The Vermont Supreme Court has just unanimously overturned a conviction for molestation because a juror did online research on the defendant's ethnic culture, but if a recent survey of federal judges is right, the great majority of jurors are behaving themselves when it comes to turning off their cellphones, avoiding researching cases on the web, and not texting about the cases they're sitting on. The survey had an impressive 53% response rate. From the summary of the report (PDF) of the survey, provided to the Judicial Conference Committee on Court Administration and Case Management:
The detected use of social media by jurors during trials and deliberations is not common, but it does occur. Thirty of the 508 responding judges reported instanc- es in which jurors were detected using social media during trial or deliberation, most often in criminal cases. This social media use most often took the form of posts about the progress of the case or the juror’s service in general. There were several instances of jurors attempting to contact participants in the case via social media. When social media use was detected, it was most likely to be reported by a fellow juror.
Every week someone has done something which helped, motivated or touched you. Send them an old fashioned snail mail note to thank them! Make it a Friday afternoon, winding-down-the-week scheduled task. If you encountered someone who needs encouragement, send them a note. If the court clerk was especially helpful or the security guard at the court house extended you a helping hand, send them a note. Ending your week with a random act of kindness is uplifting and good marketing!
Every week, the Practice Management Resource Center posts a new Tip of the Week. (Here are the archived tips.) To reach a practice management advisor, call the PMRC Helpline at (800) 341-9715 or e-mail questions to pmrcHelpline@mail.michbar.org.
Two Big Thinkers in the where-in-the-world-is-the-legal-profession-headed? universe have teamed up to launch a new blog, The Legal Whiteboard. SBM Blog will be watching. Here's an excerpt from the first post, by IU-Bloomington's Bill Henderson, explaining its purposes:
Despite the fact that I am one of the go-to people on the speaker circuit when it comes time to talk about structural change, I am not in the sky-is-falling camp. Instead, I see a lot of opportunities for lawyers, law students and legal educators to do very important and creative work. What is most exciting about this work is that it will make society better off – law will become better, faster and cheaper. Many legal services will become more standardized, productized and commoditized. I realize that these words will rankle some of the old guard, particularly those still making a good living under the bespoke model. But clients – including corporations, government and ordinary citizens—will love it. Professional ideals will remain the cornerstone of successful legal enterprises, but denying the exigencies of the marketplace is, to my mind, unprofessional.
Because clients and society want better, faster and cheaper law, I believe lawyers (including legal educators) have a professional duty to ardently pursue this goal. The hardest part of this assignment – and the most vexing and interesting – is how to parlay this transformation into a decent living.
Many people assume that the new paradigm means lawyers working longer hours for lower wages. That is one future business model. But I think it utterly lacks imagination. Lawyers are problem solvers. To my mind, the growing price elasticity for legal services and legal education is just a very difficult problem. And whenever I am faced with a very difficult problem, I typically start writing out my thoughts on a massive whiteboard. (I am told it is quite a spectacle to behold.) I am also someone who loves to collaborate. With an outward facing Legal Whiteboard, I am hoping to elicit the genius of my fellow travelers.
As reported in the Law Society Gazette, the President of the UK's Law Society told a gathering in Oxford that he expects the centuries-old English distinctions in the legal profession between barristers and solicitors will "whither away" as a result of recent sweeping changes in the UK laws regulating the profession.
It is ‘inevitable’ the professions will ‘need to revisit the question whether [they] should continue to be separately trained, represented and regulated. I envisage the time coming when the distinction will be more a decorative than a functional aspect of our legal constitution.
Art: Vanity Fair, 1870, Sir Robert P. COLLIER : Barrister.
There's a lot of "signing off" going on all the time in the legal profession, so this story deserves some attention. In The Atlantic's "Signing Off: The Slow Death of the Signature in a Pin-Code World," University of Toronto professor of semiotics and anthropology points out the importance of signatures in human history:
"We've always marked our existence," says Danesi. "Tribal cultures left the communal mark, or the kinship mark, on their surroundings. The mark could have been the figure of an animal, or a tree, or anything in their immediate environment. And that mark meant this group of people was a family."
But the bottom line is that PIN-code transactions are "much less susceptible" to fraud than signatures, and the signature as a mark of authentication is losing ground. This piece from the July 2001 Michigan Bar Journal nicely marked the moment when state laws began to acknowledge that times are changing. And the abandonment of the teaching of cursive handwriting surely plays is more handwriting on the wall.
Vielleicht. The issue in the case from Dusseldorf, Germany is this: did the family dog suffocate the drunk woman while she was lying passed out on her bathroom floor, or is her husband responsible for her death? He had been convicted in the first trial, but an appeals court ordered the case retried on evidence that the man was too drunk to have had intent. On retrial, defense counsel argued that labrador mothers sometimes accidentally smother their newborn pups, so death-by-Labrador-suffocation is a reasonable explanation for the death. The prosecution has offered expert testimony by a man from a local Labrador club, who says that the explanation is not plausible. Legal Blog Watch wonders if it might be helpful to check what a doctor might have to say on the subject. Sometimes maybe you need more than one kind of expert to answer the same question.
Jim Calloway’s column, Sites for Sore Eyes, in the latest GPSOLO eReport entitled Beyond the Basics of Google, is guaranteed to provide every reader with an "Ah Ha" moment. This article not only points out some of the most often overlooked features of Google that everyone can use, but also provides tips designed specifically to help attorneys make the most of Google. Google Alerts, Google Scholar and Google Patents are all covered in this lively article.
Did you know that you can make sure your firm appears in the results of a Google search for “attorney + your zip code”? Read this column to learn how to maximize this Google marketing tool for your firm so you can reap the dividends.
Every week, the Practice Management Resource Center posts a new Tip of the Week. (Here are the archived tips.) To reach a practice management advisor, call the PMRC Helpline at (800) 341-9715 or e-mail questions to pmrcHelpline@mail.michbar.org.
HB 1445 - State employees who work with the public shall not wear fragrances or use scented products during regular business hours.
