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Monthly Archives: December 2013

Task force to review prosecutor and defender salaries should save the money for the salaries

  By Steve Meltzer | December 17, 2013 - 11:12 pm |
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The Massachusetts Bar Association has formed a task force to report on salary levels for state prosecutors and public defenders and the potential effects those pay scales have on the criminal justice system.

via Boston Business Journal.

Back in the day, I was a public defender.  I didn’t do it for very long but I loved the work (most of the time).  I started working for the public defender’s office while I was in law school (as a student attorney authorized under Rule 3:03). After my judicial clerkship, there was nothing I wanted to do more than become a public defender.

Unfortunately, I had to take a pay cut.  The clerkship paid in the low $30’s.  The public defender’s office paid only $28,900 (that’s only about $2,400/mo. before taxes). I was able to stick it out until my second child was born.  My wife was a public school teacher and made a similarly pitiful salary. In order to survive, I had to jump ship and go to work at a private law firm.

I am but one example. The answer that the Task Force will be seeking, however, is pretty self-evident:

If you want to attract and retain well-trained high-caliber professionals, pay them a fair salary on which they can survive.  If you want a well-run, professional and high-caliber criminal justice system, it needs to be staffed by well-trained, experienced, high-caliber professionals. Just like anything else.

As they say, it doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to figure that one out. Save the time and money on the task force and find a way to pay prosecutors, public defenders and court personnel a fair salary. After all, a well-run criminal justice system is almost as important as a well-run sanitary system or mass transit system.24-1n020-stationagent-300x3001

BU law school extends fellowship program with local employers

  By Steve Meltzer | December 12, 2013 - 10:30 pm |
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Well played, BU Law:

For the second consecutive year, Boston University School of Law has teamed with local employers to offer fellowships for Class of 2013 graduates interested in working as in-house counsel.
The companies, which pay $50,000 plus benefits to each fellow, are National Grid, EMC Corp., ING and Digital Credit Union. National Grid and Digital Credit Union are taking two fellows while the other companies are taking one fellow each, according BU Law’s Career Development & Public Service Office.
The fellowship program launched last year with three students from BU Law’s Class of 2012 and three employers: Viacom, the Massachusetts Gaming Commission and Plymouth Rock Assurance.
Companies retain the fellows either to meet specific needs or to provide general legal support, research and writing, said Kelly Cruz, assistant director of BU Law’s admissions office.
Bu said 70 student have applied for the fellowship slots available for the Class of 2013, while 50 applied last year. Two fellows from last year were hired as full-time attorneys after the fellowships ended, Cruz said.

via Boston Business Journal.

AmBar Association mulling random audits of law-school hiring reports

  By Steve Meltzer | December 12, 2013 - 9:31 pm | ,
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The Boston Business Journal is reporting that the “American Bar Association is considering whether to audit the data law schools provide about how many of their graduates are employed.” According to the BBJ and the AmBar, a “draft proposal suggesting random audits was submitted . . . to the governing council.” of the section of the ABA that handles legal education and admissions to the bar. At a meeting last December, the council approved developing the draft proposal.

Under the proposal, schools with employment files that have more than a 2 percent discrepancy between what they post and what they report to the ABA would have to verify the information, using a random sample of at least 10 percent of their graduates, the ABA said. And, if 2 percent of that information cannot be supported or is inaccurate or false, the school would be required to retain an outside expert to verify the accuracy.

via Bar Association mulling random audits of law-school hiring reports – Boston Business Journal.

I say, too little too late. During my last, or maybe my second-to-last year of law school teaching, I delivered a scathing lecture to my not-first-tier law students regarding their malaise in pursuing excellence and the true state of the job market and their relative place in that market.deception-sign-375x250

My message, essentially, was that if they wanted a prayer at being a practicing lawyer when they left law school they better bust their butts hard enough to land in the top ten percent of the class. If they wanted to have any choice in the type of law they want to practice, they’d better graduate in as one of the top 5 students.  There was, back then (2010’ish) a murky conspiracy of propaganda convincing every one of those students that all they needed was law degree and they’d be good to go.

Lo and behold, within a few days I was being scolded by the director of my academic unit for that little outburst. The Dean’s Office, it turns out, heard from a whiny second-year student whose delicate ego was in jeopardy.  The Dean didn’t think reality was a good message for students. This incident marked the beginning of the end of my patience for the charade.

The truths, as I see them, are as follows:

  • There are too many lawyers
  • There are too many law students
  • Too many law students are substandard and should not be in law school
  • There are not enough good lawyers
  • Law schools are profit, not quality motivated
  • Law schools are motivated by and in the business of deception.

What in this scheme of compliance prevents a law school from reporting the same lies to the ABA as it publishes publicly in its promotional material? So long as the numbers match, no audit is triggered.

Incomprehensible

  By Steve Meltzer | December 10, 2013 - 8:49 pm | ,
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Incomprehensible

Incomprehensible

Take a look at the Judge’s order below.

I spent 11 grueling years as a Professor of Legal Writing at New England Law.  Every year at the beginning of the year I would bemoan the pitiful state of the undergraduate education system and what passed for sufficient writing ability.

By the end of their first year of law school, I was able to get 90% of every class (give or take 10%) to at least an acceptable level of writing proficiency.  To some it came naturally, to others it was a struggle at every turn (of phrase).

Some of the students should never have been admitted to law school in the first place. Some (the 10% that I couldn’t save) should have, but almost never did, take the hint and find a better way to burn all of that tuition money.

In a nutshell, effective lawyers (all lawyers – not just litigators) are effective communicators.  Most legal communication is done in writing. If you can’t write, don’t become a lawyer.

Attribution: I was alerted to this decision through the MyCase Blog.  If you’re a client, you know I use (and love) MyCase for client communications, billing and document transmittal.

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Patent reform bill passes the house 325 to 91

  By Steve Meltzer | December 5, 2013 - 8:40 pm |
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A patent reform bill has made its way through the House of Representatives.  The Senate will take the bill up next.

The Washington Post summarized how the bill would discourage patent trolls as follows:

  • Require specificity in patent lawsuits. Right now, patent plaintiffs can file lawsuits that are vague about exactly how the defendant allegedly infringed the plaintiff’s patent. That makes it easier for trolls to sue many people without doing their homework. The bill would require lawsuits to be more specific.
  • Make patent ownership more transparent. Patent holders sometimes form shell companies to engage in troll-like behavior. To discourage this, the Innovation Act requires patent plaintiffs to name anyone who has a financial interest in the patent being litigated.
  • Make losing plaintiffs pay. The Innovation Act makes it easier for a loserpaysvictorious defendant to recover the costs of defending against an unsuccessful patent lawsuit. Also, if a losing plaintiff cannot pay, the bill would allow a judge to order others who had a financial stake in the plaintiff’s lawsuit to join the lawsuit and pay the defendant’s legal fees.
  • Delay discovery to keep costs down. A big reason patent lawsuits are so expensive is that plaintiffs often force defendants to produce millions of pages of e-mails and other internal documents to help them build their case. The Innovation Act would delay this phase of the litigation process until after the courts have addressed legal questions about the meaning of patent claims. Hopefully, that will allow more frivolous lawsuits to be resolved before defendants have racked up huge legal bills.
  • Protect end users. A common troll tactic is to sue end users (such as coffee shops offering their customers WiFi access) rather than technology vendors (such as the manufacturer of the WiFi equipment). These small-business defendants can often be intimidated into paying regardless of the merits of a plaintiff’s case. The Innovation Act allows technology vendors to step into the shoes of their customers and fight lawsuits against trolls on their customers’ behalf.

via Patent reform bill passes the house 325 to 91. Here’s what you need to know.

Is it just me, or would similar provisions in ALL CIVIL LITIGATION make our system just a wee bit better?  The biggest one for me is the loser pays provision.  I insert a loser pays clause in almost every contract draft I do.  Most of the time, however, it gets over-lawyered out by a starch-rashed traditionalist from  a big firm. The specificity requirement should follow from Rule 11, but judges are too lilly-livered to give that any teeth.

 

Don’t Fall for Fake Discounts

  By Steve Meltzer | December 3, 2013 - 10:47 pm |
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Special

The quest for ever-deeper Black Friday and Cyber Monday discounts has forced retail businesses to blindly pursue each other further and further into a forbidden forest of deceptive practices.

According to the Wall Street Journal, some big retailers conceal their malfeasance (even, perhaps, from themselves) by strong-arming their suppliers to set starting prices that, after all the markdowns, will yield the profit margins they want — but still give consumers the impression of a blowout sale. The problem is that fake holiday discounts and deals constitute deceptive business practices.Special

Here are three legally suspect deceptive discount schemes:

  • Promising something you can’t really offer. Most states prohibit businesses from advertising an offer or product with no intention of honoring the offer or selling the product at that price. Groupon was recently sued for bait-and-switch advertising.
  • Marking it up so it can be marked down.  It may be a way to get consumers to think they’re getting a great deal, but such practices — including exaggerated former price and competitor price comparisons — can constitute deceptive pricing, according to the Federal Trade Commission.
  • Offering bogus “BOGO” deals. “Buy one, get the second one free” deals are clever traps to get consumers to buy an extra item. “BOGO” deals, however, need proper disclosures. It must be clear that it’s a true “buy-one-get-one” or “BOGO” sale or if each item is actually 50 percent off.

Though the temptation may be strong, small business owners should resist the urge to offer shady “fake” deals and discounts. If you have questions, or if you feel you’ve been ripped off, seek advice of a lawyer.