September 2014

Could this make your life as a reviewing attorney easier and a little less miserable?

* The world’s largest Harry Potter memorabilia collection belongs to a lawyer. His patronus is a shimmering gavel. [The Telegraph] * The FCC has ended the sports blackout rule. Expect the NFL to go bankrupt within days. [Politico] * No one expects to see “lawyer” on a Top 20 Work-Life Balance list, but there is one legal job out there coming in at number 11. [Glassdoor via Adjunct Law Prof Blog] * Want to expose the severe problems of the over-criminalization of everything? Everyone with a warrant turn themselves in on one day. Call it “Warrant Day.” See how the system copes logistically and financially when all those citations come home to roost all at once. [Street Roots] * Russia’s equivalent of Chief Justice Roberts advocates a return to serfdom. Now there’s an originalist! [Business Insider] * Bow Tie Law talks about the role of discovery software in the duty of lawyers to review documents. Because document review is “legal work” when it’s about paying people a livable wage and “computer work” when it isn’t. [The Everlaw Blog] * Before we get wrapped up in the cases the Supreme Court will decide, let’s remember all the cases it won’t decide. Because “we can tell a lot about what the court cares about—and what it doesn’t” from its cert decisions. [Slate] * Ha. After today’s story about the debt mistakes of Lisa S., here’s the cautionary tale of one “Elie M.” [Law and More] * Elizabeth Garrett, USC Provost, will become the next president of Cornell. Garrett will also be a tenured faculty member at Cornell Law School and is bringing along her husband, Andrei Marmor, who will also join the law school. See, this is how you hire administrators: get someone willing to do double-duty with teaching! [Cornell Chronicle]

According to the ATL Insider Survey, these practice groups deserve more (or less) acclaim.

We don't have the official congratulations message from the National Law Journal to the firms, but this reader created one that perfectly captures the problem...

Who are some of the legal luminaries being suggested as possible AG picks?

Restricting voting rights is the wrong side of history

Judicial tweeting might be unusual; does that make it problematic?

How much will next year cost for these students already paying over $50K/year?

How the other half is ruined.

Why did he have such a sudden change of heart?

After recent changes in features and pricing, how do the different cloud computing services compare?

Ed note: This post originally appeared on Peter S. Vogel’s Internet, Information Technology & e-Discovery Blog. Privacy issues have been highlighted by a recent Newsweek report that “mysterious devices sprinkled across America—many of them on military bases—that connect to your phone by mimicking cell phone towers and sucking up your data“ and an earlier Florida […]

Every election season there is the same refrain from candidates who are attacked in political ads run on broadcast stations – that ad is unfair and the broadcaster who is running it should take it off the air. Sometime, that request is sent by a lawyer with threats to bring legal actions if the broadcaster does not stop airing the ad. What is a broadcaster to do when it gets one of these requests to pull a political ad from the air? While we have written about this issue many times before (see, for instance, our refreshers on the rules with respect to candidate ads, here, and non-candidate, third-party attack ads, here), questions still come up all the time. Thus, broadcasters need to know the rules so that they don’t pull an ad that they are not allowed to censor under the FCC’s rules, and that they don’t run one for which they could in fact have liability.

Why are in-house lawyers limited to working only for their particular employer?

You are general counsel to a company, and your CEO steps into your office, clutching his iPhone in one hand and wiping sweat from his brow with the other, and tells you that a compromising photograph of him was stolen from his phone and posted online. You start thinking not if, but when, shareholders will discover this embarrassment, how much it will cost the company and what legal action to take.

One of the phrases we hear most frequently in client feedback interviews is “Make my life easier.” Clients often describe that as the key to their most successful outside counsel relationships, and at other times they express that wish for broken relationships. But what does it really mean and how can we put it into practice? Like a diligent athlete, those who make their clients’ lives easier pursue it as a way of life rather than an act of duty. As with most of our recommendations, we highly encourage you to customize your approach to the client, include the client in the discussion and adapt and evolve the value over time. Here are some ways to get started:

Over three days during September 17-19, InsideCounsel magazine succeeded where others have not. They created a national forum to facilitate women-to-women exchange on current legal issues. This year’s conference was the second annual meeting to bring together talented women attorneys. As part of the process, InsideCounsel invited nationally-recognized women who are General Counsel for Fortune 500 companies and attracted the best and brightest among in-house attorneys around the world. One speakers’ panel shared their experiences for getting to the GC leadership positions where they are today, and the advice is refreshingly candid.

* “[T]he ‘superstar’ model of Supreme Court advocacy marketing is prevailing”: recent Supreme Court litigation has been dominated by Biglaw and boutiques, and five of them handled about half of last term’s cases. [WSJ Law Blog]

* It’s not a “done deal” yet, but Albany Law School is in serious talks with the University at Albany to form an affiliation by the end of the year. There’s been no word on whether Albany Law would remain a stand-alone school under the yet-to-be inked arrangement. [Albany Business Review]

* The dismissal of lawsuits concerning allegedly deceptive employment statistics at several Chicago-area law schools was affirmed by an Illinois appeals court. ::insert sad trombone here:: [National Law Journal]

* If you’re still thinking about applying to law school for some reason, you might find these tips on what not to write in a personal statement to be useful. [Law Admissions Lowdown / U.S. News & World Report]

* Amanda Bynes, one of our favorite fading starlets who was already on probation, was arrested this weekend on a DUI charge after stopping her car in the middle of an intersection. [Los Angeles Times]

The talons of justice patrol Texas.

* Well here’s a headline: My Solo Practice Ended My Marriage. [Law Firm Suites] * Pennsylvania Attorney General claims officials sent and received porn via state email accounts for years, “including top state jurists and 30 current employees of the state Attorney General’s Office.” If the AG’s office is swapping porn at all hours, somehow […]