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Legal News

Legal Blog Watch

Tracks the daily musings of Law.com bloggers.
By Lisa Stone

Post Frequency: 34.5/day

Last Entry: March 31, 2011 at 17:07:51

After Security Warnings, a Recap on RECAP

Posted on August 25, 2009
Last week, I wrote about RECAP, a Firefox-based software plug-in that automatically sends documents downloaded by a user through PACER to an online Internet repository where they are made available to the public. Though RECAP doesn't appear to violate any of PACER's terms and conditions of use, some federal courts are warning lawyers who have installed RECAP to exercise caution in use...

Live From Washington: ILTA '09

Posted on August 24, 2009
If you can't get yourself to ILTA, ILTA is getting itself to you. The International Legal Technology Association is holding its annual meeting this week near Washington, D.C. True to its character, it is enabling those who cannot attend in person to participate virtually...

Half of Blawgs Fail in First Year

Posted on August 24, 2009
Launch a legal blog today and there is a pretty good chance you will not still be blogging a year from now -- maybe not even four months from now. That is the conclusion -- admittedly unscientific -- arrived at by Mark Herrmann at the blog Drug and Device Law after considering the life expectancy of a newborn legal blog...

Legal Research Revisionism

Posted on August 24, 2009
What happens in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania stays in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. That could be the new motto for that court, based on a story by Shannon P. Duffy in The Legal Intelligencer that is drawing a lot of interest among legal bloggers...

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Blawg Review Cuts Through the Pink Tape

Posted on August 24, 2009
With the nation's lawyer-in-chief officially out on vacation this week, there may not be a single lawyer in the United States left working this last week of August. So too in the U.K., where the anonymous family lawyer who writes the blog Pink Tape reports that 90 percent of sensible lawyers are off on holiday...

Fla. Lawyer Aims to Build 'Safari Law' Practice, Bag Big Game

Posted on August 21, 2009
On the hunt for a new practice area? Florida lawyer Ethan Andrew Way is trying to blaze a trail in "safari law," according to the Tallahasee Democrat. Way came up with the idea for his new specialization after learning that a friend with whom he'd hunted was having trouble recovering his hunting trophies home from Namibia...

Lawyers Viewed Negatively by Most Americans

Posted on August 21, 2009
I've long known that many people don't like lawyers, but I have to confess, I was surprised to learn just how many. According to a recent Gallup poll (H/T ABA Journal News), a scant 25 percent of Americans have a positive view of the legal field. Only three industries ranked lower: real estate, automobile and oil and gas...

Summarize This Case, Professor: Slacks v. Suits

Posted on August 21, 2009
The blawgosphere is replete with posts about how lawyers should or shouldn't dress. But where's the guidance for a law professor in need of advice on appropriate attire? Professor Bennett Capers took matters into his own hands at PrawfsBlawg, asking readers what he should wear on the first day of class: Given the importance of this first impression, am I the only one that obsesses at the start of the school year about what to wear on the first day of class, down to what color tie to wear? And I'm curious...

New Niche: Tell-Alls by Courtroom Sketch Artists

Posted on August 20, 2009
If you watched the NewsHour on PBS last week, you might have caught Jim Lehrer's interview with courtroom sketch artist William J. Hennessy Jr. If you missed it, no problem, because the transcript is now posted at the Online NewsHour. Hennessy was also recently featured in a post at The Blog of Legal Times...

Down to Yasgur's ... Blawg?

Posted on August 20, 2009
As you no doubt know unless you live under a rock, this week marked the 40th anniversary of the Woodstock Music and Art Fair. And as you no doubt also know, Woodstock was not in Woodstock, N.Y., but on the dairy farm of Max Yasgur in Bethel. Yasgur appears in the 1970 documentary about the event, proclaiming, "The important thing that you've proven to the world ...

Law Prof Tied to Pot Bust

Posted on August 20, 2009
A married pair of prominent Massachusetts lawyers -- one a professor at Suffolk University Law School -- have been tied by their son to his business growing and selling marijuana. Jonathon Cook, 20, allegedly told police in Natick, Mass., that his lawyer parents knew he was selling drugs out of their home and that his stepfather helped him build a room to grow marijuana and bought some of it himself...

Our Linked-In Judiciary

Posted on August 20, 2009
"Your Honor, I'd like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn." Connect with a judge on LinkedIn? I have not done it. But an increasing number of judges are creating public profiles on the professional networking site. Among them are federal circuit, district and bankruptcy judges and state appellate and trial judges...

Free E-Mail Services: Safe or Not?

Posted on August 19, 2009
Last week, I asked whether lawyers make a poor impression on clients when using free e-mail addresses like Gmail or Yahoo. This week, there's a more serious debate brewing in the blogosphere over e-mail, specifically, whether free e-mail services are unsafe at any speed...

Why Lawyers Hate E-Discovery

Posted on August 19, 2009
Via EDD Update, I was directed to an epic post by lawyer and electronic discovery guru Ralph Losey, entitled Plato's Cave: Why most lawyers love paper and hate e-discovery and what this means for legal education. Losey begins with the allegory of Plato's Cave, the story of prisoners who have been held captive in a cave all of their lives...

Facebook Sued for Privacy Violation

Posted on August 19, 2009
A photographer, an actress, a college student and two minors filed suit against Facebook on Monday, alleging that the site violates state privacy law and misleads members into believing that the information that they post can be accessed only by designated "friends" and not third parties, reports the Associated Press...

DOJ Political Bias Lawsuit Followup

Posted on August 19, 2009
Last June, news emerged that the Department of Justice applied a political litmus test to screen candidates for its honors programs, rejecting those whose r�sum�s or Web sites suggested liberal leanings. Eight jilted applicants have since filed a class action, alleging that DOJ improperly relied on politics in making hiring decisions and violated privacy laws by culling information from applicants' Web sites without disclosing that it had collected this information, as required by federal law...

Vault Releases 2010 Law Firm Rankings

Posted on August 18, 2009
The much-vaunted Vault law firm rankings were released today for 2010. The rankings are notable because they are based entirely on associate votes. They rank firms on five characteristics -- overall prestige, departmental prestige, regional prestige, diversity and quality of life...

Patry Returns to Blogging, and to a Debate

Posted on August 18, 2009
William Patry is back to blogging and already finds himself in a back-and-forth debate over whether copyright law inhibits innovation and props up antiquated business models. Patry is a prominent copyright lawyer who works as senior copyright counsel for Google and wrote a seven-volume treatise on copyright law...

Supreme Court Ruling Revives Death Penalty Debate

Posted on August 18, 2009
The Supreme Court caught us off guard yesterday, issuing a potentially momentous order on a quiet August Monday when we would assume the justices would be off in their RVs or wherever. The court ordered a federal district judge to hear testimony on the claims of death row inmate Tory Anthony Davis that he did not murder a Savannah, Ga...

Lawyer Continues Fight for Man's Innocence

Posted on August 18, 2009
In February, we told you about Maine lawyer Morrison Bonpasse whose book, Perfectly Innocent, had caused three jurors to doubt their 1993 conviction of Alfred W. Trenkler in connection with a 1991 bombing that killed one Boston police officer and maimed another...

After Facing the Court of Public Opinion, Judge Sharon Keller Goes on Trial

Posted on August 17, 2009
"We close at five." For Texas Criminal Court of Appeals Judge Sharon Keller, those words could end up etched on the epitaph of her career, the Texas version of "Let them eat cake." After 15 years on the bench, Keller is on the other side of the dais today in San Antonio, where she's on trial for five judicial misconduct charges stemming from her decision not to keep the CCA open after hours to accommodate the defense team for convicted killer Michael Richard, who was scheduled to be executed that night, Sept...

Are Generation Y Lawyers a Bunch of Slackers?

Posted on August 17, 2009
Over at Idealawg, Stephanie West Allen plays host to a robust debate over whether Generation Y lawyers -- or "millennials," lawyers under 30 -- who seek work/life balance to the exclusion of focusing on client needs are unrealistic slackers or serious professionals with different priorities than previous generations...

Take Back the Law!

Posted on August 17, 2009
PACER, the federal government's system for Public Access to Court Electronic Records, was originally intended to make court filings more accessible to litigants and the public at large. Now, roughly a decade later, Carl Malamud and others argue that PACER actually deters access by holding public documents hostage behind an 8-cents-a-page fee wall...

Patent Denials on the Rise

Posted on August 17, 2009
Inventors shouldn't count on a patent as a ticket out of the recession. Even though the number of patent applications is on the rise, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has been rejecting them at an unprecedented rate over the past few years. According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the PTO denied more than 59 percent of patents filed in the quarter that ended June 30 -- that's up significantly from the 35 percent rejection rate that prevailed between 1975 and 2004...

Lawyers Prefer Coke

Posted on August 14, 2009
Lawyers, it seems, prefer coke. And we refer not to soft drinks, but to drugs. As between cocaine and marijuana, occupations show a clear divide in their drug of choice. For lawyers, the choice is cocaine. Over the past week, Richard Florida has written a series of posts for The Atlantic in which he and two colleagues slice and dice data from the National Survey of Drug Use and Health to create a picture of the relationship between drug use and various political, economic and psychological characteristics of states...

The Reinvention of Legal Research

Posted on August 14, 2009
At The Huffington Post, Peter Schwartz writes that we are in the midst of "the radical transformation of the legal publishing marketplace," a transformation, he contends, that will no longer support the two largest legal publishers, West and LexisNexis...

5th Circuit Disses John Edwards T-Shirt

Posted on August 14, 2009
I presume Paul Palmer's parents thought they were taking a stand for free speech when they brought him the T-shirt that bore the slogan, "John Edwards for President '08." Palmer, then a sophomore at Waxahachie High School in Texas, had gone to school that morning with a different T-shirt, one that said simply, "San Diego...

Disgraced, Disbarred Attorney Found Dead

Posted on August 14, 2009
In Minnesota legal circles, a newspaper once wrote of him, David Moskal was "known for several remarkable achievements, including the fastest disbarment in the state's history." Moskal rose rapidly from No. 1 in his class at William Mitchell College of Law to become one of Minnesota's highest-flying personal injury lawyers, earning millions and profiled in the magazine Minnesota Law & Politics as one of the state's "Tort Kings...

Two Visions of the Future Law Firm

Posted on August 13, 2009
What will we see in the law firm of the future? It is a question Richard Susskind considered more than a decade ago in his book, "The Future of Law," and again in last year's book, "The End of Lawyers? Rethinking the Nature of Legal Services." With the economy what it is, Susskind is far from alone in considering this question, as two recently published articles underscore...

The World's 10 Best Court Web Sites

Posted on August 13, 2009
For the 11th year running, Justice Served announced its annual awards for the Top 10 Court Websites in the world. Justice Served is a consulting firm that provides services and training to courts in management and technology. It looked at thousands of court Web sites and evaluated them based on criteria that included their functionality, ease of use and appearance...

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