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If you finally made it into law school, take a short moment to pat yourself on the back. You should congratulate yourself – or console yourself. Law school can be a life-changing experience, but it can also seem life-threatening – at least in terms of your sanity. Inevitably, you’ll find a study pace that works for you … and then you’ll get lazy. But resist this temptation to slack off. If you do, this negative momentum will stick with you for your remaining years and your grades will fall....

Being out of law school for a few years and actually practicing, it’s startling how unprepared I was, both substantively and in terms of practicing. Law school, it’s well understood, doesn’t do a very good job of preparing you for anything. What it does do (maybe) is teach you how to think like a lawyer, but not how to actually be a lawyer or what to know as a lawyer. Here are some things I wish law school had taught me....

If Michael Ray Ekes didn’t know the difference between real life and video games, he probably does now. The 30-year-old central Florida man and suspected car thief was nabbed by authorities, while playing the “Grand Theft Auto” video game. It has been said that sometimes people play video games then go out to imitate the behavior that those games encourage. Perhaps that may have been what influenced Ekes’s behavior but the only person who truly knows the motives is the suspect....

In the facile computer world, people sometimes get lazy with things like spelling and math. Auto-correct covers a host of spelling sins, but math requires a little more work. For internet job sites like Monster, Indeed, and CareerBuilder, it turned out to be a bigger problem. The Illinois attorney general recently cracked down on them and others for potentially violating age discrimination laws by screening out older workers online. If you can do basic math, however, your company can avoid online age discrimination....

Ohio police recently detained a boy who punched his grandma in the face while shopping. The 11-year-old allegedly clocked his grandmother in the nose after she refused to buy him a toy at a department store in Dayton. With the “Lord of the Flies”-esque child now in juvenile custody, he should probably expect greater woes than a stocking full of coal this Christmas. The minor was cuffed by Dayton cops after a witness called 911 to report an assault in the toy aisle at Rose’s Store....

In a long, long rant published on the ABA Journal’s website, famed legal writing deity Bryan Garner accuses the vast majority of attorneys of being sorry scribes. He supports this proposition by citing the Dunning-Kruger effect, a well-known psychological principle that can be summed up in a few words: Wait, so Garner is saying lawyers are arrogant about their abilities? Color us shocked - and mildly insulted to boot. Garner might be correct, though we’d like to point out that one vital aspect of writing well, which he seemed to miss, is writing concisely – why use 1,658 words when a few hundred would do?...

Charter schools and teachers unions mix about as well as oil and water. So it’s no surprise to see a teachers union oppose a plan to convert a standard public school into a charter school. Seeing such a battle go all the way to the California Supreme Court on the question of arbitration is slightly less common. Green Dot Public Schools filed a charter petition with the Los Angeles Unified School District Board of Education in 2007 to convert Alain Leroy Locke High School (Locke High School) to a charter school....

California is trying hard to bring net neutrality back from the dead, but it may take a minor miracle. If the state’s net neutrality bill passes, it could restore protections against broadband services throttling internet traffic and charging consumers more for faster lanes in California. It is not the first state to claw back from federal deregulation in the field, but it may have the biggest stake in the game with its world-ranked economy....

Corporate clients are spending significantly less on legal services than they once did. In the last year alone, legal spend has dropped 11 percent on average, according to a new survey from Bloomberg Law and the Buying Legal Council. The most successful teams were able to cut their spending by 23 percent, or nearly a quarter. So, how’d they do it? The key to in-house cost cutting is a “well-conceived, properly staffed procurement operation,” according to the 2017 Legal Procurement Survey....

The Federal Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a lower court ruling in favor of search engine giants Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google in a patent infringement case over paid search advertisements. The order, which was released on Monday, did not elaborate why the three-judge panel upheld the lower court’s ruling, however. The patent infringement suit began in 2007 when Ohio-based company Paid Search Engine Tools sued Yahoo! over its alleged infringement of its “paid search engine bid management” patent....

An Oklahoma dad faces child abuse charges after allegedly beating his 9-year-old son for rooting for the wrong football team. Gannon Mendez is an Oklahoma State University booster. The 42-year-old man is also the father of a nine-year-old Oklahoma Sooners fan. Mendez allegedly took his fandom to fanatic levels as he beat his son for cheering on the “wrong” team, reports The Huffington Post. The Cowboys fan allegedly struck the boy with a wooden paddle, along with other incidents of alleged abuse....

The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia has ordered Robert Mueller and Roger Stone’s attorneys to file briefs explaining how the ouster of Attorney General Jeff Sessions impacts their case. Notably, due to Sessions having recused himself from overseeing the Mueller probe, the big question being asked by pundits is whether Matthew Whitaker, Sessions’ replacement, will also recuse himself. As of yet, there does not seem to be any indication that he will do so....

In In re the Marriage of Schopfer, No. C060549, the Third District faced a challenge to the trial court’s denial of the father’s motion to reduce to zero his child support obligation of his daughter, whom he shared legal and physical custody of with her stepfather since the death of his ex-wife. In affirming the denial, the court held that the father was properly ordered to compensate the stepfather for his daughter’s support as a custodial parent and that the trial court did not err in requiring father to pay child support past the daughter’s 18th birthday....

Former Major League Baseball player Danny Tartabull is the “most wanted” deadbeat dad in Los Angeles County. The distinction doesn’t come with a trophy, but rather a staggering price tag and potential penalties. His name and photo were added this week to the new wanted poster issued by L.A. County officials. According to the poster, the former baseball pro owes almost as much as the other “most wanted” deadbeat dads combined....

Interested in becoming move involved with the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals? The Judicial Conference of the D.C. Circuit recently announced a vacancy on its Standing Committee on Pro-Bono Legal Services. The role is for a 3-year term and will begin on July 1, 2012. The Standing Committee on Pro-Bono Legal Services spearheads and manages pro-bono initiatives within the D.C. Circuit. The Committee members are responsible for reviewing and reporting to the Judicial Conference on issues facing pro se litigants in the federal court system....

Is Giovanni Ramirez innocent? According to an announcement made by the Los Angeles Police Department, Ramirez has been exonerated of all accusations that he had a hand in the March 31 beating of Giants fan Bryan Stow at Dodger Stadium. A reassignment to the Robbery-Homicide Division appears to have provided the department with a much-needed reevaluation of the evidence, which has also led to the arrest of two new suspects....

If you’re a law school grad, but you can’t find or don’t want a job as a lawyer, there are plenty of alternatives: president, talk show host, Cuban revolutionary, or whiskey maker. Consider, too, the cybersecurity field. Cybersecurity, or “the cyber” as some have taken to calling it, is one of the fastest growing tech sectors, with the market predicted to be worth over $200 billion in a few years. The industry is adding millions of jobs and the unemployment rate for those with cybersecurity experience is zero, according to some reports....

Defendant’s drug distribution sentence is reversed where 18 U.S.C. section 3582(a) expressly prohibits sentencing courts from treating rehabilitation as a reason for imposing a longer term of imprisonment, and the district court committed plain error by doing so. Read In re Sealed Case, No. 08-3029 Appellate Information Argued March 12, 2009 Decided July 28, 2009 Judges Opinion by Judge Tatel Partial Concurrence and Partial Dissent by Judge Henderson Counsel For Appellant:...

If James Bond were a law school, he would be ‘shaken, if not stirred’ by Britain’s regulators right about now. The Solicitors Regulation Authority has ruled that law school will no longer be necessary to become a solicitor in 2020. Instead, prospective practitioners will need to pass a competency-based exam. For students of the law, it is a reason to toast because it should save them the high cost of legal education....

In a prosecution of defendants-board trustees, responsible for administering the City of San Diego’s (City) retirement system, for felony violations of state conflict of interest statutes for allegedly voting to authorize an agreement allowing the City to limit funding of its retirement system in exchange for the City’s agreeing to provide increased pension benefits to City employees, a court of appeals’ denial of defendants’ motion to set aside the information against them is reversed and remanded as to five of the six defendants where: 1) with one exception, the defendant trustees’ actions fall within statutory exceptions to Government Code section 1090, and accordingly, their motion to dismiss the information against them should have been granted as this case turns on the conclusion that the trustees of the City’s retirement system board were not burdened by a conflict of the sort section 1090 prohibits; and 2) the sixth defendant could, on the preliminary hearing record, reasonably be suspected of having obtained a unique, personalized pension benefit as a result of voting to approve the retirement board’s contract with the City and such individually tailored benefits pose genuine conflict problems and do not fall under any statutory exception....