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For a growing number of legal practitioners and courts, the answer to the title question is a resounding yes. What matters most is how you do it. After all, it would seem contrary to ordinary logic to discourage attorneys from assisting pro se litigants. And on that premise, some law practices have even started focusing on providing unbundled legal services as a way to provide better access to justice. Preparing a pleading or other document on behalf of a pro se litigant generally will not violate any ethical duties, though some states do require pro se pleadings to explicitly state whether attorney assistance was received, or you may have to even sign the filing....

If you’re not scrounging to make up some missed billables, the end of the year and start of the new year often brings with them a massive slow down. It’s just that time of year when the world simply isn’t as litigious. So if you have time, you might want to consider doing some of the annual housekeeping or other tasks that often fall by the wayside. Below, you can get a few ideas if you’re list has been fully crossed off, or needs to be added to, or just further procrastinated....

You’d think that for $100,000 dollars or so, law schools would teach you everything you need to know to hang out your shingle and start out in criminal defense, but it just ain’t so. Hopefully you’ve got good mentors, good practice guides and good malpractice insurance. In some jurisdictions, once you’ve made a general (as opposed to a special) appearance, you’re on the hook and you’ll need to continue representing your client all the way through trial whether he pays you or not....

Not that there’s ever a convenient time for someone to die in a car crash, but the recent fatality associated with Tesla’s Autopilot feature that killed Joshua Brown was decidedly timed badly for the electric car company. Now Tesla is being investigated by the SEC amidst allegations that it breached securities laws in connection with that crash. On top of being a phenomenally bad crash for the company, it could potentially cast a long and dark shadow over the technology for a while yet....

When a supervisor sends a subordinate texts like “ur 2 sexy,” a company should either reprimand the supervisor, or prepare to pay in a sexual harassment lawsuit. The defendant in today’s Fifth Circuit appeal chose the latter. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals recently ruled in favor of an employee who brought a same-sex sexual harassment lawsuit against his employer, finding that the evidence supported the employee’s claim that he was sexually harassed and that his employer failed to promptly respond to the situation....

In an action by a group of insurers claiming that defendant-insurer owed plaintiffs a duty to defend an underlying construction suit, judgment for plaintiffs is affirmed where the underlying complaint’s allegations did not clearly and unambiguously fall outside the scope of the policy’s coverage. However, the district court’s order denying plaintiffs defense costs in the underlying suit is reversed where plaintiffs satisfied the “common obligation” and “compulsory payment” requirements for a contribution claim under Texas law....

A few months ago, Yahoo Inc. moved about 3,000 IP patents into the patent holding company Excalibur IP LLC, and started puffing up value. The details have been in the tech news for a while and already speculators are positioning themselves accordingly. “This represents a unique opportunity for companies operating in the Internet industry to acquire some of the most pioneering and foundational patents related to Web search and advertising,” Yahoo said of the sale....

On September 9, 2010, Monique Wilkerson was at a bar enjoying a meal and the first football game of the year, presumably the season-opening game between the then-defending-champion New Orleans Saints and the Minnesota Vikings, a rematch of the previous year’s NFC title game. After hearing multiple pages from the DJ about her vehicle, which was legally parked, she went outside to investigate. Her car was legally parked. Other cars weren’t....

For in-house lawyers, climbing the ranks to a management position requires showing that you have leadership abilities. One way to show those qualities is via proper email etiquette. Unfortunately, printing out a stack of your emails to show your interviewers isn’t going to get you very far. But if you’re trying to climb an internal ladder, exercising proper email etiquette is critical when there are “carbon copies” or “CCs.” Failing to do so could earn you a lasting reputation as a luddite....

Clients, and especially potential clients, like feeling special. One easy way to make them feel special is to really listen to them. For years, those who know, have been preaching about the benefits of active listening. It’s not that difficult, and you’d be surprised by the response you get from people when they feel that you are intently focused upon what they are saying. Even in your interactions with opposing counsel, active listening can go a long way in preventing misunderstandings....

It seems like a notion so simple it might have come out of Yogi Berra’s mouth: If you don’t bill a client, you won’t get paid. And yet, lawyers leave money on the table when they don’t accurately record their time. This is especially true of solos and small firms, which don’t necessarily have the resources to devote to ensuring accurate billing (even though, ironically, inaccurate billing hurts them the most)....

One of the simplest causes of malpractice involves missing deadlines, and no deadline is more critical than a statute of limitations. If you miss one, then you can almost rest assured that (or, more likely, not sleep because) you’ll be hearing from your state bar, and/or reporting to your malpractice insurance carrier. However, before breaking the news to your client that you missed the statute of limitations, you should probably do a bit of last minute research to make sure you can’t magically save yourself from some serious potential malpractice liability....

As a young civil rights lawyer, U.W. Clemon lost an important desegregation battle against the Jefferson County school district in Alabama. A federal appeals court later reversed in his favor, however, with orders that set in motion desegregation in schools there and across the country. A lifetime of litigation later, Clemon lost it again. In Stout v. Jefferson County Board of Education, a trial judge said the people of Gardendale could secede from the school district to form their own school system so long as they complied with the decades-old orders....

For all the attention on North Carolina’s ag-gag law, the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals saw the challengers’ case as straightforward. They have standing to sue, the appeals court said in People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals v. Stein. Basically, the plaintiffs alleged sufficient injury to proceed in their pre-emptive strike against the statute. PETA and others had sued before the state enforced the law, which was designed to protect businesses from private undercover investigations....

At first hearing, you might have thought that Crispr was some sort of new age snack. But it just happens to be probably the biggest giant leap forward in biotech and bioengineering in recent history of medicine. Crispr could be the key to hacking genes in ways that scientists could previously only fantasize about. Sounds like there’s a lot of money to be made? Yeah, we’d say so. CRISPR Clustered Regularly-Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (aka, CRISPR or Crispr) represents the cutting edge in advancements in gene-editing and splicing....

FindLaw columnist Eric Sinrod writes regularly in this section on legal developments surrounding technology and the Internet. We now live in a world in which we constantly are connected electronically. We spend so much of our time in front of computers, laptops and tablets. Our smartphones can accomplish feats unimaginable not so long ago. These days we can even surf the Internet with smart eyeglasses. Plainly, connectivity presents numerous advantages from business and professional standpoints....

Eric Sinrod is a partner in the San Francisco office of Duane Morris LLP (http://www.duanemorris.com) where he focuses on litigation matters of various types, including information technology and intellectual property disputes. His Web site is http://www.sinrodlaw.com and he can be reached at ejsinrod@duanemorris.com. To receive a weekly email link to Mr. Sinrod’s columns, please send an email to him with Subscribe in the Subject line. This column is prepared and published for informational purposes only and should not be construed as legal advice....

You remember Kim Dotcom, right? The larger-than-life Internet entrepreneur from New Zealand, via Germany? The guy who changed his last name to “Dotcom” and made a mint operating the website Mega Upload? The U.S. government alleged Mega Upload wasn’t the “digital locker” Dotcom claimed it was, but rather a website that encouraged – and paid for – the sharing of infringing content. It was actually both of those, but the case has gone on because the United States wants to try him for violating U....

Advertisers often gets a bad rap for making print and online newspapers a mess to read. However, for seventy inmates in Florida’s prison system, prison officials have refused to deliver the monthly Prison Legal News publications to the inmate subscribers because of the ads in the paper. Surprisingly, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals has sided with Florida’s prison officials in ruling that denying the paper to the inmates is not a First Amendment violation....

The fight over worker status (Is she really a contractor? Is he an employee?) has become an increasingly common legal battle in the past years. The rise of the “gig economy” means that more and more people are working, at least nominally, as independent contractors or under other alternative employment arrangements. In 2005, the last time the Bureau of Labor Statistics collected data on the subject, seven percent of workers were independent contractors....