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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

Gates-gate: What's the Law Say?

Posted on July 23, 2009
As if the controversy surrounding the arrest of Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates wasn't sufficiently swirling through the media and the blogsophere, the president of the United States had to weigh in, saying during a press conference last night that Cambridge police "acted stupidly" when they put Gates in handcuffs even after he showed proof that he lived in the home where police had come to investigate a report of a burglary...

The End of Compelled Consumer Arbitration?

Posted on July 23, 2009
Even the Manhattan Institute-sponsored blog PointofLaw.com is conceding the future looks bleak for mandatory consumer arbitration. Three major developments this week, capped by a congressional hearing yesterday, throw into question the fairness of the process and the neutrality of at least one group of supposed neutrals...

Lawyer Proves the Other Side's Case in a Disciplinary Proceeding

Posted on July 22, 2009
Over at my home blog, My Shingle, I've posted on an interesting disciplinary matter unfolding in Colorado. According to the Denver Post, back in 2007 attorney Mark Brennan won a substantial verdict for his client in an employment matter in federal court, only to have it snatched away by the judge as sanction for Brennan's inappropriate conduct during the trial...

Can Lawyers Be Rebels?

Posted on July 22, 2009
Has the revolution been co-opted? That was my first thought when I read that the ABA Journal, one of the most mainstream of all legal industry publications, is sponsoring the Legal Rebels project in an effort to remake the legal profession. So who are the legal rebels? According to Ed Adams, ABA Journal editor-in-chief, the rebels encompass: Dozens of lawyers nationwide [who] aren't waiting for change...

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ABA to Take On the FTC Over Red Flag Regulations

Posted on July 22, 2009
With the Aug. 1 effective date for the Federal Trade Commission's "Red Flags Rule" on identity theft fast approaching, the ABA is girding for battle, reports the Blog of the Legal Times. That's because the FTC continues to refuse to exempt lawyers from the new regulations, which are designed to ensure that all entities that act as "creditors" implement certain procedures to safeguard customer and client data...

Doctors Don't Like Ratings Systems Any More Than Lawyers

Posted on July 22, 2009
Doctors and lawyers may go head to head when it comes to the debate over medical malpractice, but they stand united in one regard: Neither profession is all that receptive toward client or patient ratings systems. But whereas lawyers responded to Avvo's proposed rating system with lawsuits alleging violations of consumer protection laws, doctors are using intimidation...

Economy Hits GC Pay, Too

Posted on July 21, 2009
In good times or bad, general counsel compensation has tended to drift upward, notes the introduction to Corporate Counsel magazine's 2009 GC Compensation Survey. But this year, even GC were not immune to market forces, the survey finds. While some indexes of GC pay rose, the basic trend was nearly flat, it concludes...

Misbehaving Lawyers

Posted on July 21, 2009
In England, a solicitor is a lawyer. In La Jolla, Calif., a lawyer is alleged to be a solicitor, not in the legal sense, but in the decidedly illegal sense. Lawyer Steven R. Liss, 53, has been arrested on suspicion of trying to hire someone to kill his wife, the San Diego Union-Tribune reports...

Top Eight Reasons Not to Go to Law School

Posted on July 21, 2009
As far as I can tell from reading his blog, H. Luiz is currently in law school. That does not mean, however, that he is happy there (even if "happy law student" is an oxymoron). Luiz has compiled a list of the top eight reasons not to go to law school...

Web Video Series Shows Drama in the Courts

Posted on July 21, 2009
Attention Silver Gavel Awards judges: I have your next award winner. If the purpose of these ABA awards is to recognize those in the media who have been exemplary in helping to foster public understanding of the legal system, then give Ron Sylvester his due...

Tom Watson's Lessons for Lawyers

Posted on July 21, 2009
In the Boston area where I live, we pounce on beautiful days like someone wandering the desert does a sudden oasis. But on the particularly bright and sunny Sunday that just passed, I could not tear myself away from the TV, mesmerized as I was by the drama of 59-year-old golfer Tom Watson's drive toward possible victory in the British Open...

In-House GCs Can't Afford to Manage Outside Counsel

Posted on July 20, 2009
As a general matter, companies bring in outside help when they're too short-staffed to handle matters in-house. But corporate legal departments are so understaffed these days they can't even hire reinforcements or outsource the work because they don't have the time to manage outside firms, reports The National Law Journal...

Can 'Food Addiction' Be Fodder for Lawsuits?

Posted on July 20, 2009
There's a really interesting new post by Jane Genova over at Law And More predicting a possible resurrection of the obesity class action lawsuits against fast food companies. The first round of lawsuits never gained traction. Judges dismissed the suits claiming that fast food products are inherently dangerous, finding that plaintiffs could not prove that eating fast food caused their poor health...

Blogging Forces Change in Law Firm Layoff Policies

Posted on July 20, 2009
Companies are fast learning that in an Internet Age, there's no such thing as a "confidential" memo. As the Wall Street Journal explains today (and as has been previously discussed here by The National Law Journal), employees are leaking confidential company information about layoffs to blogs and Internet news sites nearly as quickly as those memos are issued...

Blawg Review #221 Gets Complex

Posted on July 20, 2009
You wouldn't expect a simple Blawg Review from a site with a name like The Complex Litigator, and this week's Blawg Review #221 doesn't disappoint. It's anything but a simple summary of this week's past posts. Covering a wide swath of the blogosphere, this edition of the weekly "blog carnival" includes topics like the potential for Europe to adopt class action litigation; enforcement of contracts in China from the China Law Blog; the impact on health care providers of the FTC's latest red flag rules to combatt identity theft, posted at HealthBlawg (and also important for lawyers to understand); and a roundup of posts on the Sotomayor confirmation hearings, including a link to Volokh blogger Ilya Somin who gave testimony on Sotomayor's position on property rights...

Judge OKs Anonymous Comments, Blogger Won't Allow Them

Posted on July 20, 2009
There are a couple of interesting new posts around the blogosphere concerning anonymous online commenters. The first, over at Volokh, discusses a recent case out of Tennessee, State v. Cobbins, where a judge denied defendants' motion to require a media outlet to disable a portion of its Web site enabling Web users to post comments (mostly anonymous) about the pending case...

Were Prime BigLaw Twitter Usernames 'Twitterjacked?'

Posted on July 17, 2009
Back in November 2008, a couple months after I joined Twitter, it was clear to me that at some point down the road big law firms were going to discover Twitter, too. I assumed that for consistency and branding, they would likely want to use their internet domain names as their Twitter username, and took some time one morning to see whether BigLaw had locked up their logical Twitter usernames...

Friday Law Link Roundup

Posted on July 17, 2009
-- How do you best a patent troll? Get all your richest friends together and buy up all the bridges. [via Legal Pad] -- So the Sotomayor confirmation hearings weren't exactly a summer thrill ride, but C-SPAN, believe it or not, does have more exciting fare...

Second Cities, Standing Out and Other Advice for Law Students Seeking Jobs

Posted on July 16, 2009
Though the pace of law firm layoffs may have abated since Black Thurday back in February (with 800 jobs lost in a single day), the aftershocks keep coming. Law firms have been deferring start dates for new associates to avoid outright downsizing, and now at least one firm -- Morgan Lewis & Bockius -- is canceling its summer program to avoid having two classes of first-year associates start in 2010...

Lawyer Disbarred for Hiding Bags Full of Cash

Posted on July 16, 2009
It may not be clear whether a lawyer who cashes a client check for $1,000 should be disbarred. But what about a lawyer who takes bags full of cash left on a judge's chair, then conceals the money from the IRS? That bizarre fact pattern lead to the legal defenestration of Seattle lawyer Mark Vanderveen, whose disbarment was just affirmed by Washington State's highest court in an 8-1 ruling, according to the Seattle Times...

Twitter Hires First General Counsel, Hacker Puts Him to Work

Posted on July 16, 2009
Last Friday, Twitter named Alexander Macgillivray as its first General Counsel -- apparently not a moment too soon. Just a few days later, reports the BBC, Twitter was in touch with its legal counsel trying to assess the fallout after hundreds of its internal documents accessed by a hacker were published on the popular TechCrunch blog...

Wikipedia Threatened for Putting National Portrait Gallery Pictures Online

Posted on July 16, 2009
A picture may be worth a thousand words, but is it worth a lawsuit? Wikipedia administrator Derrick Coetzee is about to find out. As reported by paidContent, the National Portrait Gallery in London sent Coetzee a legal notice demanding that he remove more than 3,000 photographs from Wikipedia that Coetzee had downloaded from the Gallery's database...

Good Lawyerin', Texas Style

Posted on July 15, 2009
Our friends at Tex Parte bring us news of a good ol' fashioned Texas lawyer shout-out, courtesy an A&E reality TV show called "After the First 48." The new show documents what happens in a Texas capital murder case in the days after a suspect is arrested -- following a series of events chronicled in "The First 48...

A Fair and Balanced Look at the Newest Member of the Senate Judiciary Committee

Posted on July 15, 2009
The outcome of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor's Senate confirmation hearings are a foregone conclusion. Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham said as much on Monday, barring "a meltdown" from the "wise Latina" on the 2nd Circuit. So what's the point of watching a week's worth of senatorial grandstanding? Aside from the chance to catch occasional outburst from a protester or three in the gallery -- which, again, follow fairly predictable lines -- it's the opportunity to see the newest member of the Senate Judiciary Committee in action...

Eight-Month Jail Sentence for Facebook Post

Posted on July 14, 2009
It's one thing to be fired for using Facebook. It's quite another to be jailed for it. According to the Reporters Without Borders Web site, 69-year-old human rights activist Khedija Arfaoui is facing an eight-month jail sentence imposed by a court in Tunisia for posting a message on Facebook referring to rumors about children being kidnapped in the country for their organs...

Recession Forces Lawyers to the Right

Posted on July 14, 2009
Recessionary times demand desperate measures, and for some lawyers (as well as other professionals), that means a move to the right. I don't mean right as in Republican. The "right" I'm talking about is the bold, creative side of the brain that typically doesn't get much of a workout by analytically minded, left-brained lawyers...

Sotomayor Roundup, Day Two

Posted on July 14, 2009
As these Google news search results show, coverage of the Sotomayor hearings has been almost unrelenting. Yesterday's session was largely devoted to introductory remarks from the senators on the judiciary committee. Now, day two of the Sotomayor hearings is just about complete, with the post mortems from this morning's session rolling in...

Clients Tell Law Firms to 'Show Me the Money'

Posted on July 14, 2009
In this economic downturn, corporate clients aren't just demanding lower fees from law firms. Companies are looking to their lawyers and other professional service providers for assistance in cutting costs, increasing revenues and revamping their business models, reports Larry Bodine...

How Much Trouble Can One Tweet Cause?

Posted on July 13, 2009
Twitter limits each tweet to 140 characters. Pretty hard to get in too much hot water with that kind of word limit, right? Well, Jean Anleu has found otherwise. In May, authorities in Guatemala arrested and charged Anleu after he sent a 96-character tweet urging depositors to withdraw funds from a bank involved in a political-murder scandal...

Global Counsel Names Award Winners

Posted on July 13, 2009
Winners have been announced in the third annual Global Counsel Awards, an international competition to honor outstanding in-house lawyers and legal departments. The awards are intended to recognize lawyers "for demonstrable achievements across the full spectrum of in-house responsibility, not simply those who have acted on high-profile transactions...

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