If not, then why write emails and texts the way you do? In this article at The Federalist, staff writer Philip Wegmann takes millennials and curmudgeons alike to task for degrading the quality of written communications. The piece starts with this: On the floor of the Senate, surrounded by elected officials and important dignitaries, an eccentric inventor started texting. On May 24, 1844, with an electrical wire strung from DC to Baltimore, Samuel Morse transmitted the first telegraph, forever transforming the world. Reflecting on the divine providence of this technological leap forward, Morse tapped out a message of dashes and dots that read, “What hath God wrought?” Now Kelly texts Becky, “OMG! Look at her butt!” and…
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Gee, We’re Smart!
At his Legal-Writing Blog, Wayne Schiess shares some observations from one of his students, who aspires to be an appellate lawyer and worked in the appellate practice department of a law firm. See the professor’s post for all the details, but among the student’s observations: I realized why appellate lawyers at law firms are stereotypically labeled as the smartest lawyers at the firm. The fact that they can come to work, day in and day out, and spend hours thinking and writing at such a level makes them nothing less than brilliant, if you ask me. I can’t figure out why, but that was my favorite part. Actually, I think it’s…
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Why Some Lawyers and Their Clients are Reluctant to Engage Appellate Counsel, Part 1: Categories
(NOTE: This post is the first in a series. To read the announcement of the series and/or leave your ideas for subsequent installments, click here.) Well, it’s been four weeks since I promised a series of posts on this topic. You were probably about to give up on me. I started the first post, and it kept growing, and growing, and growing . . . clearly, some better way of organizing the topics was necessary. And I’ve devoted substantial time to it. How did I get to this point? I started writing about what I figure is the number one reason lawyers don’t engage appellate counsel. The trial lawyer thinks…
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Why Are Some Lawyers and Their Clients Reluctant to Engage Appellate Counsel?
UPDATE: This post is included in Blawg Review #174 at Texas Appellate Law Blog. Why don’t some trial lawyers or their clients engage appellate counsel when it comes time for the appeal? Over the years, I’ve heard various reasons advanced for this. Among them: lawyers see no need to hire new counsel for something they can do themselves, lawyers are afraid to lose the client forever to the appellate lawyer or his firm, lawyers and their clients are afraid that the appellate lawyer won’t know enough about the specialized area of law involved in the appeal, clients are too comfortable with the trial lawyer to switch, clients are fed up…
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Why Use a Big Firm on Appeal?
D. Todd Smith (pictured) opines at Texas Appellate Law Blog on an article at Technolawyer that offers five reasons why general counsel tend to stick with large firms despite “rumblings about how high hourly rates and associate salary increases may lead them elsewhere.” Specifically, he asks: “Do these reasons apply when a GC is looking for appellate counsel?” He then goes down the list of reasons and concludes that, for the most part, they should not apply to a general counsel’s selection of appellate counsel. In the process, he notes some key distinctions between trial practice and appellate practice that many may not be aware of. Of course, all you…
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What Happens to the Trial Lawyer’s Contingency Fee when an Appeal is Taken?
The Texas Appellate Law Blog has done all appellate lawyers and contingency fee trial lawyers a favor with a post urging trial lawyers to include in their contingent fee agreements a provision explaining how the fee is affected if an appeal is taken: “There really is no right or wrong way to do it, but in my view, contingent-fee agreements should always spell out what happens in the event of an appeal.” He also covers a number of different ways to do it. Please check it out.
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Lawyer Advertising Pit Bulls, uh, Make That Pitfalls
Not that you’d ever know it from reading this blog, but I’m a pretty funny guy. So I like things about humor and the law. A front page article in last Thursday’s Wall Street Journal documents how badly some state bars lack a sense of humor (subscription required — if that link doesn’t work, go to this post at the WSJ.com Law Blog, which appears to allow non-subscribers to link to the article). Take the opening few paragraphs: Syracuse, N.Y., attorney James Alexander ran a TV spot for his firm showing lawyers offering counsel to space aliens who had crashed their UFO. He also did one with lawyers towering like…
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LawLink Access to The California Blog of Appeal and More
There’s a new way to access legal blogs and more about your colleagues. And I do mean new. I added The California Blog of Appeal to the blog directory at LawLink over the weekend. This is only the eighth blog to be added, but plenty more are sure to follow. Clicking on any of the blogs in the directory gives you an RSS feed right inside your browser window that shows teasers from the last few (up to 15) blog posts at that blog. Who knows how widely seen it may become? If you have your own law blog, you might as well get it up there now. LawLink appears…
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Plagiarism Sanctions Issue, Blog Readers React, and How this Relates to Value Billing
This post at The Volokh Conspiracy post and this one at Tax Prof Blog both provide extended excerpts from an Iowa bankruptcy case in which the court sanctioned an attorney — quite stiffly — for submitting a brief that was almost entirely (15 of 17 pages) lifted word for word from an article written by two other attorneys, without attribution. The attorney charged the client $5700 for the brief. Both posts have lengthy comment threads (Volokh’s is longer), with a great many defenders of the attorney — not for the billing, but for submitting the brief. Many are also upset (rightfully so, to my mind) with the court’s apparent position…
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Alternative Fee Structures in Appellate Practice
D. Todd Smith at the Texas Appellate Law Blog has a nice post on the suitability of alternative fee structures for appellate practice. I generally concur with his post. Appeals are far more predictable than the progress of a lawsuit in the trial court, which generally enables an appellate practitioner to estimate the time that will be spent on a case and formulate a fair flat fee. Smith also addresses contingent fees. Like Smith, I too was a “big firm” lawyer and enslaved by the concept of the “billable hour” for years. As a solo, I am far more conscious of every minute I spend on a case. The freedom that…
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Jones Day’s Low-Profile Roots?
OK, this is off-topic for this blog (I had to create the new “Law Practice & Marketing” category for it), but it concerns one of my old firms — my first firm — and I can’t help commenting. Jones Day was my first law firm out of law school in 1992. I was in their 90-lawyer L.A. Office. It turned out that “big firm” life wasn’t for me, and I left after two years, but there were many fine people and lawyers there. Which made it both amusing and distressing for me to learn from Carolyn Elefant at law.com about an article in Cleveland Scene titled “Deception HQ: Jones Day,…