Morning Docket 08.17.09
* Retired judges in Iowa are helping the state cope with its budget woes. [Chicago Tribune]
* Programmers from Princeton, Harvard and the Internet Archive have created a Firefox plug-in for hacking Pacer. In the words of Wired, “it’s still just a stop-gap measure until the federal courts figure out that in the age of the internet, charging citizens to search and read public documents should be a federal crime.” [Threat Level/Wired]
* New trend: unscrupulous attorneys preying on immigrants? [New York Times]
* Landlords are feeling law firms’ pain: “Boston Properties Inc in February was forced to stop construction of a 1 million square-foot building on the west side of Midtown Manhattan after law firm Proskauer Rose backed out from a tentative agreement for about half the space.” [Bloomberg]
* New York AG Andrew Cuomo is going after online brokerage Charles Schwab. [Reuters]
* Texas billionaire fraudster, Allen Stanford, got new lawyers. Now he wants a new judge. [Houston Chronicle]
* Former ATL ‘Lawyer’ of the Day Howard O. Kieffer sentenced to four years. And he has to pay his clients back. [Associated Press]
* Baker & McKenzie derailed from its profit track. [AmLaw Daily]
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I love being first.
PODIUM!
I have to laugh over the people being up in arms over the small amount charged by PACER to view documents. In Chester County, PA, they charge $50 a year plus $10 a month just to look at the dockets on line.
wtf is PACER?
1 TTT county in PA vs. the federal judiciary - not an apt comparison, sorry
So RECAP downloads content that is legally purchased to its own database and makes it available to subsequent users for free. Great idea but is it technically a "hack"?
--Computer illiterate
Chester County, PA is one of the wealthiest counties in the nation...hardly "TTT", though most of you will never be successful enough to live there.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chester_County,_Pennsylvania
Anyone who thinks that immigration lawyers stealing from their clients is a "new trend" is pretty out of touch with what has been going on in the immigration arena for pretty much forever. Let's see... a disenfranchised client base + desperate for services + likely educational, language, and cultural barriers + without any perceived power to object or to complain about being the victims of crime = recipe for disaster.
8: Sure, but who cares?
4 - Wow. Hang in there.
We can solve immigration lawyer corruption by ending all immigration immediately.
Problem solved!
Hacking PACER sounds like a terrible idea for any attorney or law student.
no charging for viewing public documents online as opposed to going to the courthouse is not and should not be a federal crime.
hacking pacer to avoid paying the federal fee is a federal crime