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evilweasel posted:why are you a lawyer if petty passive aggressive fights sounds unpleasant to you, that's the fun part Look, sometimes people come out of college with english literature degrees and then realize things cost money anyway, hello thread Pook Good Mook posted:This is technically a legal questions issue, but I trust this page more. The fiance and I are starting to look at houses. Do you recommend people speak with an attorney at some point in the purchase process, or will I be able to figure out what things are saying with my law degree? Depending on your state this will be either "required" or "a very good idea." You'll be able to figure out what everything's saying IF you remember your real estate and transactions classes (pop quiz: do you remember what a "recourse" vs. a "non-recourse" loan is?) BUT you also want some actual legal services to be done like a title search etc. at some point in the process so you'll need a lawyer for those things, and you want someone *else's* malpractice insurance to be on the hook if there's a fuckup. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 14:55 on Jul 17, 2019 |
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Jul 17, 2019 14:47
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Nice piece of fish posted:What's your avatar and text from? I've always been curious. It's a bit of a meta-joke about the forums, actually.  In Eric Powell's The Goon comic, Dr. Alloy is a well-intentioned mad scientist who, well, sometimes his ideas don't quite work out. In that specific comic, he's having a bit of a (literal) breakdown. Nice piece of fish posted:Also, do you like cabins? That seems like a loaded question. I like cabinetry Soothing Vapors posted:be warned, no one who goes to Fish's cabin ever returns If it gets me out of Trump's America, I mean, ok
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Jul 17, 2019 15:44
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disjoe posted:I am in fact drafting a multistate mortgage right now and none of this poo poo makes any sense even to an attorney. My state requires an attorney handle all real estate closings  They generally justify their fees by arranging to have a title search done, but I've seen cases where they somehow managed to blow it. Everyone in my state is functionally 400 years old, though. Well (subtracts 1860 from 2019) 159 years old. I don't do real estate law though. I was mostly thinking of the recent "Am I in a HOA?" discussion in the "legal questions" thread.
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Jul 17, 2019 19:26
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Mr. Nice! posted:That was some cold poo poo. The appellate judges sua sponte changed the case from john and jane doe vs doctor to him vs doctor while telling him that he was not just wrong for suing in their name, but he also failed to follow proper procedure by not using the kids initials instead of fictitious names. This is something I've pushed courts on actually. Different courts in my state have different confidentiality rules, some just anonymize to initials which is not sufficient, and importantly in cases that involve parents and children, anonymizing the children but not the parents is just a token gesture, not real anonymity protection. "Minor Child of [Parent's Full Legal Name] is a sex abuse victim" is not really accomplishing anything. 
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Jul 17, 2019 23:08
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evilweasel posted:things not to talk about when you are an accused child molester: your "perfect, perfect sex life" He's 80 years old and trying to defend his own case. There's a reason my state has mandatory judicial retirement at 75 (well, technically, that reason is that back in the 70's a junior justice on the state Supreme Court wanted to push out the Chief Justice so got a law passed to force his retirement, but still).
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Jul 19, 2019 15:27
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ActusRhesus posted:Have any of you had opposing counsel say something so completely wrong that you had a panic moment and thought you were reading the wrong file? The most useful single thing I ever learned in any CLE I ever attended was from a veteran trial attorney, one of the most well-known and reputable in our entire state. The quote was "If I'm stepping into a courtroom, someone has made a horrible mistake. It might be me, it might be my client, it might be the other side's attorney, it might be their client, but someone is going to win and someone is going to lose." I often flash back to that quote and think about how the entire practice of law seems to boil down to making sure the other guy is the one making the horrible mistake. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 16:06 on Jul 19, 2019 |
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Jul 19, 2019 16:03
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Vox Nihili posted:Mine was basically: This was pretty much what we used also. I was mostly in the A range but got one C+ because the professor decided he couldn't read my handwriting. Torpedoed my whole average. Yay. In retrospect I should probably be angrier about that than I was at the time. The same professor tried to hire me as an assistant later, I think because he'd seen me wearing a well-tailored suit that he commented on.
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Jul 19, 2019 20:18
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Roger_Mudd posted:Anyone ever resign, get a counter offer by current firm, and stay at current firm? I believe "never take the counteroffer" is a catch phrase in the programmer threads around here, isn't it? My understanding was that the logic is, if there were big enough problems that you wanted to leave, more money isn't gonna fix 'em.
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Jul 22, 2019 21:26
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Roger_Mudd posted:I resigned for money and because I didn't like working for one partner. They offered me a 15% raise and promised that I would work with that partner less. Do you think they'll stick to the deal? Do you think that partner won't shiv you later?
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Jul 22, 2019 21:40
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Phil Moscowitz posted:
Outside of legal culture, respect and pay seem to be inversely correlated. Working for a nonprofit in public interest law I frequently find myself introduced as "one of the good ones," endquote. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 15:45 on Jul 23, 2019 |
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Jul 23, 2019 15:37
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or (b) that lawyer is better than me and I’m a failure 
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Soothing Vapors posted:Feces Starbro used to claim he got laid using his bar card Best use of bar card: quote:Medieval Times Dinner & Tournament is located in vacation destinations across the United States (SC, GA, FL, CA, NJ, IL, DC, TX) and Canada. It offers Bar members a 25 percent discount on tickets and 10 percent discount on merchandise. . . . The offer is not valid with any other discount or for special shows/events. Bar members should mention this discount when making a reservation and present the card upon arrival along with their Bar card.
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Jul 23, 2019 16:29
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It seems to be the day for career questions. I've spent the past decade plus working in for a nonprofit doing civil rights law. I've done some good work there and it's been a pleasant, low stress, positive working environment with great benefits and leave policies etc. -- kindof a holy grail of legal jobs -- but the $$ pay is crap (worse than the local PD's office or Social Services) and there's zero room for upward mobility due to the organization's structure. I was casually looking for a career change for a while but for a variety of reasons -- the increasing difficulty of civil rights litigation given the Trumpification of the courts, my own personal need to advance my career, etc., I stepped up my search over the past few months. Net result, got two job offers today; one at a different nonprofit where I'd be doing similar work to my current -- at similarly low pay -- comfortable working environment, etc., and one at the local public defenders office, which would be a field change for me (civil to criminal) and likely a drastic increase in workload and work stress, but higher pay and likely much better overall future career prospects. Anyway, point being, what's it like working as a public defender and is there anything I should know going in? (I already have lots of experience working with prisoners and visiting prisons, just not on criminal issues).
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Jul 23, 2019 19:27
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nm posted:How do you like trial? Currently, I have a kinda weird relationship to trial work. I really enjoy it on the rare occasions I get to do it, because almost everything I do settles long before that point and because we don't bring a case unless we're virtually certain it's a slam dunk. Conversely though I tend to find the process of prepping for trial immensely annoying because it's all giant waste of time given that I only brought the case knowing that the other side should rapidly settle. Once I'm up there clowning on the other side, of course that's fun. Difference between the work of learning your lines and the fun of being on stage. I'm kinda expecting that attitude to change if I take the PD job since, well, I kinda doubt I 'll keep my unblemished win record though!
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Jul 23, 2019 21:03
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Nice piece of fish posted:Okay, so back to book chat, I'm working my way though The Law Megathread Approved Reading List Of Good Things For "urban fantasy" along the lines of Dresden Files, there's now a "2nd generation" of authors writing in the field who've learned from Jim Butcher's example and are just writing better novels. I'd recommend Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London series or maybe even Benedict Jacka's Alex Verus series over Dresden Files. (Dresden Files is still decent, just flawed). Rivers of London follows Peter Grant, a mixed-race London policeman who happens to be an apprentice wizard. quote:´You can’t call them black magicians,´ I said. It's set in London and Aaronovitch is a stickler for accuracy in a way that Butcher never bothered with -- e.g., not only do the cops all follow actual british police procedure, not only can you follow the chase scenes on google maps, not only do different characters speak with the appropriate dialects for their social class and area of London, but when there's a ghost the ghost speaks in appropriate dialect for its social class and region of london and historical era. It's just polished in a way Dresden isn't, getting the details right. Alex Verus series is about a wizard who's only magical power is being able to see a few minutes into the future and then adjust his actions accordingly. It's not on the same level as Aaronovitch prose-wise but it's got a very fast pace and it pulls fewer punches than Dresden does (Verus's dark past is actually legit dark, etc.). OTOH it might be wortwhile to read Dresden first then when / if you get sick of it try one of those two -- it might be easier to read Dresden and appreciate it as the first thing in its sub-genre before moving on to the second generation. The other big fantasy recommend in TBB is generally Bridge of Birds by Barry Hughart, which won the world fantasy award in 1990 and is just a polished little happy gem of a book. It has two sequels but they aren't as good -- they'd be good books if they didn't have to follow Bridge of Birds, but by comparison they're shadows. The current sci-fi hotness in TBB is the Murderbot series by Martha Wells, about a ruthless android killing machine gone rogue who has social anxiety and doesn't particularly want to be all that ruthless. quote:“I could have become a mass murderer after I hacked my governor module, but then I realized I could access the combined feed of entertainment channels carried on the company satellites. It had been well over 35,000 hours or so since then, with still not much murdering, but probably, I don't know, a little under 35,00 hours of movies, serials, books, plays, and music consumed. As a heartless killing machine, I was a terrible failure.” quote:“They were all so nice and it was just excruciating. I was never taking off the helmet again. I can't do even the half-assed version of this stupid job if I have to talk to humans.” I can recommend other genres too or if you really want a deep dive check out or Book Barn Book of the Month archives: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3893182 We've done a book a month every year for like 14 years now at least and most of the threads are archived so you can read the old discussions etc. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 11:53 on Jul 26, 2019 |
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Jul 26, 2019 11:41
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Just looking over the old BotM archives, my *particular* recommends would be January: Three Men in a Boat (To say nothing of the Dog!) by Jerome K. Jerome February:The March Up Country (The Anabasis) of Xenophon July:Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees October:Right Ho, Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse March: The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin August: All Creatures Great and Small by James Herriott April: The Doorbell Rang by Rex Stout June: 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann Also, time for a shameless plug: https://twitter.com/alloy_dr/status/1154400545362329600
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Jul 26, 2019 12:12
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Kimsemus posted:
What I tell people is "don't go to law school unless one of your parents owns a law practice and you stand to inherit it." Though even that has pitfalls.
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Jul 27, 2019 17:17
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tmm3k posted:Was just going to post this. Holy poo poo. At least it's equitable this way. I'm still salty over this: https://www.wltx.com/article/news/scs-chief-justice-explains-why-court-changed-bar-exam-results/101-381582521
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Jul 28, 2019 06:37
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Louisgod posted:Enjoy law goons, better things are possible I knew my career made a wrong turn somewhere
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Jul 29, 2019 15:23
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They need to just cancel that adminstration of the test.
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Jul 29, 2019 21:35
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Nice piece of fish posted:Interesting legal question: IF you are a person who puts his seat back on a plane or a bus, are you a huge piece of poo poo? The real villain is the capitalist system which overpopulates the plane and makes conflict inevitable.
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Jul 30, 2019 12:00
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I'd have gone with "don't hate the player, hate the game" myself
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Jul 30, 2019 16:26
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Discendo Vox posted:I'm having trouble telling, myself. The folks who asked me to do this are setting up a legal analytics startup using a truly unique dataset, and they've realized they have no real basis for their price setup. I've been asked to identify "similar products" . The example they gave me was fastcase, which appears to be a far more generic legal research company. Some others in my initial list include gavelytics and ktmine. I don't have much experience directly working with such products but they're generating a lot of buzz. I think Ravel is the big one, I've worked cases with attorneys who were using it. I went to a conference recently on artificial intelligence and the law and here are some of my notes:
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Jul 30, 2019 17:28
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Nice piece of fish posted:Pretty depressing poo poo and definitely the death of justice. I think it's pretty much inevitable. The net takeaway from the conference was make partner ASAP because everything associates do is swiftly getting automated. Interesting ly, it may help with access to justice issues, if nonprofits and legal aid adopt it on a wide scale. Cheap automated legal advice could arm a lot of people against injustice. Won't happen though because the tools will all have huge pricetags due to monopolization. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 18:31 on Jul 30, 2019 |
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Jul 30, 2019 18:29
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evilweasel posted:I have heard a lot less about doc review automation recently than I was hearing five years ago, and my guess is it hit the same wall a lot of "ai" projects have been hitting. Beyond that, I'm not sure what stuff that associates do that would be automated - and the grunt doc review stuff is already outsourced to contract attorneys instead of associates (and the stuff that associates do in that circumstance isn't automatable yet and I have doubts it will be). What other tasks were going to be automated away in the future? The main one discussed at the conference was client intake. In the nonprofit legal world a lot of grunt time is spent listening to the legally ignorant complain and figuring out if there is any remedy for their complaints. A lot of that could potentially be automated with sufficiently sophisticated tools. Past that there are increasingly sophisticated legal research and drafting tools. But yeah "within five years" in tech terms means "there is a problem nobody has solved yet but we think somebody might soon." And you're correct about subcontracted legal work too.
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Jul 30, 2019 18:49
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Look Sir Droids posted:Sorry, didn’t mean to suggest it would be soon. But that’s who will eat it first. In like 20-30 yrs. And it’ll likely be arguable AI isn’t the primary driver, just one of many. I think it's an "on the order of ten years" type thing. It depends on when the tech problems get solved, but there could be a watershed moment next year, or not for twenty.
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Jul 30, 2019 19:07
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Nice piece of fish posted:You loving plebs make me ashamed to be a working class schmoe. Have some class. For dinner. I thought all the restaurants in scandinavia served like hand-gathered scraps of forest moss
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Aug 2, 2019 00:31
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Ur Getting Fatter posted:
I was just waiting for the IOLTA account mismanagement and then WHAM that was not an angle I was expecting, normally the problem is people taking money *out* of the IOLTA account I don't know about other states but in mine that kind of shenanigans would be just asking the state bar ethics prosecutors to just hang a sword over your head, dangling Mr. Nice! posted:
Yeah, my county (not Florida) recently established pay parity for public defenders and prosecutors. Long story short, I'm starting a new job as a PD in early September (yay) This seems to be an issue where there's finally a broad national push and shift happening. I'm gonna thank Black Lives Matter and DNA testing.
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Aug 2, 2019 14:46
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Mr. Nice! posted:I have to pay my bar fees by the 15th or they add a $50 late fee. If I don’t pay by september 30 I’ll be listed as inactive and ineligible to practice. Maybe call the bar and ask if you can go on inactive status.
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Aug 5, 2019 13:22
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Does your state have mandatory appointments for active bar members? When I first got out of law school one of my big concerns was that I might get appointed to indigent cases before I managed to get a job lined up, both because I had no goddam clue what I was doing back then and because at the time at least such appointments were unpaid. I ended up getting appointed to represent a slate of random kids right after I got my clerkship -- which made me immune to the appointment, so I got out of it. In retrospect I should've gone inactive while I job hunted then gone active again once I had something.
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Aug 5, 2019 14:53
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Yeah in retrospect I should've have been worried but at the time I was. Since then my state supreme court issued a ruling saying that unpaid appointments were unconstitutional under the takings clause, so they're paid now.
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Aug 5, 2019 15:49
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Organza Quiz posted:Wait, so you become a practicing lawyer and then all of a sudden you can just be ordered to take on cases whether it's your area of law or not or you have any idea what you're doing? Different states have different rules but yeah, that's how it was when I first passed the bar in my state. There was a division between criminal and civil cases, only criminal attorneys could be appointed to criminal cases, but anybody could be appointed to civil cases where there was a right to have an attorney appointed (i.e., family court juvenile detention proceedings, mental health commitments, etc.) These were also unpaid and the official rationale was that serving a certain number of appointed cases was, in effect, part of the licensing fee for having a law license.There are also a host of exceptions and I've never actually had to take an appointed case because I've always been in a job that fell into one of the exceptions (basically any government attorney or public-interest/nonprofit attorney is exempted). The problem was that in rural counties, there might be only one attorney for the whole county, they'd get appointed to do everything, would have no time to run their own practice. Also you'd get like tax attorneys being appointed to represent people in family court and suchlike (they'd usually hire someone else to do it for them). A few years ago the state supreme court ruled that was unconstitutional under the 5th amendment -- as a taking without just compensation -- and so now even though the rule is technically still in place, the state bar has set up a contract program and attorneys who want in sign up to be contracted for the appointments. I don't know how the malpractice insurance issue works with appointments but yeah that was one of the big reasons I was so worried about getting appointed back in the day. I wasn't a very good lawyer then and didn't think to look up what the actual rules were though (I *think* there was actually a state fund that covered you but not sure and anyway the rules are different now) .
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Aug 5, 2019 18:38
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Discendo Vox posted:That's a shame, with refined design such a system could be a real boon- and I think the 5th argument seems poor. The 5th argument was logically poor but in practice it prevented rural counties free-riding on overburdened rural attorneys. In practice what happened after the 5th amendment decision came down was the legislature increased funding for legal services and set up a contract attorney program attorneys can volunteer for, so mandated appointments don't need to happen (at least as long as funding is maintained).
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Aug 5, 2019 23:32
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A lot of civil defense attorneys aren't taking cases based on whether or not they would actually win if it went to a courtroom, they're taking cases based on whether or not they think they can outlast and delay their opponent. Once you get them to the mat, sure, they'll lose, but they're betting you can't or won't take it that far. From that perspective, having good or winning arguments is irrelevant, all that matters is having a strong enough argument to avoid rule 11 sanctions, and generally as long as you're still asking "stupid or liar?" the judge will give them the benefit of the doubt. I've asked for sanctions more than once in such cases (both involving denials of medically necessary treatment to indigent children, which just makes me angry), but the requests were probably a bad idea as I've never had them granted. OTOH I won each of the cases. I'm not sure if it was worthwhile or not. I told myself it was a way to shift the Court's frame of reference about the case, but it probably just made me look like an rear end in a top hat. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 19:05 on Aug 6, 2019 |
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Aug 6, 2019 18:55
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Phil Moscowitz posted:At the hearing on his motion for new trial he actually asked the judge to take "judicial notice" that Penfold's clients routinely lose on this issue because judges apply the law incorrectly. An exquisite self-own. 
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Aug 6, 2019 19:54
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Goddam, that's somehow even dumber than what I originally thought you meant, which was that he'd won before under the old law and wanted the judge to recognize that Just . . . never checking at all
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Aug 6, 2019 20:26
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Discendo Vox posted:The next time I try to post in the main DnD threads, someone punch me Too skinny and clothed to be Remedial
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Aug 8, 2019 22:57
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Phil Moscowitz posted:Haha just my lil weekly reminder how glad I am I didn’t take that job with ICE’s head counsel in 2015 I was at a national civil rights attorney conference a couple months ago -- something like 600+ attendees from every state and territory in the US. One of the big all-attendees sessions was about all the good work all these various organizations were doing fighting against ICE detention; they had the current lead attorney in the Flores settlement speak and everything, very gung ho and inspiring. Next session I went to was a small lunch group on compliance with federal funding requirements. Like twenty people, relatively small. We do a round-the-room name / organization introductions thing. SURPRISE SURPRISE there were three ICE staff attorneys attending the session. Literally no reason at all for them to be there other than to spy on the competition, and no reason to attend that particular session unless they were trying to figure out ways to attack civil right's orgs' funding. Bizarre thing is all three of them were non-white, under 40, and female. Really hard to imagine how they ended up as ICE attorneys of all things. I guess it can happen to anyone if you make the wrong choices and never course-correct.
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Aug 8, 2019 23:23
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Phil Moscowitz posted:I would think it’s a problem to argue to the Ninth Circuit that children in concentration camps shouldn’t get soap, toothbrushes, or beds. Just as an example. Yeah, that's the crystal clear example. That particular attorney joined under the Obama admin and apparently donated to Democratic candidates. Corruption happens incrementally and often people don't realize they've crossed a line until it's in their rear-view mirror.
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Aug 9, 2019 13:23
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Kimsemus posted:I was going to answer your question Phil but evil actually hit on most of what I was going to say. A LOT (not all) of the time they're afflicted with a kind of just meandering incompetence and often you can safely ignore them. Sometimes that doesn't work, sometimes they do dumb poo poo like go before the court and lose. Nothing you can really do but caution them constantly on whatever course of action it is they are taking and at least in my case, document document document everything. The silver lining is that eventually they'll be gone, and perhaps the next admin will be brighter days. Obama appointments weren't shining stars either though. I get where you're coming from here. Thing is though, public defenders have a different ethical standard to follow than government attorneys. The public defender is allowed to make spurious arguments if that's all they have, because their sole duty is to their client. Government agency attorneys though, two clients. The government is one client but the public is another, and if there is a conflict between two of your clients, you gotta back out. Even then I'm not meaning to come down harshly on people. We're all capable of being corrupted if we are set in the wrong circumstances. But that's part of why it's so important to choose and change your circumstances as carefully as you can.
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Aug 9, 2019 17:47
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https://twitter.com/alloy_dr/status/1157082112618573825 Sadly that's a typo and it's the Madness of Crowds but still good
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Aug 10, 2019 14:38
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