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Judges have long since banned cameras, video and sound recorders from the courtroom. But what about other electronic devices in courtrooms? Will there come a time when they are no longer welcome? We may be moving steadily, though slowly, in that direction. In fact, the D.C. Superior Court has just issued an order placing substantial restrictions on electronic devices, including phones, computers and MP3 players. The court’s order got this blogger thinking....

An ex-litigator Marc Rosenthal was sentenced to 20 years for his strong-arm tactics in settlements and for bribing a judge and witnesses. The former attorney in question – Marc Rosenthal – appealed the decision against him and argued that government wiretaps of his conversation should have been excluded from the body of evidence. That argument fell on deaf ears and the Fifth Circuit upheld the conviction. It seems that Texas has been getting hit with lawyer/judge bribery cases lately....

Google screwed up. Between 2008 and 2010, the company’s Street View cars, which take photos for a street-level view of locations on Google’s maps, were sniffing data packets from wireless networks. Many companies do this, cataloging the location and name of the networks to assist the company’s location services for smartphones – when a user’s GPS signal is faint, nearby wireless networks help pinpoint the user’s location. That was all fine....

Can you be a lawyer in real life, and play one on TV (or on the radio, or over the Internet)? Yes you can, and a live lawyer call-in show could be your ticket to fame and referrals. With a variety of new and traditional media within reach, the possibilities for lawyer self-marketing via call-in shows are virtually limitless. (Of course, you still have to follow all the ethical rules about attorney advertising....

Last month, we discussed an interesting dispute between AOL’s TechCrunch and People+, a startup that helps Silicon Valley professionals connect, in a semi-creepy, Google Glass-enabled world. People+ used TechCrunch’s CrunchBase database to pull the contact information needed for their competing product. Because CrunchBase licensed its content via the Creative Commons Attribution [CC BY] license, it was all legal, as the license only requires attribution back to CrunchBase. Except AOL also had other, more restrictive, terms of service on the API (software pipeline) used to access the data....

A few years ago, it seemed like Uber was a business model for success. Today, not so much. But the idea of the Uber-like law practice still persists. Like, wouldn’t it be great if you could pick up a new client as easy as picking up a passenger who just ordered your services on a cell phone? On-demand lawyers may thrive in the future, but not yet. As many have learned, it’s not that easy to create a new way to deliver legal services....

In Claudio v. Holder, No. 08-61060, the Fifth Circuit denied petitioner’s petition for review of the BIA’s final order removing petitioner from the U.S., on the ground that a petitioner cannot exhaust his claims by raising all of them in a notice of appeal to the BIA, but addressing only some in a supporting brief, and petitioner failed to exhaust the claim that he was not removable. As the court wrote: “[O]nce a petitioner elects in his notice of appeal to file a brief, that brief becomes the operative document through which any issues that a petitioner wishes to have considered must be raised....

Today is Employee Appreciation Day, and your law firm probably has at least few non-lawyer employees. Paralegals, legal assistants, and legal secretaries do a lot of the hard work at a law firm, and today is a great day to appreciate them for what they do. But heck, why limit your appreciation to one day? Even Ebenezer Scrooge celebrated Christmas all year long. You can certainly do better than him, and you don’t even have to come face to face with your own mortality first!...

ConductR is a cloud-based software tool designed with attorneys in mind. They tested and consulted with dozens of firms before releasing the product, according to the company website. Essentially, conductR is marketing itself as a litigation support management tool. The difference is that unlike more traditional on-site software and hardware, if you use conductR your information will be stored off-site, and the software is based on the software-as-a-service (or SaaS) model....

At this point, nearly everyone has at least heard of Bitcoin. The intangible cryptocurrency has been making headlines recently for reaching an all-time high, soaring to over $11,000 per Bitcoin. However, a recent decision out of the Federal District Court for the Northern District of California may have some crypto-investors concerned, as the IRS wants to get to know Bitcoin users in a way they’re likely not going to like, and the court is giving the federal agency the go ahead....

We hear the nightmarish “Big Brother” tales of employers requiring social media passwords as a condition of employment. But as in-house counsel might expect, only three percent of Americans have actually been asked by an employer to hand over their social media passwords, according to a new FindLaw survey. The incredibly low rate of password collection by employers brings great relief to employees. In fact, eighty-three percent of American adults say that employers should not be allowed to obtain passwords to personal social media accounts, such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, according to the FindLaw survey....

President Obama has nominated several Indian-Americans to posts on the federal judiciary, and last week, a unanimous U.S. Senate voted 94-0 to confirm Indira Talwani as the first Indian-American to sit in the First Circuit, reports INDOlink. Read on to learn more about Massachusetts’ newest district judge. Born of immigrants from Germany and India, Indira Talwani went on to get her undergraduate degree from Harvard University and graduate in 1982. She later earned her J....

Overworked as in-house counsel? Feel yourself burning out? Take a vacation! As you’re no doubt already aware, even Americans who get paid vacation days still take the least amount of time off of any OECD members. We’re forfeiting $52 billion a year in paid time off, CNN reports. So we’d better use it, and this goes for you, too! The legal department will survive for a while without you, so here’s why you should take that vacation:...

There’s that old joke, right? The “you know what they do to guys like that in prison” truism. Well, David Karl Danser, who was convicted of sexually abusing his 9-year-old daughter, then taking photographs and sharing them with others, was put in the SHU (Special Housing Unit, aka protective custody) at a minimum security prison. SHU inmates are given the choice of outdoor recreation in 10-by-10-foot cages, usually with another inmate or two....

FindLaw columnist Eric Sinrod writes regularly in this section on legal developments surrounding technology and the internet. Long ago in internet time, back in the mid-1990s, Congress considered how closely to regulate Internet Service Providers (ISPs). Congress determined that it was in the best interests of the United States not to burden ISPs with restrictions, so that the Internet could grow and flourish in the areas of commerce, communications and education....

We’re (mostly) all lawyers, but we’re not all gun buyers. In order to fully understand this case, it might help to have some information on interstate gun purchases and Federal Firearms Licenses (FFLs). In order to purchase a handgun from another state, it has to be shipped to a dealer holding a valid FFL. That FLL holder then charges their own fee, which typically includes state and local fees as well....

The new Apple MacBook Air is out and many are wondering whether it could be the perfect notebook for attorneys. You could call it a netbook, but then you would draw the ire of Mr. Steve Jobs who said, netbooks are ‘‘just cheap laptops." The MacBook Air is certainly not cheap, but for many attorneys it could be well worth the investment. It is light enough to carry around a courthouse, client meeting, jail house, train, anywhere....

Lawyers make up terrible passwords. You know, like “password.” Or “12345!” But it’s not as though we have lots of confidential, important information trapped in the hardware or software or clouds that we’re password protecting. Oh wait, we do. A strong password is considered strong because of the number of possible combinations based on the available characters on a computer. George Washington University calculates that a strong password offers 7.2 quadrillion combinations....

Carllene Placide had a good gig, but that deal expired. She was a partner at Dorsey & Whitney, a big law firm, pulling down a base salary of $225,000 a year. Apparently dissatisfied with her non-equity status, she started doing legal jobs on the side. That violated firm policy, and led to her termination. She refused to pay back more than $50,000 for the outside work, and that led to the end of her career....

FindLaw columnist Eric Sinrod writes regularly in this section on legal developments surrounding technology and the internet. Privacy is like oxygen. It generally is not noticed by a consumer until it is gone. California lawmakers, however, are quite aware of privacy and have recently passed perhaps the most strict privacy law in the United States. Only days ago, the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 (“the Act”) was signed into law by Governor Jerry Brown after it has been approved on a unanimous basis by the California State Assembly and the California Senate....