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Lawyers will convene later this month to discuss the path of a case that made it up to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals earlier this year. The case involved Jeffrey MacDonald, a former Army surgeon at Fort Bragg. MacDonald was convicted in a 1970 murder of his pregnant wife and two daughters. He maintained his innocence throughout his trial, which culminated in a 1979 conviction. MacDonald claims that he had evidence that exonerated him....

You can bill clients for the work your student interns do, even if you pay those interns nothing. That’s the conclusion of a recent opinion from the New York State Bar Association’s Committee on Professional Ethics. In March, the committee addressed the situation law student interns who work, for free, for local firms, in exchange for academic credit in lieu of cold hard cash. The firm could ethically bill for that student work, the committee concluded, though it emphasized that it spoke only of attorney ethics, not applicable labor law....

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg acquired Instagram pretty much on his own, without consulting Facebook’s board or its in-house lawyers, The Wall Street Journal reports. Zuckerberg and Instagram’s CEO Kevin Systrom hammered out the $1 billion deal – the biggest in Facebook’s history – over three days of discussions at Zuckerberg’s home in Palo Alto, Calif., according to the Journal. The board “was told, not consulted” by Zuck about the deal just hours before it was set in stone....

Dirty, dirty gossip. It has no place in the workplace, unless you are the enterprising sort who uses it to your advantage. However, for employers, it usually hurts more than it helps. Easy solution: ban it. After all, free speech doesn’t extend into the private workplace, does it? It’s not a bad idea, but if you do ban office gossip, just be sure to provide a Section 7 exemption. This isn’t the first time the National Labor Relations Board has invoked Section 7 to protect workers’ speech....

Myth #10: Finally, with the banking and mortgage mess, we’ve had a crisis that won’t be blamed on the lawyers. As evidenced by emergency warning from the California State Bar, it appears that more than a few of the less scrupulous members of our profession have found ways to prey on those in desperate need. Who says lawyers are blood-suckers? Myth #9: Legal ethics forbids many romantic relationships with clients, but sleeping with a client’s spouse will probably not lead to problems....

With so much of our data, and our clients’ data, transferred over the Internet, lawyers have an especially significant interest in data privacy. We aren’t tweens visiting Justin Bieber sites. We are counselors with clients’ financial records, identifying information, and sensitive case data stored on our computers, in the cloud, and occasionally, in our email inboxes. It’s not just the company and hackers you have to worry about, however. Though the Feds aren’t peeping into everyone’s inboxes, if you have a client with a sensitive matter, isn’t worth choosing the most stalwart provider?...

Date: Tuesday, April 28, 2009 Time: 12:30 PM (EDT)/9:30 AM (PDT) Register today Description: The consensus among corporate counsel is that the state and federal rules have only complicated the discovery process and increased costs. Register for this webcast to learn how electronic discovery can be used as a strategic advantage through the proper interpretation and practical application of the rules. By gaining the upper hand you can mitigate risk, control costs and avoid being put on the defensive....

The most lucrative practice is not the one that makes the most dollars, grasshopper. It is rather the practice that makes the most sense. OK, so that’s not a real Chinese proverb. But David Carradine wasn’t a real Kung Fu master either. The point is, legal career consultants agree that if you want to make money and be happy, choose a practice area that you like. After all, money doesn’t buy happiness, right?...

With the recent news about the Trump administration’s proposal to roll back the granting of work visas to the spouses of high-skilled immigrants, employers that need to recruit those high-skilled immigrants may soon be faced with a difficult choice: move operations abroad, or pay immigrant employees more money to offset the fact that spouses will be unable to work. And while there is a severe lack of support for the proposed rollback and critics seem to make valid points that the proposed rollback is nothing but bad for businesses and the country, the Trump administration is continuing to push forward....

In 2011, Leodegario Resendiz-Moreno pleaded guilty to one charge of illegal reentry. His sentencing range was calculated at a total offense level of 21, which included an upward adjustment based upon the judge’s determination that a prior Georgia conviction for first-degree cruelty to children constituted a crime of violence. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals disagreed with that finding, and vacated the sentence. Sure, a child cruelty conviction may support the argument that Resendiz-Moreno is a terrible person, but it doesn’t support a finding that he committed a crime of violence....

The trial of the infamous James “Whitey” Bulger began with jury selection in Boston federal court on Tuesday, with both the prosecution and defense choosing jurors from a pool of 675 people. Bulger’s legendary status as a Boston mobster and crime boss will play a huge role in voir dire, asjurors are chosen to hear charges based on Bulger’s decades of alleged killings and other misdeeds, reports USA Today. What will the prosecution and defense focus on to ensure a proper jury for the infamous 83-year-old?...

While everyone wants to make more money for the work that they do, there are times when you might need to make extra money, which is a little bit different. Unlike small firm attorneys who can only really make more money by generating business, raising their hourly rates, working more hours, or setting up ethical referral fee arrangements, solo attorneys are uniquely positioned to make extra money outside of the legal field....

Sure, you’ve got the legal marketing basics down: a website, some print ads, all that jazz. But you want to see your firm grow bigger, faster. Can you? Of course, with a little bit of work. To help you out, here are our favorite posts on how to take your legal marketing to the next level, courtesy of the FindLaw archives. If you want to bring in new clients, you want to make sure you’ve got a strong online presence – including a lot of online reviews....

A mix between outside counsel and in-house attorney, compliance attorneys are the Liger of the legal industry. They’ve managed to straddle both the corporate and private practice worlds and they’ve been getting a lot of press as the solution to legal unemployment and corporate regulation. Why all the hype? The work of a compliance attorney will be familiar to most in-house lawyers, though the compliance attorney generally makes only a fraction of an in-house lawyer’s salary....

Sixty-eight-year-old Dr. Pramela Ganji is serving her last days in federal prison, but she will soon be free again. The U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals court threw out the case against her in United States of America v. Ganji. The appeals court said prosecutors did not prove she was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. The government’s case was “rather peculiar,” the judges said. It was also a lesson in how not to try a case....

FindLaw columnist Eric Sinrod writes regularly in this section on legal developments surrounding technology and the internet. The Second Annual Cost of Cyber Crime Study by the Ponemon Institute makes plain that cyber attacks are not going away and are financially painful for victim companies. Indeed, the median annualized cost of cyber crime for a company is $5.9 million, with a range of between $1.5 million $36.5 million per company. This represents a 56% increase from the 2010 median cost....

In White v. Thaler, No. 06-20736, a murder prosecution, the court of appeals reversed the denial of petitioner’s habeas petition, on the ground that defense counsel rendered ineffective assistance by 1) cross examining petitioner regarding his post-arrest silence, which allowed the prosecutor to impeach him with his failure to tell the police his exculpatory version of the events, and 2) failing to file a motion in limine or object to evidence of the murder victim’s pregnancy....

Between Facebook, Twitter, and a website (and, if you’ve been reading here, podcasts!), maintaining your Internet presence can seem like a full-time job, or at least a half-time job. And, wait, don’t you have a law firm to run? All that marketing won’t matter if you don’t have to do any actual lawyering. That’s why you might want to consider hiring a social media manager – a full- or part-time employee who not only manages your Twitter feed, but functions partly as a marketing manager who knows how to leverage social media....

Is a teacher’s pattern of inappropriate conduct toward students sufficient proof to support a Title IX sexual harassment lawsuit against the school district? Not necessarily, according the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals. J.F.K. and M.C.K. sued the Troup County School District for sexual harassment under Title IX after learning that Elizabeth Gaddy, a 45-year-old teacher, had molested O.K.K., their 12-year-old son. O.K.K.’s parents claimed that multiple parents had alerted the school principal, Thomas Whatley, to Gaddy’s unprofessional behavior toward O....

The Securities and Exchange Commission has launched a “preliminary” investigation into Groupon’s revision of its fourth-quarter financial results, The Wall Street Journal reports. It’s the latest sign of a rocky relationship between the financial regulator and Groupon, a popular online “daily deals” coupon service. Groupon and SEC regulators exchanged a series of contentious emails in the run-up to Groupon’s IPO last fall, the blog Silicon Beat reports. Less than five months after its IPO, Groupon announced Friday it was revising fourth-quarter results to show a bigger net loss and lower revenue, Reuters reports....