I’m a trial lawyer for injured people and businesses at The Beasley Firm. Founded in 1958, we have recovered over $2 billion for our clients through hundreds of verdicts and settlements in excess of $1 million. We’re listed in Super Lawyers, Best Lawyers in America, U.S. News’s Top Lawyers, [...]
Clinton’s Cabinet Appointment and the “Emoluments” Clause
So far I've seen three legal blogs pick up on Senator Hillary Clinton's "Emoluments" problem if she's appointed to serve as Secretary of State: Adam B at DailyKos, Jack Balkin at Balkinzation, and Eugene Volokh at the Volokh Conspiracy. Great work by all three. The situation is tailor-made for a first-year ConLaw exam. By Executive Order dated January 4, 2008, President Bush enacted cost-of-living adjustments ("COLA") for a wide variety of Executive Branch employees, including members of the uniformed service, judges and justices, administrative law judges, the employees of Veterans Affairs and, importantly, the Cabinet. The latter is the problem for Clinton, who ... Continue Reading
A Party From Whom You Do Not Want To Steal
A Billboard company. Oy. Via Neatorama. ... Continue Reading
How (and Why) to Make Your Case Like a Destroyed Ferrari
A picture that's been making its way around the internet: Can you imagine how fast they were going? From the Daily Mail, here's why this picture is evidence of triumph, not failure: The un-named driver and his passenger were taken to the Royal Adelaide Hospital for treatment, but their injuries were said to be not serious. "Not serious?" They destroy a race car driving it into an immobile object at a speed most people never reach and their injuries are "not serious?" Ignore the idiot driver. Three cheers for Ferrari, for designing a car that collapsed in such a manner to ... Continue Reading
Another View of Associate Bonuses — “smart clients care about bonuses and marketplace “value”"
David Giacalone has kept the conversation about alleged client concerns over associate bonuses at firms like Cravath going at his site, f/k/a, where I have replied in comments. My reply is also below in the extended entry if you're interested. I don't disagree with most of what you wrote, particularly about value billing, which can be a ripoff in many circumstances, particularly 'basic' representation. Let me focus on one sentence in your post: "In the market for legal services, then, every "sane" client should very much care whether sellers are operating efficiently and savings are passed on to buyers." That's ... Continue Reading
Clients Don’t Care About Associate Salaries or Bonuses (Only Partners Do)
So I was talking with the Kevin at LexBlog about what he pays those support people I interact with when -- wait, no, none of that happened, because I don't care and it's none of my business. LexBlog provides a service. I thought the fee was fair and reasonable and that I got a great service. So I paid the fee and got the service. If the salaries or working conditions LexBlog provide intentionally violate labor, employment or discrimination laws, then we've got a problem. Otherwise, I have better things to do than micromanage my service provider's business. Same for most ... Continue Reading
“Why You Can’t Travel Back in Time and Kill Hitler”
More than a dozen reasons, at science fiction site io9. An example: Making History by Stephen Fry: A history student and a physics professor manage to send a permanent male contraceptive pill back in time where Hitler’s father will consume it, ensuring Hitler will never be born. But without Hitler, the Nazi party is ripe for the leadership of Rudolph Gloder, who shares Hitler’s genocidal agenda, but is far more efficient, stable, patient, and charismatic. Free from Hitler’s personality flaws, Gloder was able to take over all of Europe, so that, in the alternate present day, an extremely conservative US ... Continue Reading
“Jury awards $1.8 million to Bethel Park woman fired while on maternity leave”
Another company walloped for pregnancy discrimination: A jury awarded $1.8 million to a Bethel Park woman in federal court yesterday after it found that her employer fired her improperly during maternity leave. ... Ms. Smith gave birth to her son, Tommy, on Nov. 8, 2005, by Caesarean section. He was born with collapsed lungs and pneumonia and was hospitalized in a neonatal intensive care unit for two weeks. He left the hospital on Nov. 21. Ms. Smith had planned to take six weeks off -- the amount of time recommended by her physician and allowed by company policy -- but ... Continue Reading
“Voice dictation tools helpful, but still have kinks”
I'm taking the Canadian legal press by force: ... Productivity is, of course, the main attraction. But litigator Maxwell Kennerly discourages people from using traditional measures of productivity to evaluate these tools. “If you simply ran a stopwatch and compared how long it took to dictate and correct a document versus simply typing it, voice recognition doesn’t seem much faster and, indeed, is sometimes slower,” wrote Kennerly of the Philadelphia, Pa.-based, Beasley Firm LLC in an e-mail. “The critical difference is fatigue. After I type a document, I usually feel tired and unwilling to move on to my next task. ... Continue Reading
Third Circuit to Employee-Shareholders: No Breach of Fiduciary Duty Under ERISA Unless The Company Goes Down for the Count
Breach of fiduciary duty class actions under the Employee Retirement and Income Securities Act ("ERISA") are as common as the day is long. If an employee pension plan loses a lot of value, odds are good there will be a lawsuit. Unsurprisingly, the federal courts have clamped down on these lawsuits over the years. As the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit (Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware) just reaffirmed, in the context of an ERISA plan that offers employees the option of investing in a fund consisting solely of the employer's own securities, there is a "presumption ... Continue Reading
Monday Morning Cup of Coffee
Some links to get your neurons going over the next week: A former producer reveals the secrets of talk radio. I Can Has Cheezburger... and pathos? : Salon writer Jay Dixit discusses the link between LOLCats and the human condition. A particularly crazy dog vs. cat "fight" Woman reaches US army's top rank -- "And you know what they say, behind every successful woman there's an astonished man." New Scientist kicks off it's science fiction special by asking "Is science fiction dying?" And finally, in 1936 Buckminster Fuller explained Einstein's theory of relativity in a telegram: EINSTEIN'S FORMULA DETERMINATION INDIVIDUAL ... Continue Reading
