money for the recipient’s own purposes in a way he knows the entrustor did not intent or authorize....