If all you manage to do was read the headline from the ABA Journal online story today — “Self-represented litigants perceive bias and disadvantage in court process, report finds,” your reaction will likely be limited to “Duh.” But, there is much more that can be gleaned from this “Cases Without Counsel” study and report that the Institute for […]
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Radiolab does the “buried bodies” case
Over the last couple of years, like a lot of other people, I have gotten very into listening to podcasts on my way to and from work and on car trips. Most of what I spend my time listening to is in the comedic vein (MBMBAM, Judge John Hodgman, You Talking U2 to Me), but […]
So, blame my children for the Meghan Trainor reference, but it is a catchy tune and, actually, not the worst of messages of female empowerment. Nevertheless, it fits my ramblings today too well for me to resist. A blurb about a trademark infringement suit involving an Atlanta law firm that operates under a trade name […]
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Dishonesty in settlement negotiations
This is a topic I’ve spoken about on a number of times over the years as it can make for a pretty decent CLE presentation. Any such presentation almost always involves use of a hypothetical to explore issues that seem (or at least can sound) academic to a large extent. The usual jumping off point […]
Back in June 2015, I dedicated a post here to praising APRL’s proposal to streamline ethics rules imposing outdated restrictions on lawyer advertising. A proposal that recognizes that lots of states currently have advertising restrictions on the books that could not survive a constitutional challenge and that aren’t really even being sought to be enforced and […]
Two weeks ago, I offered some thoughts on the latest flare-up in the long-running off-and-on ABA exploration of the third-rail of the practice of law: potential non-lawyer ownership/investment in law firms. This time around, before I could even manage to finish reading all of the comments and try to write some thoughts about the comments, […]
There are lots of sources and stories about the escalation of dollars poured into, and spent in, judicial elections in various states. Here’s an April 2016 article about Wisconsin; and here’s an October 2015 press release from a special-interest group made of folks including The Brennan Center. But that isn’t the only thing that makes […]
When you allow yourself to ponder just how quickly technological advances have changed the daily life of a lawyer, it becomes pretty easy to speculate about just how foreign the daily life of a lawyer 10 years from now will be when compared to what it is today. When I stop to think about the […]
April 2016 has brought another iteration of a seemingly, endless, (yet kind of potentially pointless unless you think the politics of the situation will somehow play out differently from the past) debate: whether some entity within the ABA is attempting to usher into reality a world in which people other than lawyers will be allowed […]
I’ve written (quite a long time ago now it seems, but it was only just last Spring) about the unfortunate nature of lawyers calling people who aren’t lawyers “nonlawyers” – rather than referring to them in a less condescending fashion such as “regular people,” for example. But, I still do it all the time, so […]