The Young Lawyers Division of the American Bar Association has a new leader. Elected during the ABA conference in San Francisco, New Jersey attorney David B. Wolfe will serve a one year term as head of the Division. If one of the benefits of youth is energy, David Wolfe will be a youthful leader in the best sense. In addition to his work as a partner at at Skoloff & Wolfe, P....
In a personal injury action arising out of a nightclub’s failure to monitor an alley next to its exit where Plaintiff was attacked, judgment for Plaintiff is affirmed where a reasonable jury could have found that Plaintiff did not voluntarily enter the fray, but rather was swept up in the attack. Read Novak v. Capital Mgmt. & Dev. Corp., No. 08-7135 Appellate Information Submitted November 14, 2008 Decided June 26, 2009...
Two Pennsylvania brothers stole a bridge and tried to sell its 15.5 tons of parts as scrap metal. To make matters more interesting, the bridge they tore down and sold is none other than the haunted Covert’s Crossing Bridge. The story behind the bridge is that it’s haunted by a 1940s prom queen who died when her car drove off the side of the bridge. Some say you can see a vision of a girl in a prom dress dancing on the eerie crossing....
Richard Posner, now a retired and controversial jurist, is back in court. When Posner suddenly quit the federal court of appeals, court watchers wondered why. Then he self-published a book that left no question: he was disillusioned with the judiciary. One critic called it a trainwreck, but whatever. Now the judge is back on track and on a mission. “Advisory Counsel” Posner wants to represent a pro se litigant as advisory counsel in a case before the U....
These young bucks still care about rankings. Turns out pre-law students value a law school’s ranking as most important when deciding where to attend. According to a Kaplan survey, prospective law students who just completed the LSAT often stated that a law school’s reputation was the most critical factor when choosing among different schools. In an interesting twist, Kaplan also surveyed recent law school graduates to get their sense of what the most important factor should be when choosing law schools....
Jay Clayton, a partner at Sullivan & Cromwell, is at the top of his game and it says something about being a partner in BigLaw. Nominated by President Trump to head the Securities and Exchange Commission, Clayton will take a big pay cut to accept the job but will earn the prestige that goes with it. The financial disclosures that are part of the transition, however, offer a glimpse inside the oft-guarded secrets of partnership compensation....
The data recently released from the Department of Education tracking student loan default rates has produced some concerns for those trying to analyze the data specifically for law schools. The student loan default rate tracks how many students fall into default on their loans by school and year. If the rate goes above the 30 percent mark, then a school risks losing its ability to receive federal money. Fortunately, according to the data, no law school is even remotely close to that mark, but as the ABA Journal noted, the data may be wildly inaccurate....
What does it take to be an appellate lawyer? Better yet, what are the attributes of a strong appellate lawyer? Here’s a quick list of some top traits for appellate lawyers: Strong knowledge of appellate procedure. Appellate procedure is complex and complicated, with specific rules on how briefs are to be written and delivered. It’s very important to know the rules of court. For example, your brief could be rejected if the font size in the footnotes is the same size as the text of the brief....
There’s a fine line between what you can do during a traffic stop by police and what you should do. Sure, maybe you can flip off, insult, or swear at a police officer, but that doesn’t mean you should. What you should do is not pull up to a traffic stop to pick up your daughter, attempt to pull rank on some local cops as a Port Authority Commissioner, then drop the f-bomb on your way out....
Schools are cutting class sizes! Some have shed as much as 66.2 percent of their incoming classes! The law school bubble has burst! Maybe. Enrollment numbers are certainly down from their obscene peak in the height of the recession, but we’re willing to bet that the market for a JD will recover in the near-future, hopefully after a few diploma mills go belly-up, saving a few thousand unfortunate souls from taking on six-figure debt for a degree from a non-entity....
As in-house counsel, the last thing you want is more work. But, if the company you work for advertises, it might be in your best, long term, interest to review all advertising before it gets pushed out to the public. Doing so could actually save you quite a bit more work, and save your company a lot of money. Not only is there potential copyright infringement liability for copying ideas from popular culture, but regulatory compliance can lead to even costlier legal battles....
If your name and likeness avatar are used to promote a business, you deserve to be paid. Kind of. Facebook found itself in trouble last year after California users complained that their images were being used to promote products without their permission through ‘Sponsored Stories’ posts. The users sued the social network, arguing that using a person’s image to promote a product without the person’s consent violates California’s right of publicity laws....
There are hundreds of law schools in this country. All of them teach law. We’d even venture a guess that nearly all of them use casebooks. And really, the the quality of instruction doesn’t vary that much between the schools, though you’d almost certainly learn more from an Ivy League school than the People’s College of Law in Los Angeles or some online dump. In fact, the main differentiators are cost, geography, and prestige (which means jobs)....
A prominent lawyer arrested for bringing a gun to a movie theater insists he did nothing illegal. Sung-Ho Hwang, 46, of New Haven, Conn., says he only carried his gun for self-protection, the Connecticut Post reports. Hwang, an immigration lawyer who graduated from UConn, is president-elect of the New Haven County Bar Association. He also has a valid permit to carry a pistol in Connecticut, police said. At a news conference Wednesday, Hwang told reporters he did nothing wrong....
Minneapolis lawyer M. Tayari Garrett had a good reason for not showing up in court last spring. She claimed she was sick. Except, an investigation into the issue found that Garrett may have actually jetted off to Paris. Judge William Howard was not amused. Garrett now faces a fine of $1,000 and a jail term after being charged with criminal contempt. Garrett purchased plane tickets to go to Paris about a month before the trial....
News has gotten out that California’s State Bar bungled the administration of its “baby bar” exam, adding to growing list of horror stories and scandals that hound the bar exam experience. This makes you wonder just how bad things can get before a reputation team is hired to burnish the bar exam’s image. In the meantime, those who’ve taken Cal’s baby bar are enjoying a special kind of personal torment as they await the results of the test....
In what’s being hailed as a win for the public, one federal court judge ruled (over the weekend) that the federal court system has been misusing the profits generated by the PACER and the CM/ECF system. The Saturday ruling in the National Veterans Legal Services Program v. U.S.A. case found that several programs and purchases funded by the profits generated by the PACER systems, which climbs into the millions annually, were improper....
The “Ground Zero cross” gleaned from the wreckage of the World Trade Center can remain at the 9/11 memorial site despite concerns about church-state division. The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a 2013 ruling allowing the steel-reinforced cross to stay at Ground Zero, finding that despite its likeness to the Christian symbol, its purpose is secular, reports Reuters. An atheist group has been fighting the inclusion of the “cross” as a publicly funded religious symbol in state and federal courts....
Rhea Lana’s Franchise Systems puts on semi-annual consignment sales of used toys, clothing, furniture, and the like. Staffed “principally by mothers and grandmothers,” the sales are not much different from community fundraisers or garage sales – except that Rhea Lana is a for-profit business that franchises its sales, but doesn’t pay any of its salespeople. Failing to pay its salespeople brought Rhea Lana to the attention of the Department of Labor, which sent the company a letter notifying it of its noncompliance and warning that penalties could be imposed for repeated or willful violations....
In Colantonio v. Shinseki, No. 09-7067, the Federal Circuit faced a challenge to the decision of the United States Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims finding that petitioner was not entitled to a free medical examination in connection with his claim for compensation for a service-connected disability. In reiterating the interpretation of subparagraph B adopted in Waters v. Shinseki, the court wrote: “[M]edically competent evidence is not required in every case to “indicate” that the claimant’s disability “may be associated” with the claimant’s service....
