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We quipped that the Tenth Circuit’s two SCOTUS-bound cases were the most boring you’d hear all year long. Apparently, we were wrong. Meet the case that has twin issues: a “first to file” limit on related qui tam actions, as well as a six-year-statute of limitations that bars claims … except maybe, when we’re in wartime. Kellogg Brown & Root Services, Inc. v. United States ex rel. Carter is not a case you’ll want to read before operating heavy machinery....

In the wake of the non-indictments in both the Michael Brown and Eric Garner cases, everyone’s talking about the possibility of civil suits against the Ferguson, Missouri, and New York City police departments. Those are by no means certain, though. If you have a client who’s thinking about suing a police department, here are some things to keep in mind about police civil suits. Civil suits take a back seat to criminal ones because criminal suits carry the great weight of the state’s punishment power, meaning civil suits get stayed pending the criminal trial outcome....

Lisa Walinske, an attorney, is not homeless. It just looks that way. She’s on a type of strike, living in a shack to raise money for a non-profit law firm to help homeless, poor and underprivileged people. But her 12-year-old son said she looks homeless. “He’s homeless,” Walinske told a reporter while pointing to a bearded man in his 50s. “I’m trying to help him.” Homeless Crowdfunding After working as a partner at an established law firm, Walinske left to found ReDetroit East Community Law Center....

Curious about the Eleventh Circuit vacancies? After a long-rumored bipartisan deal came to fruition last month, that left only one vacancy on the Circuit Court of Appeals: Judge Joel Dubina’s recently-vacated spot, created when he moved to senior status late last year. Assuming the seven pending nominees are confirmed, that would leave the Circuit Court of Appeals bench with eight Democratic appointees (one of whom was rumored to be picked by the Republicans as part of the deal, and had previously been appointed to the district court by a Republican president) and three Republican appointees, plus Dubina’s vacancy....

Imagine you drove your car into a bad part of town, parked on the side of the street, and walked away to go eat dinner. When you came back, you discovered that thieves broke your car’s windows and stole your backpack and mobile device hidden in the trunk. How would you react if you found out later that it wasn’t ordinary street criminals who broke into your car, but the Feds?...

Evgeniy Mikhailovich Bogachev. Meet the man at the top of the FBI’s Cyber Most Wanted, who along with his associates (also on the list), is responsible for two of the most damaging computer viruses in history: Cryptolocker and Gameover Zeus, as well as JabberZeus, a less sophisticated virus that spread earlier. Yesterday, the Justice Department unsealed the criminal cases in Nebraska and Pennsylvania against the yet-to-be-apprehended man and his cohorts, accusing them of pilfering millions through stolen information and ransomware....

FindLaw columnist Eric Sinrod writes regularly in this section on legal developments surrounding technology and the Internet. It is very easy to communicate freely and anonymously on the Internet. And some people believe that if they do not use their real names and easily identifiable information, they can basically say whatever they want online, without needing to worry about the impact that their Internet speech may have on others. Is this true?...

There’s very little doubt or disagreement among anyone that works for a living that there are too few hours in the day. However, rather than doing the impossible and adding more hours into the day, the brilliant minds over at the Harvard Business Review are recommending cutting back the workday from eight hours to just six (and no, they are not adding a sixth day to the workweek). And while this solution seems a bit far fetched for lawyers that work off a billable hour basis, based on their research, it might just work....

How does an award-winning judge, who is ironically the elected head of the American Judges Association (an organization that promotes best practices on the bench), lose total control of his docket? No big deal. He just, allegedly, ignored the law, handed out illegal sentences, hid or sealed case files, and tweaked court transcripts. Now, Novi District Judge Brian MacKenzie has been bench-slapped to extent rarely seen, with the Circuit Court seizing control of his docket, ordering him to provide records of all delayed or suspended sentences since 2004, and more....

It turns out that Prenda Law was Prenda Porn. John Steele, formerly of Prenda Law, has admitted that his firm made pornographic films to trick people into downloading them from file-sharing websites. Then, Steele said, he and his former law partner Paul Hansmeier would sue those people for copyright violations. The scheme was illegal and resulted in Steele’s pleading guilty to conspiracy to commit mail fraud, wire fraud, and money laundering....

There’s plenty of talk about law firm cyber security on legal blogs. Tales of hacked emails, ransomed documents, even hacked household devices. But don’t forget, not all threats are cyberthreats. Some thieves still prefer to practice their craft the old-fashioned way, by kicking in the door or crawling through the window, as a recent string of law firm robberies in West Virginia reminds us. The small town of Martinsburg, West Virginia, was hit by a string of law firm robberies this December, according to a report by the Herald-Mail....

Now we have all heard about the virtues and the dangers of Facebooking at work, or tweeting during meetings, but can in-house counsel actually benefit a company’s bottom line by foraying into the world of social media? According to an article on the subject in Bloomberg, there is a possibility. The article reports on a general counsel’s online exchange of ideas of how his legal department saves company green by drafting trademark applications in-house before sending to outside counsel....

Congratulations, less-than 18.2 percent of America! You now have access to mobile Microsoft Office, assuming you also want to pay a $100 per year subscription cost! Yep. And that’s further proof that Microsoft is losing its way. First, the company steadfastly squandered its position in the mobile phone market, allowing Apple and Android to achieve a de facto duopoly. (Yes, Windows Mobile pre-dated the two mobile OSes. People actually used it too....

The prayers of the Rowan County commissioners have not been answered. After losing their appeal before an en banc Fourth Circuit, the county commissioners petitioned the Supreme Court for review. Last week, the High Court rejected the petition. Curiously, a dissent was authored by Justice Thomas and signed on by Justice Gorsuch. The Fourth Circuit ruled that the county commissioners had favored one religion over others, and found that the big problem was that the commissioners would lead prayers themselves, as opposed to inviting local faith leaders and community members to do so....

In recent years, no case has made such a splash over a statute’s lack of punctuation as the Oakhurst Dairy overtime case. On appeal, the First Circuit overturned a lower district court ruling finding that dairy delivery drivers in the state of Maine were not entitled to overtime under the state’s overtime statute due to a missing comma. The appellate court found that but for the lack of an Oxford or serial comma, the statute could not be read unambiguously, and that that ambiguity had to be resolved in the dairy drivers’ favor....

Papa John’s is being sued for $250 million by a class of plaintiffs citing the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA). The Papa John’s text-message lawsuit could lead to the largest damage award ever under the TCPA, CNN Money reports. In the lawsuit, plaintiffs claim they called their local Papa John’s to order pizza, and soon received a barrage of unsolicited text-message spam. Some customers claim to have received 15 or 16 messages in a row, many in the middle of the night, according to CNN....

It’s strange to think that drones were regarded by many legal naysayers as mere annoyances a couple of year ago. Pretty soon, they said, these things would go the way of the Macarena and would fade away from relevance. Boy, did they call that one wrong. Now drones are getting so prolific that federal and local laws have been enacted just to track them. They’re peeking into our homes, helping us conduct war, may deliver our packages, and now a manned Unmanned Aerial System may be flying you to work....

An ethnically Tamil Sri Lankan’s petition for review of a decision by the BIA denying his application for asylum, withholding of removal, and relief under CAT is denied where: 1) the BIA’s recent findings have been sustained that treatment of Tamils in Sri Lanks does not rise to the level necessary to establish a pattern or practice claim that standing alone permits relief, and here, the record in this case neither compels a contrary finding nor supports petitioner’s assertion that his claim was ignored; 2) the BIA did not err in denying petitioner’s motion to reopen the proceedings; and 3) petitioner’s claim that he is entitled to asylum because he is part of the particular social group of failed asylum seekers is barred as he failed to raise it before the IJ....

If you think that a court will be hesitant to issue sanctions against court-appointed attorneys with stellar records, think again. The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals admonished court-appointed attorney Thomas Liotti on Friday for five different charges of attorney misconduct, most relating to factual misrepresentations. Liotti conceded the misrepresentations, but argued that he should not be publicly disciplined because they were unintentional. The court was not persuaded. The Fourth Circuit asserted that Liotti:...

Every week, there is a new NSA revelation. First, they were only collecting phone call metadata from a single cell phone carrier. At last count, they were tapping into email services and sniffing data from the pipelines between major tech companies’ servers. To prevent this latter scenario from continuing, Yahoo announced on its Tumblr blog yesterday that it would encrypt their email service, all user data that travels between its servers (regardless of service), as well as all data that goes to and from end-users....