Legal Docs LibraryKnow Your Rights

Congressman Barney Frank, long a courageous advocate for gay and lesbian rights after coming out himself, is taking a firm stand on his current bill in the House. Despite grumblings and rumblings from moderate and right wing allies and opponents, Frank is determined to keep in the bill on employment discrimination a section protecting transpeople. His bill three years ago included such a provision, and he was persuaded to remove it, only to see the bill fail in the Senate anyway. Here is the nice article the Boston Globe ran today on the issue.

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On this debut podcast of Litigation Support Review, host Mary Pat Poteet, an eDiscovery/Litigation Support expert with almost 20 years experience in the litigation support industry welcomes Gene Eames, member of the Daegis consulting team, to discuss legal search. Mary Pat and Gene explore the challenge of recall and precision in the industry and ultimately how to achieve better recall and precision in legal search.

At Chronicle of Higher Education, Prof. Pennywise offers a terrific column, “In Debt to Your Degree”. It is very possible that you may not be able to access the column linked here without a Chronicle password. So, I am going to snip some of her best bits of advice here. But her column is witty and pithy, and if you can access it in full, I heartily recommend reading it in full. here are snips: Read the rest of this entry »

On this edition of the Legal ToolKit, brought to you by Catuogno Court Reporting, host Jared Correia, Law Practice Management Advisor with Mass. LOMAP welcomes Stephanie Kimbro, an attorney who operates the virtual law firm Kimbro Legal Services. Jared and Stephanie will look at virtual law practice, including the technology components, the benefits of such systems and the impact of the virtual practice of law upon the future of the legal profession.

On this edition of Ringler Radio, host Larry Cohen and colleague Manny J. Valdez Jr. welcome Attorney John Gomez, a nationally recognized trial attorney at the Gomez Law firm, to discuss the latest in Toyota litigation. Attorney Gomez talks about his involvement in these Toyota cases, his participation in the congressional hearings and getting justice for the victims and the families of victims involved.

Trevor Rosen and Andrew Zimmerman’s guide focuses on websites that will help you determine whether a lawyer is currently licensed to practice in a particular state.

The media’s popularization of certain types of evidence may be inspiring a “CSI effect” on decision makers according to Ken Strutin. There is a question about whether impressions created by the media in its treatment and portrayal of forensic proof as either irrefutable or absolutely necessary for conviction is truly impacting the outcome of criminal cases. Ken’s guide is a collection of select legal scholarship and media studies that illuminates the extent of the phenomenon and whether it needs to be addressed and how.

GLAD is representing plaintiffs challenging the DOMA (federal Defense of Marriage Act) in the federal district court in Boston, the case, Gill v. Office of Personnel Management. See here for a press conference (kind of hard to hear — there is a lot of traffic and wind noise). The GLAD site has lots of info and documents. If you stick past the attorney from GLAD, you get to hear from the various plaintiffs, and it’s really worthwhile. You begin to hear their stories and get a personal view of how the Defense of Marriage Act unfairly impacts them and their families.

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The technology and legal world was abuzz over an incident involving a prototype of the iPhone 4G. An Apple engineer allegedly left behind the iPhone, which eventually ended up in the hands of Gizmodo.com, a technology weblog. After pictures surfaced on the Gizmodo site, a search of a Gizmodo editors home and computer was issued. Attorneys and co-hosts, J. Craig Williams and Bob Ambrogi welcome Sam Bayard, the Assistant Director of the Citizen Media Law Project and Eric Goldman, Director of the High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University School of Law, to discuss the legal issues behind this complex debacle. They look at the shield law, the validity of the search warrant and the legal battle that could possibly lie ahead.

Google has announced that it will start selling digital copies of books this summer, according to an article in the Telegraph. What makes this news significant is that these digital editions will not be tied to individual devices; rather, they will be available wherever and however a user accesses his Google account. As the Telegraph points out, this approach “will put the search giant in direct competition with established digital book retailers such as Amazon’s Kindle Store and Apple’s iBook Store.” It also has a potential democratizing effect as users won’t have to purchase expensive dedicated devices. Read the rest of this entry »