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Netflix is not just movies; it’s about real-life drama. Dirty Money: Cartel Bank is a documentary that speaks for itself. Watch it and you’ll see the real story about Mexican drug cartels laundering money through a global bank. The producers turned to Brett Wolf, a senior correspondent with Thomson Reuters, for deep background. Here’s the inside scoop. The Interview Thomson Reuters is an international leader in information services, including FindLaw, known as “The Answer Company....

While Google may have seemed to come out of the recent walkout fiasco with their reputation intact, it appears that Google’s lawyers still hadn’t gotten the memo that the company wants to have a pro-worker reputation. In a pleading filed in an NLRB action weeks after the company CEO seemed to have just barely smoothed things over by rescinding the company policy of mandatory arbitration for sexual harassment claims, the lawyers traded away all that goodwill by arguing that employees shouldn’t have the right to organize via company email....

One proof-positive thing about the future: it will come. And when it does, will you still have a job? Or will the future take back the career you worked so hard to create for yourself? If you aren’t sure about your future, here’s another thing to know. Lawyers, you really can future-proof your career. Career-counselor Ashira Prossack says the main thing to do is to invest in yourself. She says to:...

In 2011, the State Bar of California began taking an aggressive approach to auditing lawyers for MCLE compliance. In 2012, 5% of lawyers, about 3,000 to 4,000, were audited and in 2013 10% will be audited – between 7,000 and 8,000 lawyers. The best way to survive and maybe even avoid an MCLE audit, of course, is to be in compliance with your requirements. Here are five tips which will help you get and stay compliant and might keep you out of the Bar’s sights....

Last week, we had a little fun with good and bad lawyer ads. Our main contention was that too many ads contain some guy standing in front of a bookcase and babbling about what he can do for you - the timeless “telling, not showing” problem. In any good story or speech, the most important thing is to know your audience. You wouldn’t use the language of Judge Selya (think big, archaic words) when giving a speech to high schoolers, unless you were punishing them....

When a piece of an iceberg breaks off, it’s doesn’t mean sea levels will rise around the world. But if a polar cap starts to fracture, scientists will certainly take measurements. Sedgwick LLP, which has lost 40 lawyers in the past two weeks, is somewhere in between. It started with two groups of partners splitting off and then another 25 attorneys breaking away. It marks the most recent – and maybe the biggest – fracture at the firm, which lost more than 10 percent of its lawyers each year in recent years....

Last week, we covered the enormous verdict in the Trinity guardrail case: $175 million which, when tripled under federal law, could mean a verdict of $525 million. While Trinity has indicated it plans to appeal the jury verdict, that may not be necessary. Why? The judge in the case has just referred the parties to mediation with a Duke Law professor, Francis McGovern, who is one of the foremost experts in alternative dispute resolution....

Trying to get access to motions and court orders in Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s trial for allegedly committing the Boston Marathon bombing is not easy because most of the documents are sealed. But, there are a few documents that the public has access to. After reviewing these court papers and related news accounts, our first reaction is this: you just can’t make this stuff up. The flurry of motions must be keeping Judge O’Toole busy, and the trial, though not scheduled to start until November, already has the makings of a television drama....

Radio commercials are like the middle child of lawyer marketing – everyone knows they exist, but they are far too often forgotten or neglected. People always remember the older kids (print and television ads) and the younger kids (websites and social media), but radio? It’s probably one of the last things you think of, and yet, who doesn’t listen to the radio, at least occasionally? Of course, not all radio ads are going to be effective....

On Friday, The Guardian reported that the NSA is not only using malware, but they are tapping into U.S. telecom providers’ networks (with permission) and redirecting some users to malware via “man in the middle” attacks, similar to the way China censors its Internet. These attacks are directed at users of Tor, the anonymous Internet browser. Less complicated attacks are likely being used on less security conscious individuals as well....

Usually it’s clients who suffer because they didn’t read something all the way through. This time, though, it’s the lawyers who didn’t heed that most lawyerly of advice. Thanks to its lawyers – the good people at Sidley Austin, LLP – AT&T has to pay a $40 million jury verdict that would have been appealable, if only they’d filed the notice of appeal on time. After five years of patent infringement litigation, Two-Way Media won a jury verdict against AT&T on October 7, 2013....

If you’ve uploaded photos of family or friends to Facebook, you’ve probably been asked to “tag” them, or in the past few years, to confirm the tags suggested by Facebook. Instead of requiring you to say, “That’s Sarah!” Facebook now asks, “Hey, isn’t this Sarah?” In doing so, it uses its facial recognition software to scan members’ faces and identify them in photos posted across the site. That practice, made possible by Facebook’s “DeepFace” technology, may also be against the law, according to a new class action lawsuit filed against the social networking site....

Peter A. Folkens drew a picture of two dolphins crossing underwater. Robert Wyland painted a similar picture. The artists appreciate the same marine animals, but they have had different commercial successes. Folkens’ drawing, adapted for a Greenpeace card, sells for 1.50 Euros. Wyland’s art sells for a lot more. Folkens thought he could capture some of Wyland’s earnings by suing for copyright in Folkens v. Wyland Worldwide. A federal appeals court said there is no copyright in a naturally occuring scene....

Last year, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that displaced hurricane evacuees may not sue the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) for formaldehyde exposure under the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA) because the plaintiffs lacked subject matter jurisdiction. That case only involved Mississippi plaintiffs, but the outcome doesn’t change when the plaintiffs hail from Louisiana. Tuesday, the Fifth Circuit once again concluded that federal courts lack subject-matter jurisdiction to consider FEMA trailer formaldehyde exposure complaints under the FTCA....

In Moffitt v. Residential Funding Co., LLC, No. 10-1316, the Fourth Circuit dealt with plaintiffs’ three interlocutory appeals challenging the district court’s denial of their motions to remand their cases to state court, arising from their individual complaints against various financial entities alleging violations of the Maryland Secondary Mortgage Loan Law. Under these circumstances, where the plaintiffs filed amended complaints in federal court that alleged facts giving rise to federal diversity jurisdiction under the Class Action Fairness Act of 2005 after their cases were removed and prior to moving to remand, it need not be decided whether the cases were improperly removed as the amended complaints provided an independent basis for the district court to retain jurisdiction....

A Florida law that prevents doctors from asking patients about guns in their home will soon go into effect, the Associated Press reports. The Eleventh Circuit vacated an injunction against the law last week, allowing the so-called “Docs v. Glocks” law to go ahead. The Florida legislation, officially titled the “Firearm Owners Privacy Act,” prohibits doctors from talking with their patients about guns in their homes when irrelevant to medical care....

Rule v. Fort Dodge Animal Health, Inc., No. 09-1364, concerned a plaintiff’s putative class action suit against Weyth Corporation and its subsidiary, alleging that defendants had sold a heartworm medication to her dog without disclosing safety concerns revealed in initial testing and in subsequent use. In affirming district court’s grant of defendants’ motion to dismiss for failure to sate a claim, the court held that recovery generally is not available under the warranty of merchantability where the defect that made the product unfit caused no injury to the claimant and the threat is now gone and nothing now possessed by the claimant has been lessened in value....

Hackers have a bad rap – but not all hackers are bad. For instance, those wearing “white hats” are A-OK, according to the government in its recently filed appellate brief in the Auernheimer case. Background Andrew “Weev” Auernheimer (“Weev”) is a self-proclaimed hacker who, together with a colleague, found a gap in AT&T’s website that allowed him to harvest more than 100,000 email addresses of iPad users, according to The Washington Post....

While we wait for the First Circuit Court of Appeals to hear the “big guns” challenge to the Defense of Marriage Act, the court dealt with a related issue to gay marriage in a decision released on Tuesday. Upholding a Maine law that requires groups that spend more than $5,000 on referendum advocacy to disclose the identity of donors that gave more than $100, the First Circuit held that the law provided fair warning of its reach, it was not overbroad and its $100 threshold was narrowly tailored to meet Maine’s compelling interest in an informed electorate....

For game developers these days, suing YouTubers is becoming more and more of a thing. The creators of Fortnite, the current game that the whole world seems to be going crazy over, don’t seem to have any qualm with going after the Tubers that are helping other gamers cheat. It was recently reported that the company filed a lawsuit against a video game YouTuber that goes by the handle Golden Modz....