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It is that time of year where we recover from the holiday madness, dig ourselves out of the snow and look ahead to a brand new year! Attorneys and co-hosts Bob Ambrogi and J. Craig Williams welcome returning musical guest, Attorney Larry Savell from the law firm of Chadbourne & Parke LLP, to talk about his new album, Yule Hear from Our Lawyers. Later in the show, Bob and Craig reflect on this past year with Lawyer2Lawyers Best of 2010!

On this edition of The Paralegal Voice, co-hosts Lynne DeVenny and Vicki Voisin welcome Kim Walker, a senior litigation paralegal with the firm of Berger & Montague, P.C. in Philadelphia, to talk about her recent Law.com article, “What Do Attorneys Wish Their Paralegals Knew” Lynne, Vicki and Kim discuss how paralegals can improve their legal technology skills, maintain the highest level of professionalism in the office, and communicate more effectively with their supervising attorneys. They also share what they wish attorneys knew, emphasizing how attorneys can better utilize paralegals in the practice of law.

USA Today continues its series on prosecutorial misconduct with the latest article, “Prosecutor misconduct lets convicted off easy,” published in today’s edition. The first two articles highlighted innocent people who went to prison because of prosecutorial misconduct, and pointed out that few prosecutors get into trouble for these offenses.

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My husband, who is a librarian at a public library, recently gave me a poem to read. Entitled “Library Days,” it is part of Philip Levine’s new collection, News of the World. The poem is copyrighted, but the most of the text, including this poem, is available at Google Books. The poem is set in Detroit during the Korean War, and the narrator is a beer delivery truck driver who plays hooky from his job to “sit for hours with the sunlight streaming in the high windows” of the library. The library is treated with the same reverence as a house of worship. Some of the narrator’s favorite authors are Melville, Balzac, and Walt Whitman, “my old hero.” The books have “the aura of used tea bags.” He also favors the great Russian writers–Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, Chekhov, Tolstoy; reading The Idiot confirms that “life was irrational.” What particularly caught my attention was the depiction of the librarian, one of the most negative I have ever seen. The librarian has “gone gray though young,” and sits “by the phone that never rang, assembling the frown reserved exclusively for me …” Her voice was full of “pure malice” when a patron made the mistake of asking for Jane’s Fighting Ships instead of literature. She never exchanges a smile with the narrator despite his tentative attempts at engaging her. Ultimately, however, the librarian is just an annoyance. Reading is the narrator’s real job, and his actual job takes a back seat to it. It did not matter to him that the beer he was supposed to deliver “could sit for ages in the boiling van slowly morphing into shampoo …” The poem concludes, “it mattered not at all to me, I had work to do.” Read the rest of this entry »

A very good essay in the Boston Globe Ideas section today by Avi Steinberg, who recently came out with the memoir, Running the Books about his stint as a prison librarian in the Boston area Suffolk County House of Correction. He writes about the periodic, well, probably ongoing, attacks on prison libraries, from well-meaning reformers who fear that the books will undermine the principle of punishment or might encourage prisoners to consider making a break for it or more fruitless appeals. Steinberg writes with excellent detail about the experiences he had as a prison librarian that lead him to the opposite conclusion. In his opinion, the true value of the prison library lies not so much in the reading material, as in the civilizing, educating locus of the place. The prisoners, who learn that the library is a haven that can make them feel like normal people for that short visit, run there when allowed, they are so eager to arrive.

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Ken Strutin focuses on the impact of social media on jurors who increasingly try to stay connected to work and home while performing their civic duty, and the resulting impact of the power of individual jurors to virtualize a trial by going online. His article collects recent and notable examples of juror online misbehavior and highlights scholarship and practice resources concerning its implications for voir dire, trial management and the administration of justice.

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 Attorney Christopher Strang from Desmond, Strang & Scott, LLP and Attorney Alexandra Gorman from Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP, to discuss their roles as co-chairs of the Boston Bar Associations New Lawyers Section. Jared, Chris and Alex talk about the importance of networking, effective networking techniques, some common mistakes new lawyers make when it comes to networking efforts and the perks of getting involved in your bar association.

The Chronicle of Higher Education, in a news story dated December 12, by Marc Parry, reports that as colleges and universities create more social media-based services and “hubs” for students, there is an increasing problem with visually disabled students lacking access. The developers of these sites simply don’t think about making them accessible, the way that architects now routinely consider ramps and braille signage. But the problem is bigger than social sites’ accessibility. E-textbooks often lack the metadata tags that are key for the screenreaders used by visually disabled readers. If an illustration does not have a caption explaining what the illustration, graph or image shows, the blind student cannot access that information. When schools mandate the use of Kindles they really need to be aware that these machines do not have decent readers built in, and blind users will HATE or be unable to use the machines to access e-books (depends on the version whether there is a voice at all — visit this 2009 CNet review for a sample of the voice). When websites require mouse clicks to navigate, a vision-impaired user cannot access the site, because they cannot see to move the mouse around on the screen. They use a keyboard, and need a key substitute for the button click that the web designer imagines for the mouse. With a mouse-only design, visually impaired users have been locked out of the website.

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Recently in an Oakland, California courtroom, a jury awarded Oracle Corp., a whopping $1.3 billion verdict against competitor, SAP AG, a market and technology leader in business management software, for damages due to copyright infringement by a now-defunct software maintenance unit called, TomorrowNow. Attorney and co-host Bob Ambrogi welcomes Attorney Carol Smith, from Hiaring + Smith LLP and David H. Levitt, Partner at the firm, Hinshaw & Culbertson LLP, as they take a look at this complicated case that is sweeping the legal community. They discuss copyright infringement and stolen intellectual property, SAPs admitted liability, the significance of the billiondollar jury award and the impact of this case on future cases.

On this edition of Ringler Radio, host Larry Cohen welcomes cohost and Ringler colleague, Jim Brady and guest, Attorney Virginia L. Price, shareholder with Klinedinst PC, to explore the many different areas of transportation law. Virginia talks about the kinds of cases that fall under transportation law including casualty litigation, cargo and employment law, 24-hour rapid response protocol and getting involved before lawsuits are filed.