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Paralegals are an important part of the trial team, and play a valuable role in jury selection. On this edition of The Paralegal Voice, co-hosts Lynne DeVenny and Vicki Voisin welcome one of Americas most influential trial consultants, Dr. David Ball, to explore the many ways that paralegals can assist in jury selection and why attorneys should maximize paralegal support at trial. Dr. Ball explains why paralegals may be under-utilized and why they are ideally suited to help their attorneys during this critical phase of trial work.

Time online reports on Maine’s voters repealing gay marriage in that state. GLAD.org, the organization that has engineered most of the gay marriage legal and political efforts across New England and beyond has more information at their website.

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It’s no secret that today the medical malpractice area is one of the most difficult areas of litigation. Plaintiffs not only have to deal with the physical effects of medical malpractice but also the challenges that they face in the courts. On this edition of Ringler Radio, host Larry Cohen welcomes Attorney Barry J. Nace, senior partner at Paulson & Nace in Washington DC to look at the process for the medical malpractice plaintiff in the trial court and specifically deal with how the biases of some judges can affect the result.

The New York Law Journal, in an excellent (and free!) article discusses an en banc decision by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals about the extraordinary rendition of a Canadian citizen in 2002. Mark Fass writes Read the rest of this entry »

I have spent a couple decades by now teaching legal research. I started with the optimistic idea that I could just pour the information into students’ heads. Well, not quite that naive, but nearly. Early on, we lectured, and then gave our students worksheets, and reading assignments to introduce them to the various research tools. But over the years, I began to feel that the lecture was really not doing much, and the worksheets were where the learning (if any) was happening. I thought back to my own days as a library school student. The bibliography classes were hugely time- consuming, but we really learned how to understand all those different tools, how to teach ourselves new resources in the future, and how to evaluate and choose them, too. I thought, that is what I think the law students really need. Nearly anything I teach them NOW will be different by the time they graduate. So, I went to work on creating a bunch of worksheets that showed the law students how to look under the hood at various types of legal research tools.

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Peggy Garvin has updated her directory of useful government information resources online, the e-Government and Web Directory: U.S. Federal Government Online. Her research has found that federal web sites do not change as rapidly as users believe. The content on these sites is dynamic, constantly being refreshed and redesigned. However, the sites themselves, the ones that represent so much of the work of the federal government and are selected for inclusion in the book, are fairly stable.