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Defendant’s cocaine distribution conspiracy conviction is affirmed where: 1) because of the many similarities between the crime of conviction and the two previous drug runs by defendant, there was no error in the district court’s determination that the evidence of the previous runs was relevant to establish how the conspiracy was structured and operated, and thus intrinsic; 2) certain testimony by an officer was offered to rehabilitate his assertion that defendant appeared deceptive during interrogation rather than for the truth of the assertion, and thus was not hearsay; and 3) given the amount of inculpatory evidence in the record, the jury was not irrational in finding defendant guilty of knowing, voluntary participation in the narcotics conspiracy....

What does the recent ruling in Oracle v. Google mean for the future GPL/GNUs? If we’re lucky, and if wide Internet opinion is correct, it means more of the status quo – and that’s a good thing if you’re an open-source community developer. For a case that’s worth billions of dollars, the jury’s special verdict sheet looks awfully innocuous. It’s the Code That Makes the Difference Although lines of code are subject to copyright protection, the functioning purpose of one company’s Application Programming Interface (API) may be mimicked by another person so long as the code itself is different....

We all need help sometimes, especially in the beginning. Other more experienced lawyers seem like an obvious choice. But at what point does asking for another attorney’s help become total dependence on that other lawyer? Just keep a few things you mind. Ask For Another Lawyer’s Help When: You Don’t Know the Procedure: It’s a sad reality of life but law schools do seem to place too much emphasis on theory and not enough on actual procedural implementation of the law through motions, petitions, and pushing papers....

We may be preaching to the choir here, but it appears that general counsel are increasingly valuable to their employers, especially in the area of compliance, even while the rest of the legal market struggles. The idea that people will always need lawyers still holds true, but in the current economy a lot of the “people” who still need lawyers are companies. As state and federal governments increase regulations and crack down on consumer issues, companies desperately need legal advice....

A few weeks ago, we advised you to handle your Yelp disputes with clients using kindness and confidentiality. Shortly after the post went live, a concerned reader wrote in to ask if we had heard about the Yelp extortion allegations and lawsuits. We have definitely heard the conspiracy theories, they’ve been around for years. But, coincidentally, the owner of a fabulous local Chinese restaurant had just complained to me, the night before, that after she had turned down Yelp’s advertising services, negative reviews popped up on her page, and positive reviews were hidden by the site’s quality control filter....

If the best things in life are free, compliance should be one of them. It may cost your company some time and effort to comply with workplace regulations, but it’s nothing like government fines and litigation. Being out of compliance can be dollars-and-cents costly. So to help control those costs, Forbes offered some strategies to ensure regulatory compliance. Here are three free tips from their experts: 1. Utilize Free Resources “Subscribe to trusted law firm blogs and attend conferences to help you stay up to date with federal and state policies,” they say....

One of the biggest issues new lawyers discover is that the demands of the job are very real and don’t end when the office closes. It’s a difficult transition from law student/post-bar exam purgatory to full-fledged lawyer. But the truth is that even veteran lawyers still struggle with work-life balance. Fortunately, these days, the topic of work-life balance is rather prevalent in the mainstream, and that means you can probably find some leeway for trying to find out what that means for you....

Litigators are nothing without a good expert in their pocket. You can hang all the billboards you want, make indescribably amazing Super Bowl commercials or really bad ads, and line up dozens of clients in neck braces in your lobby, but without an expert to testify that her neck really is hurting from whiplash, your case is probably hopeless. It’s not just personal injury attorneys that need experts either. Criminal law, patent and IP disputes, and pretty much all litigation can come down to a battle of the experts....

Computers may not have tough lives, but they can have terrible deaths. Some have their lives cut short out of nowhere, sideswiped by a bug of virus and sent to oblivion. Others are slowly strangled over years, suffering under bloatware, spyware, and adware. The worst computers, however, they get thrown out of windows, driven over by cars, doused in hot water, or, as recently happened in Colorado, taken down in a rain of bullets....

The Association of Corporate Counsel has released its 2015 survey of Chief Legal Officers. ACC asked almost 9,500 CLOs or GCs a whole lot of questions, receiving responses from 1,289 of them in 46 countries, to determine what GCs are thinking about these days. Among the things in-house lawyers seem to be most worried about: ethics, compliance, and data protection. Let’s look at five highlights. This was a huge area of concern, with 96 percent of respondents saying that ethics was “important” in 2015 and 25 percent saying it was “very important....

An employer does not have to reassign a disabled employee to a vacant position ahead of more qualified, non-disabled employees, a federal appeals court said. The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals said the American with Disabilities Act “only requires an employer allow a disabled person to compete equally with the rest of the world for a vacant position” as a reasonable accommodation. “The ADA does not require reassignment without competition for, or preferential treatment of, the disabled,” the panel said....

This really shouldn’t have taken this long to decide. Max Moussazadeh is serving a seventy-five year sentence for murder. He is also a practicing Jew and his family kept kosher throughout his life. In 2005, he filed an administrative grievance over the unavailability of kosher foods. However, it was dismissed again, as the lower court felt that Moussazadeh had not yet re-exhausted his administrative remedies and because he was not “sincere in his beliefs....

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last week that the Army Corps of Engineers (Corps) is liable to property owners who suffered billions of dollars in damage during Hurricane Katrina, reports the Associated Press. The court affirmed District Judge Stanwood Duvall’s 2009 decision in the matter on Friday, finding that the Corps is not protected by qualified immunity under the Flood Control Act. The Mississippi River Gulf Outlet (MRGO), which affords a shorter shipping route between the Gulf of Mexico and New Orleans, was originally designed to be 36 feet deep and 500 feet wide, increasing at the Gulf of Mexico to 38 feet deep and 600 feet wide....

What should lawyers be focusing on in the middle of their work day? Recently, we gave you five things every attorney should do to start their day. Of course, before that, there were reminders about what you should have done before you leave the office at the end of the day. So, naturally, the next obvious question is – what about the middle of the day? Not the beginning, as you’re revving up, or the end, as you begin to wind down....

More than a year after the Ninth Circuit initiated a judicial misconduct review at his own request, former Chief District Judge Richard Cebull stepped down from the bench, ending his brief foray into senior status. While normally we’d avoid quoting such inappropriate material, the content of the email is relevant to the concerns of some over whether Judge Cebull, in finding such things humorous, could be impartial in cases involving women and minorities, reports The Associated Press....

A high school graduate from a Massachusetts public school filed a $2 million federal suit against the school district, its officials, and the towns in which the school district is located, creating the first suit of its kind to be brought under Massachusetts’ Anti-Bullying Law. Eighteen-year-old Isabella “Belle” Hankey alleges that the bullying she experienced during her time at Concord-Carlisle High School, which included “death threats, crude slurs, . . ....

Everybody is in the cloud these days, including lawyers of all sizes. From BigLaw to solo practitioners, cloud computing has become a great equalizer. It enables almost any lawyer to practice virtually anywhere. Many concerns, like cybersecurity and confidentiality, are always there. But the cloud-based lawyer is not some tech experiment. It’s a proven business model that can help keep you competitive. Cloud Practice Small firms have never been in a better position to threaten BigLaw, says Carolyn Elefant....

Impostor syndrome is the feeling that you are not cut out for your job, combined with a fear of being discovered as a fraud. That’s the syndrome plaguing many lawyers today, writes Neha Samat in an article for the ABA Journal. She says it’s a hidden source of their stress. Samat shared her perspective after reading about a lawyer who committed suicide because he couldn’t cope. She cried because she knows too many lawyers who are suffering from the same malady....

For the Marinello Schools of Beauty, an adverse court decision would have required a complete make-over of the business plan. Students had sued the cosmetology school, alleging they were treated like employees and were owed money for cleaning up salons and other menial tasks. The school answered that they were students fulfilling educational requirements. In Benjamin v. B&H Education, Inc., the courts said the schools were just doing business as usual....

In Jackson v. Watkins, No. 09-10635, an action claiming that plaintiff, a veteran county prosecutor, was discharged on account of his race in violation of Title VII, the court affirmed summary judgment for defendants where plaintiff failed to provide sufficient evidence to rebut each of defendants’ nondiscriminatory reasons for plaintiff’s termination. In US v. Dowl, No. 09-31041, the court affirmed defendant’s conviction and sentence for wire fraud and theft of government funds, holding that 1) the alleged wire supported the wire fraud count, and the evidence presented at trial supported defendant’s wire fraud conviction; 2) it was not error for the district court to define “steal,” for the purposes of 18 U....