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Real estate agents can represent both the seller and buyer of a property in California, despite the potential conflicts of interest, so long as the parties consent and it is disclosed that the agent owes a fiduciary to both. But do the same dual fiduciary duties arise when two agents, both operating under one broker’s license, represent both parties in a transaction? Does the seller’s broker, acting as an associate licensee, owe a fiduciary duty to the buyer and vice versa?...

Ever hear your parents tell you that if you don’t behave they’ll turn the car around? Well, two drunk female passengers had that experience … but on a plane. Canadian police arrested two inebriated twenty-somethings, Lilia Ratmaski and Milana Muzikante, after Sunwing Flight 656 had to be diverted back to Toronto (on its way to Cuba) following a “disruption on board.” According to Canada’s Global News, the two troublemakers drank a ton of duty-free booze, lit a cigarette in the lavatory, then proceeded to fight and make threats....

A Minnesota man’s part-time job is on thin ice, after he was arrested for driving a Zamboni while drunk at a pee-wee hockey game. Joel Keith Bruss, 34, of Apple Valley, Minn., was supposed to maneuver a Zamboni around an indoor ice rink to make the surface smooth for skating. But Bruss’ moves were anything but smooth when he took to the ice Monday night, Minneapolis’ WCCO-TV reports. Kids and hockey moms were stunned as Bruss struggled to control the Zamboni, bumping into the rink’s walls and unable to drive in a straight line....

Former Chicago Bears quarterback Kyle Orton is suing a law firm, claiming the firm misled him into making investments that cost him and other NFL players millions of dollars. And it wasn’t because of a bear market, either. Kyle Orton’s suit alleges lawyers at the Chicago firm Chuhak & Tecson fumbled by creating tax shelters that failed to meet legal requirements, the Chicago Tribune reports. The firm assured the new Kansas City Chiefs signal caller that he’d get big returns, but never told Orton its tax shelters weren’t legit, Kyle Orton’s suit asserts....

We didn’t know his name at the time, but we knew his work. Last summer, the FBI began investigating the St. Louis Cardinals after an employee clumsily hacked into the Houston Astros scouting database. And we use the word “hacked” loosely here: the criminal mastermind simply logged in using the database creator’s password after he switched teams from the Astros to the Cardinals, and did it all from a Cardinals employee’s house....

Assault isn’t really in the eye of the beholder, even if the victim is wearing Google Glass. Google Glass user and tech writer Sarah Slocum reported Monday via Facebook that she was attacked and robbed at a San Francisco bar by “Google Glass haters.” Slocum later recovered her Google Glass, but she says her phone and purse are still missing, San Francisco’s KPIX-TV reports. Is hating on “Glassholes” illegal? Shortly after Slocum posted her story on Facebook, users on both Facebook and Twitter emerged to dispute her story....

The good news is that nearly 3 percent more law graduates got jobs in 2017 than the previous year. The bad news is that’s because there were fewer graduates last year. With declining enrollments in recent years, the graduating class for 2017 shrunk by about 6 percent. But maybe the bad news is not so bad, after all. When you do the math, fewer sharks in the water means more fish for everybody else....

Every law student or attorney that is currently riding out the economic downturn from the comfort of her parents’ home is well aware that food and shelter are being provided merely out of the goodness of their hearts. But what if such financial support was a court-ordered requirement? And the law mandated that our parents allow us to wallow in self-pity at their expense? Well, one litigious and wayward law student has managed to pull it off....

What do law professors think about when they’re not grilling you on the procedural posture of Palsgraf v. Long Island Railroad? No, they’re probably not thinking about how to improve their lecture on proximate cause. (They haven’t changed that in 15 years.) And they’re definitely not thinking about how great you performed on that cold call. It turns out, they could be ruminating on B-list celebrities insulting Ann Coulter, or bootlegged videos on Steve Harvey’s 90’s stand-up routine, or which zoo animal best represents their colleagues....

One Lyft rider has filed a class action lawsuit against the ride-hailing service, one driver, and several employees, alleging that she was sexually assaulted because of Lyft’s many failures. The rider’s story is absolutely horrific. After making the smart decision to go home after getting drunk, she entered a Lyft car, then blacked out. And while she only remembers waking up the next morning in her bed, the surveillance cameras insider her home told a much scarier tale....

Lawyer, lawyer, pants on fire! For real. You can’t make this stuff up. A Miami lawyer’s pants literally caught fire in the middle of his closing argument on behalf of a client who was charged with arson. Attorney Stephen Guitierrez noticed that his pocket felt hot, and then saw smoke coming out. He exited quickly, stage right. “I noticed the heat was intensifying and left the courtroom as quickly as possible – straight into the bathroom,” he told the ABA Journal....

Electronic discovery is not cheap, particularly in patent cases. In response to rising electronic discovery costs, Federal Circuit Court of Appeals Chief Judge Randall Rader recently announced the Model Order on E-Discovery in Patent Cases (Model Order). There are five main areas of electronic discovery costs: Collection. Includes vendor and/or licensing fees, and media-related charges. Processing. Includes data and text extraction, de-duplication, imaging fees, project management time and potential hosting fees....

Mark this one down in your book of bad ideas: feeling up 15-year-old girls under the guise of measuring them for an ROTC uniform. The incident put Chris Carter’s scholarship at Ohio State in jeopardy, although the university now says he will keep it as the charges have been dropped. Carter is an offensive lineman at John F. Kennedy High School in Cleveland, Ohio. After the incident, he was arrested and held in jail for a night on allegations of sexual imposition, which essentially means fondling....

Conviction of defendant for premeditated attempted murder is reversed as, without more evidence of good cause for a court order barring defense counsel from discussing the contents of co-defendant’s written declaration with the defendant, the order unjustifiably infringed on the defendant’s constitutional right to the effective assistance of counsel, and as such, the defendant is entitled to reversal without making a showing of prejudice resulting from the error. Remaining issues are considered and the decisions of the trial court affirmed only to the extent necessary to provide guidance in the event of retrial....

‘The particular intersection had not had a stop sign at it for 18 years of my life,’ explained Charles Ross in a recent YouTube video. This was months after Ross, AKA Rosscreations, told his 500,000 followers that ‘as a self-appointed city traffic flow coordinator, I think it’s time now to remove some of these unnecessary stop signs.’ That first explanation was part of a plea for donations to fund his criminal defense – Ross was arrested on felony grand theft charges, which could land him in prison for five years....

You’re in law school. You’re a digital native. You want to build your name, share your thoughts, make some memes. Can you blend the two worlds, your future-lawyer self and your online-commentator self? Should you have a blog? Plenty of lawyers have made their name by being loud online, so go ahead and start up your own version of Bob Loblaw’s Law (School) Blog. Eugene Volokh wouldn’t be even half as well-known as he is if he was limited to sharing his legal musings in trade mags and legal journals, instead of on the Volokh Conspiracy....

Wednesday marked the government’s 16th and final day of the government shutdown, and the D.C. Circuit was prepared on or around Thursday to reassess its position on the impasse. According to USA Today, even astronauts were keeping up to date on the shutdown, as NASA had been reduced to less than 4% of its employees. The D.C. Circuit isn’t keeping its employees alive in a zero-G vacuum – although publishing opinions may be rocket science – but its services may have changed if the government shutdown continued....

When can you deduct money spent on prostitutes as extraordinary medical expenses in your income tax calculation? According to Tax Court Judge Joseph Goeke, never! Last September, an octegenarian tax attorney tried to claim prostitutes and various pornographic materials as “extraordinary medical expenses.” William G. Halby of New York, 78, claimed that these expenses should have been deductible because of “the positive health effects of sex therapy.” The court wasn’t moved....

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last week that the Obama administration can’t brag about using drones to kill terrorists overseas, but clam up about drone program documents at the drop of a FOIA request, NPR reports. The appellate court phrased its opinion in less direct and more eloquent terms, so let’s turn to its reasoning. The central legal issue in the case is whether government officials — including President Obama and former CIA Director and then-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta — officially and publicly acknowledged the existence of the CIA’s use of drone airstrikes....

They call them your golden years – not your Golden Gloves years. But that didn’t stop two septuagenarians from sparring over samples in a South Carolina Costco last week. According to The State (the Columbia newspaper, not the MTV comedy show), a 72-year-old man “cut in line” in front of a 70-year-old, “took some cheese and walked off.” It happened again in the free cheeseburger sample line, but that time it led to fisticuffs....