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Why are the worlds best communicators often unable to have difficult conversations with clients, employees, partners, or even family members? Find out on The Un-Billable Hour, with host Attorney Rodney Dowell, Director of the Massachusetts Law Office Management Assistance Program and interim executive director at Lawyers Concerned for Lawyers, along with Szifra Birke, counselor, consultant and co-host of Shrink Rap, a syndicated cable TV show. They discuss the impact on success and how legal professionals can start handling difficult conversations in a healthy manner.

The chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, Roderick Ireland and the chief justice for administration and management, Robert A. Mulligan, sent a strongly worded statement to Governor Deval Patrick. Seven justices of the Supreme Judicial Court joined in a letter requesting Governor Deval Patrick not to nominate any more judges because of the impact on the overstrained budget for support staff. And Mulligan sent a letter to Patrick as well.

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We recently sat down with Suffolk Law Professor Christopher Dearborn to discuss issues in the Whitey Bulger case. Learn more about Professor Dearborn at http://bit.ly/p2F4jY.

The struggle over the papers of Robert F. Kennedy continues. We previously blogged about papers dating from Kennedy’s time as Attorney General, held by the John F. Kennedy Library, but closed to researchers because the Kennedy family refused to grant full public access. On March 1, the presidential library decided to open up the sixty-three closed boxes, and archivists have been “organizing and declassifying” the papers since then; this work should take between six months to a year to complete.

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468B Trusts (derived from Internal Revenue Service Code Section 468B), were originally created to simplify the settlement of mass tort cases. More recently, they have been suggested for the settlement of single claimant cases, which has become a source of much debate. On this edition of Ringler Radio, host Larry Cohen welcomes co-host, Carmella Limongelli and guest, Rick Woollams, Chief Claims Officer at Chartis U.S., to take an in-depth look at 468B trusts and the rather controversial area of their use in cases with a single claimant.

Jason Kaufman, a fellow of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society put together a research team in 2006, of 5 sociologists. Himself, 4 others from Harvard, and one from UCLA, to look at the Facebook pages from the students at Harvard College who would graduate in 2009. They hired student assistants at Harvard to help them go through, and collect data, as they followed the students through their 4 years at college. They collected information such as home state, major, political views, network of friends, gender, romantic relationships and preferences. They believed they were redacting information in a way that would protect the identities of the subjects adequately.

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With the Supreme Courts 2010-2011 term over, looking back, there have been some decisions handed down by the Justices that have created a stir. From the controversial ruling of the Wal-Mart discrimination case, Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. v. Dukes, to the courts rejection of a ban on violent video games, Brown v. EMA, this was by no means an ordinary term. Attorneys and co-hosts Bob Ambrogi and J. Craig Williams welcome Tony Mauro, Supreme Court correspondent for The National Law Journal, American Lawyer Media, and law.com and Amy Howe, editor of SCOTUSblog, to look back at the 2010-2011 term, the Justices, spotlight the biggest cases of the term and look ahead to the upcoming term.

International criminal law has been in the news of late. The International Criminal Court recently issued an arrest warrant for Muammar Khadafy; it remains to be seen if he will ever be brought to justice. In addition, Ratko Mladic,
commander of the Bosnian Serb army, was charged with genocide and crimes against humanity, and went on trial before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia on June 3. This is the fiftieth anniversary of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, architect of the Nazi policy of forced deportation of European Jews, who was responsible for the deaths of millions. The conjunction of current events and the anniversary of the Eichmann trial inspired a thoughtful piece in The Boston Globe, written by Illana Bet-El, a writer and historian.

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As smartphones and GPS devices become increasingly sophisticated, your every move can be tracked and your every communication read by law enforcement. On the July edition of Law Technology Now, host Monica Bay talks with consultant Joshua Engel, the Fourth Amendment Guru of the EDD Update blog, about privacy issues, and the U.S. Supreme Courts announcement that it will hear a controversial case involving police planting GPS devices on suspected criminals.

NALP Executive Director James Leipold, speaking at the Northeast Association of Pre-Law Advisors, pointed out a few bright spots in the otherwise dismal job market for lawyers:

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