Griffin Bell, Carter AG dead at 90, was (among much else) respected Democratic voice for litigation reform [Atlanta Journal-Constitution]
“700,000 squiggles”: historic NY high court crackdown on trial lawyers’ pothole map [NYT; D’Onofrio v. City of New York slip op h/t reader Andrew Barovick; way back, City Journal]
Judge gets off pretty easy after her drunken crash into cop car [Hartford Courant via ChicTrib] Connecticut’s wild-n-crazy judiciary [Courant]
Follow the rules and seat Burris: National Journal quotes me in its bloggers’ poll [Illinois Senate appointment]
Legal history moment: Statute of Anne, 1710, turned copyright law into force for liberty [Cathy Gellis]
Blind editorial squirrel finds acorn: NY Times editorial on Calif good-Samaritan liability not half bad [yes, NYT]
“Win yourself a $50,000 bounty by busting a patent” [Forbes]
Dental student dismissed from University of Michigan wins $1.7 million from four profs, argued that claimed academic deficiencies were just ruse [ABA Journal]
Posts Tagged ‘patent quality’
Microblog 2008-12-19
- Newest “Trial Lawyers Inc.” report is on Louisiana [Manhattan Institute, Point of Law]
- Mel Weiss disbarred automatically w/strong language from judges [Matter of Weiss h/t @erwiest]
- Pro se claimant: I wrote down cure for cancer and then the darn hospital stole it! [Above the Law]
- “California Supreme Court Ruling May Deter Good Samaritans” [The Recorder; SF Chronicle with copious reader comments, GruntDoc, our coverage last year]
- Due diligence on dodgy funds? Sometimes it seems everyone’s relying on someone else to do that [Bronte Capital] Madoff fraud may date to 1970s, maybe “recent laxity” angle has been overdone [Securities Docket] “Ponzi crawl” = pub crawl whereby new person is added at each location and has to buy a round [Re Risk]
- Radley Balko on Julie Amero malware-prosecution story [Reason, earlier]
- Join Paul Ehrlich in some of the world’s most famously refuted predictions, and you too may get to be Obama’s science adviser [John Tierney/NYT, John Holdren]
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WisconsinMinnesota pig-sitter trial set for March, claim is that defendant let star porker overfeed and gain a hundred pounds [LaCrosse Tribune h/t @kevinokeefe] - More on the Patent and Trademark Office “acceptable error” employment case [Venture Chronicles, Jeff Nolan; earlier]
- Procter & Gamble “Satanism” case finally settles, soap giant got $19 million verdict against four Amway distributors who spread rumor [OnPoint News]
- Once filing of a suit severs the channels of communication, attorneys and clients alike begin to make up “what really happened” narratives [Settle It Now]
- Sometimes lawyers need to be formal. Don’t IM “Court denied your appeal u will b executed saturday thx” [Beck & Herrmann]
- Bangladesh hoping to build replica of Taj Mahal despite copyright claims [Times Online h/t @mglickman]
- Midnight regulations? “OMB Watch” vigilant (and with reason) during this R-2-D transition but sang different tune in 2000’s D-2-R [Gillespie, Reason]
Federal Circuit: Patent Office can fire examiner with 35% error rate
Annals of civil service protection: the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has ruled in favor of the Patent and Trademark Office, which dismissed Asokkumar Pal after it “reviewed 16 randomly selected cases from Pal’s file to determine whether he was properly reviewing examiner decisions. They found he was not making the correct decisions – that he erred more than 35% of the time. (A 25% error rate would have been acceptable).” Pal’s appeal contended that others in the office had even higher error rates, that he had received many “outstanding” performance reviews, and that managers should have been required to review all of his cases rather than just a random sampling, but to no avail. (Patently-O, Dec. 16)*.
*Yes, we’re linking Patently-O even though they’re (momentarily) still ahead of us in the ABA blog contest voting. We’ll even stipulate that they’re a pretty good blog. That doesn’t excuse you from going and voting for Overlawyered now.
October 24 roundup
- Chemerinsky, other critics should apologize to Second Circuit chief judge Dennis Jacobs over bogus “he doesn’t believe in pro bono!” outcry [Point of Law and update]
- New York high court skeptical of ultra-high contingency fee in Alice Lawrence v. Graubard Miller case [NYLJ; earlier here and here]
- Panel of legal journalists: press let itself be used in attack on Judge Kozinski [Above the Law]
- Unfree campaign speech, cont’d: South Dakota anti-abortion group sues to suppress opponents’ ads as “patently false and misleading” [Feral Child]
- Even if you’re tired of reading about Roy Pearson’s pants, you might still enjoy Carter Wood’s headlines on the case at ShopFloor [“Pandora’s Zipper“, “Suit Alors!“]
- Rare grant of fees in patent dispute, company had inflicted $2.5 million in cost on competitors and retailers by asserting rights over nursing mother garb [NJLJ]
- Time to be afraid? Sen. Bingaman (D-N.M.) keen on reintroducing talk-radio-squelching Fairness Doctrine [Radio Equalizer]
- “Yours, in litigious anticipation” — Frank McCourt as child in Angela’s Ashes drafted a nastygram with true literary flourish [Miriam Cherry, Concurring Opinions]
Microblog 2008-09-24
- Both McC and Palin seem cold-blooded about firing people, might be seen as feature rather than bug [McLaughlin/Baseball Crank] #
- Legal obstacles to four day work week [Point of Law via @lilyhill] #
- Yep, that’s Joe: Biden said he’s “done more than any other senator combined” for trial lawyers [Point of Law] #
- Day of protest against software patents [OUT-LAW via @lawtweets] #
- Related? “EPO staff strike over patent quality” [OUT-LAW] #
- What a curious Nigerian scam email, do you think it could be genuine? [Cernovich] #
Don’t
More things it would be better to avoid doing if you’re a lawyer:
- Claim to be assetless and thus unable to make restitution for the largest theft of state money in Massachusetts history even though you live in a $1.5 million Florida house with a $70K BMW and other goodies [Boston Herald, Globe, disbarred attorney Richard Arrighi]
- Botch appeals and then refrain from telling clients their cases have been lost [Clifford Van Syoc, reprimanded by New Jersey high court; NJLJ; seven years ago]
- Attempt to deduct “more than $300,000 in prostitutes, p0rn, sex toys and erotic massages” on your income tax returns, even if you are “thought of as a good tax lawyer” [NY Post] Nor ought you to accept nude dances from a client as partial payment for legal fees [Chicago Tribune; for an unrelated tale of a purportedly consensual lap dance given by secretary to partner, see NYLJ back in April]
- Introduce a patent application purportedly signed in part by someone who in fact had been dead for a year or two [Law.com/The Recorder, Chicago’s Niro, Scavone, Haller & Niro, of blog-stalking fame, client’s patent declared unenforceable] Or pursue a patent-infringement case based on what a federal judge later ruled to be a “tissue of lies” [NYLJ; New York law firm Abelman, Frayne & Schwab and lawyer David Jaroslawicz, ordered to pay opponents’ legal fees; earlier mentions of Jaroslawicz at this site here, here, here, and here]
- Demand ransom for a stolen Leonardo da Vinci painting [biggest U.K. art theft ever, all defendants have pleaded not guilty, LegalWeek via ABA Journal]
May 2 roundup
- Contriving to give Sheldon Silver the moral high ground: NY judges steamed at lack of raises are retaliating against Albany lawmakers’ law firms [NY Post and editorial. More: Turkewitz.]
- When strong laws prove weak: Britain’s many layers of land use control seem futile against determined builders of gypsy encampments [Telegraph]
- “U.S. patent chief: applications up, quality down” [EETimes]
- Plenty of willing takers for those 4,703 new cars that survived the listing-ship near-disaster, but Mazda destroyed them instead [WSJ]
- “Prof. Dohrn [for] Attorney General and Rev. Wright [for] Secretary of State”? So hard to tell when left-leaning lawprof Brian Leiter is kidding and when he’s not [Leiter Reports]
- Yet another hard-disk-capacity class action settlement, $900K to Strange & Carpenter [Creative HDD MP3 Player; earlier. More: Sullum, Reason “Hit and Run”.]
- Filipino ship whistleblowers’ case: judge slashes Texas attorney’s fee, “calling the lawyer’s attempt to bill his clients nearly $300,000 ‘unethically excessive.'” [Boston Globe, earlier]
- RFK Jr. Watch: America’s Most Irresponsible Public Figure® endorses Oklahoma poultry litigation [Legal NewsLine]
- Just what the budget-strapped state needs: NY lawmakers earmark funds for three (3) new law schools [NY Post editorial; PoL first, second posts, Greenfield]
- In Indiana, IUPUI administrators back off: it wasn’t racial harassment after all for student-employee to read a historical book on fight against Klan [FIRE; earlier]
- Fiesta Cornyation in San Antonio just isn’t the same without the flying tortillas [two years ago on Overlawyered]