The Law Blog of Plaintiff's Attorney Max Kennerly
I’m taking the Canadian legal press by force:
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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
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Another great post at Build A Solo Practice, LLC:
Do you know how your potential client will find you? Have you done a survey of your existing clients or studied secondary information if you are just starting out to determine the best marketing/advertising vehicles to reach them? With money tight, the scatter shot approach is…
One of my favorite cases, Huber v. Taylor, filed 2002, loaded with allegations against the plaintiffs former attorneys and all kinds of fun remedies like disgorgement, just finished its second round on appeal, back down to the District Court for the third time.
The prior opinion, Huber v. Taylor, 469 F.3d 67 (3d Cir.
“Schiess’s basic document design for lawyers” at Legalwriting.net.
Although I agree in principle, I don’t think it works in practice.
For example, I don’t think it is practical to use more than one font in a given document, since too many readers will not expect it and will be momentarily confused when they…
Most attorneys I know keep a "legal research" file. As they have continued on their careers, they have come across numerous issues that took a considerable amount of time to research. After spending that time, in hopes of increasing productivity, the attorneys then dump the core parts of the research into a really long Microsoft…
Most everything you need to know to be a Google, Windows, Mac and Firefox professional. Nice.
The Conglomerate is mad at the NYT’s "The Ethicist:"
Anyway, this Sunday Cohen is asked by Patrick Hebron of Brooklyn whether it is "ethical" for him to give a young artist friend $9,000 in return for a 1% share of his "lifetime earnings" no matter what time of work the artist does. Cohen claims that
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In New York comes word of an attorney being ordered to repay $403,000 for mishandling a judge’s estate. To wit:
Nearly half of the $403,000 Ambrosio ordered Taylor to pay to Phillips’ estate stemmed from her handling of the $696,000 in net proceeds from a court-approved sale of one of Phillips’ properties.
Taylor acknowledged taking
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Building on my prior post about there not really begin any "50-50" cases, the NYTimes interviews a
a physician and molecular biologist who teaches judges about science and genetics:
Q. DO SCIENTISTS AND JUDGES HAVE MUCH IN COMMON?
A. Well, a scientist almost never says anything absolutely. Everything is a theory, to be disproved or adjusted later on. Judges worry a lot about the certainty of conclusions, too. Judges are used to thinking of truth as an elusive concept. A lot of judges, when you bring up “the truth,” they roll their eyes. They say, “I don’t know what to say about truth. I do know about probabilities.”
As I wrote before, "If you can see a wide array of evidence and argument, which it is your sworn duty to evaluate, and yet you remain totally unmoved, then the problem lies with you, not with the inherent unknowability of the world." I think that is a common ground between science and law, the acceptance that absolute certainty of the rightness of one’s result is neither possible nor necessary.
It’s worth pondering a bit more. Back in law school, I took a number of classes with an extraordinarily intelligent professor who had, among other academic achievements, previously edited a 14 volume hornbook in a particularly dense, broad and complicated legal field. He was recognized by most of his peers as the smartest professor there, and had devoted more brain power to considering the law as a whole than most anyone on earth.
He was also a cynic, dismayed by the ease with which judges would produce inconsistent arguments and wholly irrational theories of law — frequently at odds with their own prior opinions — just to support a particular position in a case before them. So at one point, I asked him, "is anything in the law real, or is all just made up after the fact to justify the decision?"
He answered quickly, "burdens are real. Whatever else is going on, the burdens of production and persuasion tell everyone what they’re supposed to do."
Continue Reading Truth vs. Probabilities: Judges, Law, Scientists and Science
How many e-mails do you have in your inbox? I was doing great, then had the five-week trial, and as of this morning it was 3682.
Time to re-implement Inbox Zero.
Really, if you do one thing today, get your DMZ going:
- Open your email program and create a new folder called “
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