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Possibly putting a damper on the annual tennis tournament currently underway in New York, a group of four U.S. Open umpires have filed a federal wage lawsuit against the U.S. Tennis Association (USTA), claiming that the organization misclassified the officials as independent contractors so that they could avoid offering overtime pay and other benefits. Seeking class action status, the lawsuit covers all U.S. Open umpires since 2005, many of whom were only paid between $115 and $200 a day despite working in excess of 40 hours a week....

University of Arkansas’ redshirt freshman tight end Garrett Uekman was pronounced dead late Sunday morning after his roommate found him unconscious. Another roommate had seen the 19-year-old playing video games just an hour earlier. There were no suspicious circumstances, and the university was not aware of any pre-existing conditions. He was in cardiac arrest when first responders arrived. A campus vigil has been set, and funeral information is forthcoming. However, there seems to be one little kink in the community’s plans to honor Uekman:...

It wasn’t news when James Comey told the Senate that he leaked a memo to the press; the information had come out a month earlier when he was fired. But his admission raised issues about confidentiality that have polarized parties and legal pundits. When President Trump told Comey that he expected loyalty about the Russian investigation, what exactly did he expect from the FBI director and former U.S. Attorney? And what happens when attorneys leak such information?...

Welcome back to How to Get Away With Murder, where the brightest minds of a generation learn how to literally pin murders on Mother Theresa. This week’s episode is called “I Want You to Die,” but this show is still giving us life. On last night’s episode, things got even more Oedipal, characters went splat, and we might have our first major hint of who shot Annalise. Let’s get started....

When it comes to a phone and its components, what is the “article of manufacture?” In the Apple v. Samsung patent infringement case, the U.S. Supreme Court said last year that it could be a product or a component of the product. The decision upended Apple’s $399 million judgment against Samsung based on the phone’s entire design. The Supreme Court did not define “the article of manufacture” for calculating damages in the case, however....

How’s your March Madness bracket doing? If it’s like mine, you’ve probably given up. Which is fine, since college basketball isn’t what matters. The law matters. And when it comes to leaders in the legal field, we’ve got plenty of titans. We’re not talking about the industry’s biggest rainmakers here, nor the most innovative changemakers. We’re talking about attorneys who are the best at behaving badly. Really badly. If you haven’t seen it, Above the Law is running a bracket of lawyers behaving badly – that is, attorneys who are the best at being the worst....

We’ve come a long way from the simple :). That little smiley, invented over 30 years ago, has now been supplemented by a host of emoticons and emojis, the little pictorial characters meant to convey a writer’s mood, expression, or, well, whatever a frog face, burrito, and dancing woman are supposed to mean. And there, of course, is the rub. Often, emoticons can add more ambiguity than clarity to a message....

President Trump’s personal attorney reportedly has been subpoenaed for information about Russian efforts to influence the 2016 campaign, bringing into focus the reaches of an attorney’s privileges against a subpoena. Can Michael Cohen assert a Fifth Amendment privilege? Can the president’s lawyer testify against him? Can the president keep his lawyer from testifying? Unlike bar exam questions, these are real-life questions. But like the bar exam, the pressure is on for some serious answers....

Law school rankings are a source of anxiety and stress for many law students. But at least one employer agrees that they shouldn’t be so important. Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas has no time for them, he told students at University of Florida’s Levin College of Law. Justice Thomas denounced U.S. News & World Report for creating a discriminatory atmosphere in the legal job market. He compared the difficulty law students from lower ranked law schools face in the job market to struggles based on race and gender....

A diaper-wearing man poses as autistic to get his adult diaper changed and to grope teenage girls? You can’t make this stuff up. Mark Anthony Richardson came to the public’s attention late last year after a woman reported to police that a diaper-wearing man had pretended to be autistic, and then groped her 18-year-old daughter while she was sleeping. After pleading guilty last month to felony sexual battery and seven counts of outraging public decency, Mark Anthony Richardson was sentenced to 3 years behind bars, 5 years of probation, and ordered to register as a sex offender by a judge in Oklahoma City on Wednesday....

Moshe Gerstein, magna cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School, and graduate of Yale University. A perfect pedigree for many attorneys. But, add this line to the list: Moshe Gerstein, among those arrested in New York for possessing horribly disturbing, illegal photos of children being raped and sexually assaulted. Gerstein was most recently an attorney at Gibson Dunn & Crutcher working in the corporate department, according to Gerstein’s Martindale profile. He had previously worked for Skadden Arps, according to the ABA Journal....

There is just nothing like an upstanding, avuncular looking, Reagan-appointed, alum of the Citadel, war veteran federal judge getting down and dirty for sheer shock and awe value. Federal U.S. District Judge Jack T. Camp Jr. was arrested last Friday, October 1, on wepons and drug charges. How was he caught? His stripper friend rolled over on him. According to MSNBC, the judge was informed on by a drug-using stripper pal, known only by the cute nickname given to her by the feds, CI-1....

Around this time you may find a would-be Bar exam taker decide not to take the three-day, seventeen-subject marathon that is the California Bar Exam that begins today. It is, however, rare to find someone petitioning the state supreme court for the chance to sit for the exam—and being backed by the state governor. Sara Granda graduated from UC Davis School of Law in 2009. Being awarded a coveted Juris Doctor degree from one of the country’s top fifty law schools is made more meaningful by the fact that Granda is paralyzed from the neck down following a car accident she was in over a decade ago....

Transgender people have seen unprecedented growth in public visibility lately, what with the public transition of Caitlyn Jenner and award-winning shows like Transparent. But even as the national awareness of transgender issues grows, transgender individuals continue to face discrimination, violence, and shockingly high rates of homelessness and suicide. Today marks the 16th annual Transgender Remembrance Day, where we remember the transgender people who have been murdered over the past year – at least 81 in total, largely women of color – and pledge to fight for greater equality....

The Justice Department has asked a federal appeals court to throw out the $85 billion AT&T-Time Warner deal. Legal observers say the government has a losing argument against the mega-merger, which brings major television programming to AT&T’s cable service DirectTV. But that hasn’t stopped the government’s lawyers. Mary Wimberly took her best shot in United States of America v. AT&T, arguing that the trial judge made “errors of economic logic and reasoning....

Karaoke and alcohol usually go hand and hand, but the combo isn’t for everyone. In fact, it definitely wasn’t for Jeffrey Thompson on Sunday night. Police in Melbourne, Fla., arrested the 28-year-old after he instigated an Applebee’s karaoke brawl. None too pleased when the restaurant manager asked him to leave the karaoke stage, he turned violent and punched the guy in the face. He was then tasered by an off-duty cop who just happened to be chomping down on some chain restaurant food....

The U.S. Postal Service has decided to sue disgraced cyclist Lance Armstrong for prior sponsorship money, claiming he was unjustly enriched. Armstrong, who was stripped of all titles he’d won since 1998, received approximately $40 million over the course of six years from the USPS, and now they want their money back, reports CNN. If the USPS is successful, they may collect up to triple their sponsorship money. But it all may hinge on whether Armstrong was unjustly enriched....

Call it a case of mistaken identity. Shaun Michael Stroud, from Kiln, Mississippi, thought that zombies were chasing him and that the apocalypse was upon him. So he hijacked a front-end loader from a local recycling center and smashed into at least four cars in a Walmart parking lot. Two of those cars had people inside. Mr. Stroud’s wild ride finally came to an end when he ran into a palm tree, and the front-end loader blew a tire....

The KTLA story lists William Rice’s age as 65. Did this staunch anti-socialist take advantage of his single-payer Medicare benefits to get himself stitched up?Was Los Robles Hospital guilty of rationing its severed-finger care? Did any fingerless patients that night get their digits reattached?Would a British or Canadian hospital have been able to reattach the finger, or would they have made Rice wait 6 months before trying?Or do American hospitals provide the best finger-reattachment care in the entire world?...

The infamous Minneapolis Hilton orgy lawsuits have settled. Two Minneapolis sexual harassment lawsuits were filed in late 2008, one in November and one in December, on behalf of two female Hilton employees whose employment was terminated upon allegedly witnessing what they claim was an “orgy” involving upper management at a Minneapolis Hilton chain. The two women have now reached an undisclosed settlement with the hotel chain. Deborah Smith and April Bezedichek were both employees of the Hilton hotelier chain until they were fired from their jobs for complaining about the orgy that they claimed to have witnessed....