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Penn-America Ins. Co. v. Lavigne, 09-2059, involved an insurer’s suit against its insured and plaintiff seeking a declaratory judgment that the insured’s insurance policy excluded liability coverage for claims arising from roofing, arising from serious injuries sustained by plaintiff when a portion of a scaffolding snapped while visiting his friend, the insured, at the job-site. In affirming district court’s grant of summary judgment in favor of the insurer, the court held that the only language added to Endorsement A plainly expresses the intent of the parties to exclude claims arising from roofing....

Lawyers around the world need to be on the lookout for scammers pretending to be them on the internet. Unfortunately, there might not be much you can do to stop a scammer from using your name, address, or even copying your website content, in order to make a credible looking online profile to scam legal consumers. At this point, the best you can do is know the basics of how the scam works, monitor your online presence, and be ready to contact the authorities if you find that a fake lawyer website has been setup using your identity....

Judge Lynn Hughes’ federal district courtroom may have earned itself a reputation as one litigators want to avoid. Simply put, wild-card judges often cause appealable issues, and appeals are expensive, and Judge Hughes is proving to be one such wild-card. Judge Hughes isn’t yelling for attorneys to get off his lawn, though based on the remarks the Fifth Circuit is blasting him over this time, he probably would. Apparently Judge Hughes actually said the following to a woman prosecutor:...

While CSI-style forensics make for compelling TV and really damning evidence in a courtroom, the truth is, forensics aren’t always accurate. Sure, DNA evidence is pretty much rock-solid, but things like hair and fingerprints even have been discredited, right alongside bite marks too. And to that end, the Innocence Project has filed a lawsuit against the National Museum of Health and Medicine after it refused to allow the group to review records related to forensic bite mark evidence....

It is enough to make you defenestrate your lunch. By going beyond the exigible using supererogatory vocabulary, Judge Selya just took the simple matter of appealing a plea bargain and made it far more complicated. Waivers of appeal are presumptively enforceable and will be upheld so long as three elements are met. The plea agreement should have a clear statement elucidating the waiver and delineating its scope. Also, the judge should question the defendant specifically about his understanding of terms of the waiver and agreement, as well as inform him of its ramifications....

When the Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act was announced, it promised to quash a number of Securities and Exchange regulations that had made startup company funding an arduous process restricted to the most well-connected angel investors and venture capitalists. It would allow startups to publicly sell stakes in their private companies, and allow crowdfunding (like what we’ve seen on Kickstarter) for the company itself, rather than for a product or project....

It’s not like we told you so, but we did say nondisclosure agreements make Weinsteins possible. Now six women have sued Harvey Weinstein for civil racketeering and hiring lawyers “to prevent, hinder and avoid the prosecution, reporting, or disclosure of his sexual misconduct.” In the immortal words of Uncle Buck to a terrified teenager, “Is there a little similarity there?” We Think So In their class action, the actresses say Weinstein lured hundreds of women to the proverbial “casting couch” ostensibly to help their careers....

At the annual Relativity Fest in Chicago earlier this month, kCura, the eDiscovery company, brought together four federal judges to discuss eDiscovery, the law, and even a bit of privacy. The panel, hosted by kCura’s eDiscovery counsel, David Horrigan, featured some of the names behind eDiscovery’s “most impactful rulings,” Legaltech News’s Ian Lopez reports. The discussion covered everything from proportionality to the Sedona Principles to Deflategate. Here are some of the highlights....

While many attorneys in the US are concerned about losing their jobs due to legal outsourcing, others are using outsourcing to benefit their clients. India has become a hotbed for the outsourcing of American legal work. The New York Times published an article on August 4, profiling Christopher Wheeler, a former assistant attorney general in New York who moved to India to take a job managing 110 Indian lawyers at a legal outsourcing company called Pangea3....

Yesterday, when tinkering with the free Office Web Apps, we also came across SkyDrive. While we had heard of it, we had never taken the time to really get to know it. So, we did what any tech geek with a company computer would do: installed another program. Despite our extremely modest expectations, it’s actually pretty darn good. Have you used DropBox? If you forced us to describe the difference between the two services, we’d mumble a bit and then say that SkyDrive is prettier....

Are you looking for new technology that will help you with your practice? There are two new law practice management tools that help attorneys manage documents for e-discovery. While there are many attorneys attempting to do e-discovery on their own, sometimes it does help to work with companies that specialize in document management. The first is DiscoverReady and the second is M-Files. Attorneys who recently attended the 2011 LegalTech Conference got first-hand views of both services....

Law firms everywhere, here’s some unsolicited advice: Don’t throw a Halloween party that makes light of your firm’s work. This is especially true if your firm deals with serious legal actions like foreclosures, such as Steven J. Baum’s New York law firm. It can cost you goodwill and your reputation. Baum’s firm specializes in foreclosures. It’s what many describe as a “foreclosure mill.” Surprisingly, in 2010 some of the firm’s employees decided to throw a Halloween costume bash that poked fun at foreclosed homeowners....

As an employer, you have more than just the responsibility of running your firm – you manage everyone that works there. This is a big month for interacting with employees; next Wednesday is Administrative Professionals Day, and the day after is Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day. As the fearless leader of your law firm, you need to have a plan in place for hosting your employees’ daughters and sons....

Here is a lesson for in house counsel that you should already know: emails can be searched, and the things you say on the phone or in an email can really come back to bite you. For an example, we need only to look to the Rajaratnam trial in Manhattan. Raj Rajaratnam, who was heard on wiretaps at talking about setting up a false e-mail trail to create evidence that he did not buy a stock on which he had received inside information because of that information....

Reverse auctions continue to change the way small firms get work. If your firm is fishing for new projects, you may encounter this process. Should you be concerned? Not if you’re up-to-speed and you know what you’re getting into. This rise of reverse auctions parallels the increasing use of alternative fee arrangements. In the context of nit-picking over legal fees, it makes sense that a business would engage in competitive bidding for legal services....

Sure, the legal industry isn’t the most creative in the world. But can a robot eventually perform the job of a lawyer? We may be about the find out. In the burgeoning field of “quantitative legal prediction,” engineers and computer scientists are creating programs that can perform some of the functions of attorneys. By combining databases with algorithms, these engineers are creating programs that can analyze case variables and identify patterns in order to predict the outcomes of a case, reports Dallas Blog....

BlackBerry might be releasing a tablet computer and investors like the news. After The Wall Street Journal published an article on the product, which would compete with the iPad, shares rose 3%. It is believed that the new product could be formally announced by BlackBerry next week at a developer’s conference in San Francisco. The iPad has already been a hit for Apple, selling millions. The BlackBerry product, which some have already dubbed the “BlackPad,” will have a seven inch touch screen, Bluetooth, broadband and the ability to connect to cellular networks through a BlackBerry smartphone, as well as one or more built in cameras, according to sources cited in the story....

After a police dog named Rocco was stabbed to death, jurors at the trial of his accused killer listened to a recording of the dog barking. It was too much for one juror, who started to cry. The defendant’s attorney asked the judge to remove the juror, but the judge refused and an appeals court affirmed the ruling. “The showing of emotion, in and of itself, during upsetting testimony, does not require juror dismissal,” the Pennsylvania appeals court said....

Skype and eBay have been in a hot mess about Skype’s peer-to-peer (P2P) online telephone technology for months now. Well, they might be close to settlement according to the New York Times and other independent sources. Skype founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis sold Skype to eBay in 2005. And just like the “mornings after” with any big purchase, when John Donahue stepped into the role of eBay CEO in 2008 he began to assess and reassess how Skype meshed with eBay as a whole....

Charlottesville, Virginia. Beloved by Thomas Jefferson. Adopted by John Grisham. Home to the University of Virginia. (One hellUVa school.) You know what you won’t find in Charlottesville if the city council has its way? Admissible drone evidence. Charlottesville is the first U.S. city to pass an anti-drone resolution. What does the resolution mean for the courts? A whole lotta nothing. It isn’t binding. It certainly isn’t going to stop the police from investigating Charlottesvillians....