Appellate Attorney Greg May on Practice and Developments in the Appellate Courts of California

Victoria Pynchon of the Settle It Now Negotiation Blog asked that I pass along her suggestion for a law blogger meeting at the California State Bar Convention this week, and I do so gladly.  From Victoria:

Please let me know if you’re interested in a legal bloggers meeting at the state bar convention in monterey this week. 

We could have drinks at the Hyatt between, say, 5 and 7 on the 27th — the annual dinner & cabaret starts at 7 p.m. that evening — Saturday — and we could just flow into that event; or we could do Thursday AT the Opening Night reception, which starts at 5:45 . . . I’ve got the Cal Women Lawyers Annual Dinner at 7 p.m. 

What would be most convenient for everyone? 

Reply to Vickie Pynchon at vpynchon@settlenow.com or leave a comment on the [LinkedIn] Group discussion thread on the meetup. Thanks.

Some of you may have noticed some changes in sidebar information that clued you in to my recent relocation and change of practice name. Most of you probably didn’t, so here’s everything you need to know (more than you need, actually) in one post.

First, the new digs. I’ve moved from Ventura to Oxnard, and specifically to the Fisherman’s Wharf area of Channel Islands Harbor, where you’ll find the fine gentleman at right (the one in the yellow coat) standing post in front of the Ventura County Maritime Museum, which is in the building next to my office.

I’ve gone from a professional building in a busy part of town — with the attendant traffic — to a far more tranquil setting. Instead of having doctors and lawyers as neighbors, I share a building with Anacapa Surf Shop and The Studio Gallery, which is . . . cool. There are two other law offices in the complex. One is my old boss, the other I haven’t been able to check out yet.

The location also makes for distinctive driving directions: “After you pass the lighthouse, turn in at the second ship’s mast and park near the water taxi sign.”

Oh yeah, remember that view of the parking lot? It’s been replaced with this:

OK, I admit, that’s not quite my view. I actually have to take a few steps outside my office to see this. But my old view was of a parking lot, and when I stepped outside my office, I still saw a parking lot. This is better. My first office as a lawyer in BigLaw was on the 46th floor of the Gas Company Tower in downtown Los Angeles, from which I could see Dodger Stadium, the HOLLYWOOD sign, and Griffith Park Observatory. Again, this is better. And it’s minutes from my house, so the commute is better, too.

And perhaps one of the biggest benefits of all: windows that actually open . . . fresh air!

Luckily, the nature of appellate practice means I can work on appeals from all over the state (or from around the Ninth Circuit, for that matter) no matter where I locate my office. Most appeals require only a single court appearance and very few meetings with the client (sometimes none). Send your documents to me in Channel Islands Harbor (or deliver then yourself as an excuse for a brief getaway to this beautiful place), and let me take care of the rest!

By the way, when you send them, you’ll no longer be sending them to me at “G.T. May Law Offices.” You’ll be sending them to me at “The Law Office of Greg May.” Not exactly a radical change, but I thought the name of the practice should include the name under which I have developed an online presence. The rest of my new contact information:

I will be in San Diego or in transit July 17-19 and doubt I will be accessing the blog in that time.  If there’s a blog storm over some bombshell opinion between now and Friday and you’re wondering why I have nothing to say about it, it’s because I’m either driving, in my seminar, or with my wife and 5-year-old daughter watching Shamu and the other killer whales jump through hoops.

You will have to content yourself with the posts I have already drafted and scheduled to publish automatically (assuming I did it right) through July 19.  The California Blog of Appeal will thus have at least one new post per day (again, assuming I did it right) for those of you who can’t get through your morning coffee without checking to see what I published in the wee hours.

Regular readers will note some small changes to the post and commenting formats.

First, the comment form now includes a field for your URL. If you fill out this field with the URL of your own blog, then a recent snippet from your blog will appear immediately below your comment. For an example, check the comment I have added to this post. In effect, you’re advertising on my blog. This service is by way of a plug-in called “Blogfollow,” and the Blogfollow badge appears below each post and on the comment page (which may be overkill — I’ll probably take it out of the position below each post). Hovering over the badge explains what the plug-in does. Clicking on it takes you to the developer’s webiste.

Second, I have added links for “E-mail This” and “Add a Comment” below each post. I was concerned that the “No Comments” link at the bottom of the post (which is still there), rather than communicating that no one had yet commented, might instead convey that comments were not allowed. “Add a Comment” hopefull dispels that impression.

This last feature has proven to be a little buggy. (For example, those links don’t appear to show up in this post, though they are in earlier posts.) I’m working through the issues with the developer. If I can’t get it functioning correctly in the next few days, I’ll take it out.

I got everything done, and from now on I’ll be posting exclusively here at the self-hosted site. No more posts will be made to the Wordpress site, except in order to direct traffic here. Some things you may need to do:

Bookmarks: If you had the Wordpress URL bookmarked, you need to update your bookmark for The California Blog of Appeal to http://www.calblogofappeal.com.

Posts Feed: If you were a subscriber to the feed from the Wordpress site and wish to continue receiving a feed, you need to update the feed URL to http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheCaliforniaBlogOfAppeal. You can subscribe to the posts feed automatically using either the newsreader button or web aggregator button in the right sidebar. If you need an Atom feed rather than an RSS feed, don’t worry. The feed is set up with Feedburner’s SmartFeed, which should convert the feed on the fly to either RSS or Atom, depending on your aggregator. You can also use the second button to subscribe by e-mail. If you try subscribing and your feed does not work, please email me using the link in the left sidebar.

Comments/Trackbacks: To leave a comment or to trackback to the post, click on the title of the post or on the comments link below the post. (A link that says “No Comments” doesn’t mean that comments are not allowed. It just means no one has left a comment yet.) The trackback URL is the same as the URL for the post.

Blogrolls: If you have The California Blog of Appeal on your blogroll, please update the link to http://www.calblogofappeal.com.

I’m in the process of setting up my own web host for The California Blog of Appeal. Right now, the blog is hosted on Wordpress.com. at the URL http://calblogofappeal.wordpress.com.

Those of you who have found the blog through a link from another site already know this. But those of you accessing the blog through the URL http://www.calblogofappeal.com may not. I have domain forwarding set up on the calblogofappeal.com domain name and, until tonight, also had domain masking enabled. That means that if you typed in the URl http://www.calblogofappeal.com, you were forwarded to the Wordpress URL but it was hidden from you.

The chief drawback to this domain forwarding and masking scheme is that if you then click on a specific post title or the link to its comments, the URL in your address bar still says calblogofappeal.com, which means you can’t identify the specific URL of the post for trackbacks or linking. Tonight, I disabled the masking, so as soon as you reach the site, you’ll see the wordpress URL in the address bar.

When I move the blog to my host, the actual address of the bog will be calblogofappeal.com. If you subscreibe to the RSS feed, you will probably have to resubscribe after the move.

I’m trying to get this done while the blog is still young (it’s 32 days old today) and before it gets too many followers (being optimistic — except for the three-day weekend, I’ve enjoyed a boost in traffic most of the last week or so, creating a greater sense of urgency to get set up as a self-hosted blog). And since I’m not sure I can resume my blog stats where they leave off when I move from Wordpress, I do not want to let a large number of hits build up just top start at zero again. Finally, I’ve been holding off on many of the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and other steps for increasing theblog’s visibility until it moves to its own host.

I plan to keep the same general look on the blog (the maroon-to-black banner, fonts, etc.), though I may have to make some changes in the course of switching to the new host.

This won’t happen for a while, but I wanted to give everyone fair warning and explain what I will be doing and why I will be doing it. I also want to mininmize any loss of readership due to the transition. My target date to complete this process is June 18, but that’s likely to slip. I will post updates as the project progresses.

Purely administrative stuff here, folks.

In 1979’s The Jerk, Steve Martin’s character, Navin Johnson, sees his name in the phone book for the first time and exclaims, “This is the kind of publicity that gets people noticed!”

Well, that’s what they say today about Technorati and blogs. So here’s my post for the Technorati spiders to claim my blog and send me on the way to internet fame . . .

Technorati Profile

Here we go! Hold on!