Information Filled Under 'In-house Law Departments' Category
And Now, a Viral Video for Divorce Lawyers Thursday, August 6th, 2009
If you haven’t seen Jill and Kevin’s wedding dance video, you’ve either been in a self-induced post-bar exam coma or off on vacation on a remote island with no Internet access. Yes, the video went viral, as no one, it seemed, could resist watching the about-to-be-hitched couple and their wedding party/posse boogie down the aisle in a break — or a break dance — from the traditional wedding processional. “At this wedding, the party got started well before any vows, rings, and kisses were exchanged
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And Now, a Viral Video for Divorce Lawyers
Today’s Boston Globe describes the dramatic drop in funding that is forcing legal aid programs across Massachusetts to lay off lawyers, cut back office hours and turn away a growing number of people who need legal representation. The problem, of course, is not confined to Massachusetts. Earlier this year, the New York Times reported that cutbacks in staffing for legal aid programs throughout the country were expected to reach 20 percent or more, even as requests for their services rose by 30 percent or more.
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Tough Times for Legal Services
As I wrote in this column last month, in-house legal departments are more pressed than ever to control legal costs, while at the same time they are being charged with assuming greater risk management responsibilities that come with increased government regulations and compliance workloads. In June, we announced the results of a recent LexisNexis CounselLink study conducted by Corporate Counsel and published by Incisive Media, which found that 68 percent of in-house legal professionals feel pressure to reduce the law department budget, and nearly 59 percent of them already have experienced actual reductions in total budgets. Meanwhile, a 2009 study by Corporate Executive Board found that in-house law departments at major corporations are thinly spread across multiple jurisdictions.
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Self-Managed Discovery Solutions: How Corporate Law Departments Are Reducing Costs And Increasing Control Of Data
There’s no work/life balance for centenarian Texas lawyer Jack Borden, who today is honored as “America’s Outstanding Oldest Worker for 2009.” As Borden told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, his work at his law practice is his life, as well as his life-saver: If I were to go home and sit down, I wouldn’t live another year,” [Borden] said. “I come down here” — to his office — “really to live.” Borden began practicing law in 1936 following graduation from University of Texas law school
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Centenarian Lawyer Wins Oldest Worker Award
The College of Law Practice Management this week named Israel’s New Family Organization as winner of its 2009 InnovAction Award. This year for the first time, the COLPM also named the winner of an Honorable Mention, the New York-based legal services provider Practical Law Company. (By way of disclaimer, I should mention here that I was recently elected a fellow in the COLPM and am slated to be inducted as such at its annual meeting in September, where these award winners will also be recognized.) The InnovAction awards recognize outstanding innovation in the delivery of legal services.
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Israeli Group Honored for Legal Innovation
Concerned about the shrinking number of available jobs in the legal profession, the Law Society of England and Wales is warning potential law students to proceed with caution before signing up for law school, advising that they may want to consider alternative careers. As The Lawyer reports, 7,000 people completed the U.K.’s Legal Practice Course in 2008, but there are only 6,000 training contracts available. In addition, taking the LPC costs 10,000 pounds ($16,400).
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U.K. Law Society Warns Students Away From a Legal Career
Posted by Chuck Kallendorf: “The Ohio Supreme Court last Thursday held that ‘there was no legal basis for a private lawsuit based on a claim of unauthorized law practice in Ohio prior to September 2004, when the General Assembly amended R.C. 4705.07 to expressly recognize such a cause of action.’ ( Holding ) ( Court’s Summary ) The case was one evolving out of a homeowner’s seeking to recover civil damages from a mortgage company for allegedly using non-attorneys in 2002 to perform legal services, such as the drafting of promissory notes & similar documents, for which it then charged “document preparation fees.” Citing prior court decisions that held that a non-attorney was not entitled to payment for any service that constitutes the unauthorized practice of law, Plaintiff Gary Greenspan had asked the trial court to order the lender to refund the $300 he had paid for document preparation services. He hadn’t filed a grievance with the Ohio Supreme Court’s Board on the Unauthorized Practice of Law or a local bar association regarding the lender’s actions, nor did he obtain a ruling by the board that the lender’s actions constituted the unauthorized practice of law
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"Ohio Unauthorized Practice "Right of Action" Prior to Sept. 2004"
Harvard Law Professor Jonathan Zittrain, author of the book, “The Future of the Internet — and How to Stop It,” was the keynote speaker yesterday kicking off the annual meeting of the American Association of Law Libraries in Washington, D.C. I was not there to hear his speech, but Georgetown Law Professor Rebecca Tushnet was and she reported on it on her blog, Rebecca Tushnet’s 43(B)log. Just last week, Zittrain caused somewhat of a stir with an op-ed he published in the New York Times, Lost in the Cloud, in which he discusses the dangers of cloud computing and how the law might help minimize them.
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The Future of the Law Library (and How to Stop It)
A few months ago, author-turned-lawyer Elizabeth Wurtzel stirred up some controversy with an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal arguing that perhaps time spent working at BigLaw was just one big waste. Now Bitter Lawyer throws a few questions Wurtzel’s way in hopes of catching a little more controversy. Wurtzel says she decided to go to Yale Law even though it was a crazy idea — she already had a successful career as a writer.
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Bitter Lawyer Quizzes Elizabeth Wurtzel
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.
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Lawyer Proves the Other Side’s Case in a Disciplinary Proceeding
Posted by: John Jantsch : “I’ve hung out with thousands of entrepreneurs over the last few years alone and I can tell you, they’re not who you think they are. So much of the popular literature on entrepreneurs portrays them as some sort of gut wrenching risk takers walking out there on the bleeding edge daring to tread where most fear. And a few of those do exist, but more often than not, those are the ones who fail.
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"7 Uncommon Traits of Successful Entrepreneurs"
Posted by StephanieWestAllen: ” She’s 88 years old and mayor of the third largest city in Ontario , a city that is debt-free with $700,000,000 in reserves. Asked about reasons for her success, her responses included taking care of her people and keeping taxes down. In the video, this dynamo plays hockey, bowls, and takes part in a music video.
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"An Impressive, Unique and Very Active Octogenarian Mayor: Inspire Yourself by Watching This Video"
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. It was not to be, the world now knows, but this year’s Open championship will forever be remembered not for the winner, but for the improbable story of the man who almost won.
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Tom Watson’s Lessons for Lawyers
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. Going through a list of the top 50 law firms, I was quite surprised to see that no less than 95 percent of the names that I thought these top 50 law firms would eventually want to use were unregistered.
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Were Prime BigLaw Twitter Usernames ‘Twitterjacked?’
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. The Twitter hacking incident first came to light on July 14, with this TechCrunch post that recounted its dilemma: The guy (”Hacker Croll”) who claims to have accessed hundreds of confidential corporate and personal documents of Twitter and Twitter employees, is releasing those documents publicly and sent them to us earlier today.
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Twitter Hires First General Counsel, Hacker Puts Him to Work
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
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Wikipedia Threatened for Putting National Portrait Gallery Pictures Online
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. So what’s a law student to do?
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Second Cities, Standing Out and Other Advice for Law Students Seeking Jobs
From [Their] Source: “American Tort Reform Association A new Legal Backgrounder published today by the Washington Legal Foundation spotlights a growing body of provisions within federal law that, in effect, deputizes state attorneys general to enforce federal law. The paper also cites the personal injury bar’s multimillion-dollar lobbying support for such provisions as its members stand to profit when attorneys general they support politically hire them to carry out resulting litigation.
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"Federal Law Increasingly Encourages ‘Pay-to-Play’ Among State AGs and Personal Injury Lawyers"
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.” The highlight of this episode was a spectacular shouting match between Dallas County Assistant District Attorney Marc Moffitt and Edwin V. King, a Dallas criminal defense attorney. After Tracy Holmes, judge of the 363rd District Court, asked Moffitt why one of his crucial witnesses was absent from the courtroom, he told her: “Well, that’s because some lawyer told them they didn’t have to come.” King, thinking Moffitt was insinuating that Moffitt meant King, got in Moffitt’s face and screamed “That’s a [BLEEP] lie!” To which Moffitt yelled: “I didn’t say it was you!” Lawyers in Texas certainly aren’t the only ones ever to raise their voices in the heat of the moment, but they’re pretty damned good at it.
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Good Lawyerin’, Texas Style
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. Citing this report by Clemente communications, Bodine writes that: In the near-term, companies will be exploring all manner of corporate growth opportunities to transform themselves in an effort to either realize cost-reduction synergies or to support wholesale shifts in strategy.
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Clients Tell Law Firms to ‘Show Me the Money’
Economy still in decline: Though stock prices may indicate otherwise, bankruptcy filings show that the economy has not recovered just yet, at least in California. BankruptcyProf Blog reports that over the course of June, “the Central District of California saw 9,578 total filings, compared to 8,965 in May, 8,398 in April, 8,518 in March, 6,967 in February and 5,999 in January.” That’s 48,550 for the first six months compared to 33,396 for the same six months last year, an increase of 45 percent.
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Friday Legal News Link Roundup
The AmLaw Daily has an interview with Weldon Latham, head of Jackson Lewis’ corporate diversity counseling group, in which Latham cautions companies to be especially cautious in their human resources decisions in these times of economic woe.According to the piece,… Continue reading this article, and get more corporate counsel news and information, at FindLaw.com.
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Before You Fire in These Times of Adversity, Give a Little Thought to Diversity
Posted by Michelle Golden: “Got an unsolicited email about negativity in speech. Don’t normally read my junk mail, but SO glad this item escaped my ruthless delete stroke so that I could share the gem with you: Negative Vocabulary: Say what you will do, not what you can’t do. We can change people’s perceptions of a situation by changing the words we use to tell them
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"I’m Afraid it’s a Terribly Unfortunate Problem When We’re Negative"
Posted by Joe Hodnicki: ” Opinion Writing and Opinion Readers (SSRN) was inspired in large part by the work done by Judge Aldisert, United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, and two of his law clerks, Meehan Rasch and Matthew P. Bartlett, in editing and preparing the second edition of Judge Aldisert’s classic book Opinion Writing (forthcoming), an updated, comprehensive guide intended to be of wide practical use to members of the judiciary, judicial staff attorneys and law clerks, state and federal administrative judges, hearing officers, commissioners and private arbitrators, law librarians, scholars and students
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"Judge Aldisert on Opinion Writing and Opinion Readers"
In 2007, transsexual Ava Cordero was the sweetheart of the gossip pages — and the gossip bloggers — when her high-profile New York lawyer boyfriend William J. Unroch sued the even higher profile billionaire money manager Jeffrey Epstein alleging that he pressured the then-16-year-old into sex in exchange for promises that he would help her get modeling work. Soon, Cordero was the plaintiff in a second lawsuit, this time for libel against the New York Post after it reported that she was a he
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Transsexual Loses Libel Suit Against NY Post
Bloggers may be gaining respect as citizen reporters or commentators, but they still don’t have all of the legal protections that apply to journalists. As The New Jersey Law Journal (via Law.com) reports, Monmouth County, New Jersey Superior Court Judge Louis Locascio ruled that blogger Shellee Hale is not covered by New Jersey’s reporter shield laws and must disclose the source of comments posted on Oprano.com, a site dedicated to “the business of porn.” According to the article, Hale’s comments at Oprano criticized a software product known as NATS, which helps businesses that link to each other keep track of…
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New Jersey Blogger Not Protected by Shield Law
There continues to be a large gap between what Chief Legal Officers want and what they see their law firms delivering. According to a new study by consulting firm Altman Weil ( as reported in the American Lawyer ), …25 percent of CLOs surveyed said they were putting a ‘high’ amount of pressure on their outside panel firms to change “the value proposition in legal service delivery,” as opposed to simply cutting costs… while …only five percent of CLOs surveyed said firms are serious about changing their structure.
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According to CLO’s, Most Law Firms Not Meeting the Challenge