Posts

Cheers to Dallas attorney Michael Peticolas, who has quit his law practice and is going solo – as in, sole proprietor of the city’s first standalone microbrewery, the Peticolas Brewing Company. It’s not that he’s completely lost his taste for the law. He just likes craft beer much better. A video clip posted this week on the new brewery’s website shows he’s just getting started. What it doesn’t show is all the legal maneuvering it took to get there....

A DUI suspect in Georgia insists that he couldn’t possibly have been driving drunk. Instead, he claims aliens dumped him near the site of an alleged DUI crash. Alas, sheriff’s deputies did not find any little green men to confirm Joel Lankford’s story, so he was charged with driving under the influence and leaving the scene of an accident. What actually happened, and could extraterrestrials have been involved? Before Lankford’s DUI arrest, deputies had responded to a 911 call from a woman who was bleeding profusely in a church parking lot, reports The Huffington Post....

The flurry of legal trouble continues for former NBA player Jayson Williams. To add to his guilty plea to aggravated assault in the accidental shooting of his driver, he now also has a DWI charge. According to the Associated Press, Williams was arraigned on drunken-driving charges after his SUV struck a tree in Manhattan. Police say they charged him at the hospital. He didn’t enter a plea. His bail was set at $10,000....

California bailed on bail. Actually, it’s not that simple. After a 40-year campaign to end cash bail in the state, Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill that gives judges discretion to release defendants pending trial without bail. But reports make it sound like there’s a get-out-jail free card in California. Actually, that’s basically true. Pre-Trial Detention The new law goes into effect next October, but the writing has been on prison walls for years....

Altshuler Berzon, a small San Francisco firm, has taken on some giants in the Silicon Valley recently. The 25-lawyer firm sued Google last month, alleging gender and pay discrimination. Not ones to rest on their pleadings, the attorneys are also suing Oracle on gender grounds. In some ways, the tech giants are easy pickings because the government made similar accusations against them last year. “Awful to Women” When the Atlantic said Silicon Valley is “Awful to Women” earlier this year, it was repeating a secret that got out years ago: the tech industry discriminates against women....

Rachael Denhollander is an extraordinary person, let alone an extraordinary lawyer. As a teenager, she was a world-class athlete preparing for the Olympics. She was also a victim of sex abuse at the hands of Larry Nassar. Nassar was later convicted of molesting young gymnasts and sentenced to more than 175 years in prison. Denhollander started the case that put him there. Inspiration of the Year For her courage as the first woman to publicly accuse Nassar, Sports Illustrated has chosen Denhollander as Inspiration of the Year....

Summer is unofficially over, but those legally weird stories just keep on coming. We realize you may have taken a much-needed break over the past few months. Strange and stupid criminals, however, apparently didn’t. So in case you missed some of these gems, here’s our list of the Top 10 strangest stories to grace our Legally Weird blog so far this summer: Related Resources: The First Rule of Toddler Fight Club is ‘No Pinching, Only Punching’: We’d like to summarize the gist of this story, but isn’t the first rule supposed to be “Do Not Talk About Toddler Fight Club”?...

Steve Wynn, the billionaire casino owner, knows something about high risks. But he had no clue about how devastating his high risk behavior could be to his company. When allegations about his sexual misconduct became very public recently, Wynn Resorts lost $2 billion – in a day. That’s how the market responds to stories that don’t sell so well these days. In the Weinstein era, it is especially bad business to let sexual harassment go unchecked....

Taking a drive to clear your head is one thing, but hitting the road drunk to “drive it off” will get you busted for a DUI. In another embarrassing arrest story for Florida, a man named Michael Moore – a 61-year-old from Hobe Sound, not the famous filmmaker – was arrested on suspicion of DUI after police caught him allegedly speeding. Moore told the officer “that his wife told him that [he’d] been drinking too much, so he decided to go out and ‘drive it off,’” according to an arrest report obtained by TCPalm....

Introducing our Ex-Lawyers of the Week: Dean Obeidallah and Amer Zahr. Both Obeidallah and Zahr began their professional careers as attorneys, the Associated Press reports. But their senses of humor – and their shared sensitivities about the public’s perception of Arab Americans in the wake of 9/11 – led them to new careers as stereotype-shattering stand-up comics. “People are afraid of us because they don’t know really who we are,” Obeidallah joked on Comedy Central’s “Axis of Evil Comedy Tour,” noting two kinds of news stories about Arabs:...

‘Follow the money.’ That’s a holdover quote from the Watergate scandal that bought down the President of the United States, and it means that the money trail leads to a motive. In the case of Arizona Summit Law School, the trail leads to InfiLaw Systems, a for-profit consortium of three law schools. They won a legal battle this week, when a federal judge dismissed a fraud claim by a former employee and student alleging the Arizona law school misrepresented incoming students’ grades and admission test scores....

Due to diminishing enrollments, the author of a new study is predicting that more than a dozen law schools may soon close their doors. Robert Zemsky, a professor of education at the University of Pennsylvania, said law school enrollment dropped by 21 percent at private schools and 18 percent at public schools between 2011 and 2015. Analyzing information from 171 law schools in Mapping a Contracting Market, Zemsky concluded that the third-tier schools will drop out first....

They’ve tweaked the curve, but the bottom line is the same: Who really cares about the new “Best Law Firms” rankings by U.S. News and World Report? The folks at U.S. News and Best Lawyers sure do. Their “Best Law Firms” publication is a growing business, and the new second-annual list is being described as better than ever. It also appears law firms named as being the best in the country care too....

For lawyers these days, strategic action is as important as ever. And attorney Charles Hamilton Houston’s history, the namesake of the Charles Houston Bar Association and the Charles Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School, can teach lawyers how to effectively implement a go-wide strategy. If you don’t know who Charles Houston is, you may have learned about him in your U.S. history class as he is widely credited as “the man who killed Jim Crow....

Four juveniles arrested in Lakewood, Colorado may have set an all-time Colorado record high for the most stolen cars in a single day. The Denver News Blog reports that the Lakewood Police Department transported the juveniles to a detention facility. While being placed in custody, one of the juveniles asked if they had “set a record for the most stolen cars in a day.” The names of the four juveniles arrested in the case were not released....

When your kid comes home complaining of a bully, what do you do? Do you teach him to turn the other cheek? To throw a punch? Or do you request a bully restraining order? Robert Casteel of southern California did the latter after his 10-year-old son Christopher came home last week frazzled. A classmate had pulled out a knife and threatened to “get [him] after school.” The bully’s 5-day suspension wasn’t enough, so Casteel obtained a restraining order....

Merit Systems Protection Board’s denial of petitioner’s request for a survival annuity benefit based on the federal service of her late spouse is affirmed as, the Board’s determination that petitioner’s husband failed to elect a survivor annuity benefit during the two-year window provided for by statute is supported by substantial evidence. Read Dorsey v. Office of Pers. Mgmt., No. 09-3071 Appellate Information Appeal from: Merit Systems Protection Board Decided November 25, 2009...

Kentucky Fried Chicken (also known as KFC) is now part of a lawsuit that claims that recent KFC ad campaigns featuring grilled chicken are biased against the chain’s extra crispy selection of chicken. BusinessWeek reports that the lawsuit centers around ad bias. The plaintiff, the KFC National Council and Advertising Cooperative, Inc. claims that the President of KFC (Mr. Roger Eaton) is favoring grilled chicken over its staple fried chicken. The lawsuit was filed in Delaware Chancery Court....

Gregory Berry is proof that sometimes you need to keep your mouth shut and your head down, even if you do think you’re better than everyone else. The former first year associate at Kasowitz Benson Torres and Friedman is suing the New York firm and two partners for $77 million claiming that the firm lied about its work culture, engaged in unethical behavior, and is trying to ruin his career....

In a Title VII action for Defendant’s allegedly racially discriminatory failure to promote Plaintiff, summary judgment for Defendant is affirmed, where Plaintiff failed to offer evidence supporting an inference that, absent discrimination, she would have been picked for the job. Read Hendricks v. Geithner, No. 07-5392. Appellate Information Appeal from the United States District Court for the District of Columbia(No. 03cv02239)Filed June 19, 2009 Judges Before: SENTELLE, Chief Judge, and GINSBURG and BROWN, Circuit Judges....