Circumlocutions

ver a year ago, I helped a local attor­ney on a crim­i­nal appel­late case. I did some legal research and helped draft the argu­ments for the client’s appeal to the MD Court of Spe­cial Appeals.

   In Octo­ber, I sat in the court­room after meet­ing the client and lis­tened to oral argu­ments on the case. I was still involved enough that I was mouthing answers to the court’s ques­tions from my seat against the wall.

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he Supreme Court recently ruled that there is a 14 day time limit to a defendant’s Miranda rights.
Scott Green­field has writ­ten about it, as has Orin Kerr.

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cott Green­field over at Sim­ple Jus­tice posted today about the cus­tom of lay­ing wreaths on the graves of those who have made the ulti­mate sac­ri­fice for their coun­try, thanks to a pro­gram called Wreaths Across Amer­ica.

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hile perus­ing the twit­ter­stream yes­ter­day, @ProfJonathon shared a link to a new web ser­vice named CMP​.ly. Accord­ing to the web­site, it pur­ports to be a “dis­clo­sure engine” for every­one online — from blog­gers to Agen­cies.
   My first ques­tion to ProfJonathon was whether it was rec­og­nized by the FTC. Since he was merely shar­ing a link and was in no way asso­ci­ated with the ser­vice, we agreed that it was an inter­est­ing intel­lec­tual exer­cise and we each went our sep­a­rate ways. Then, I got a response from @cmply:

‘

@ProfJonathan @mglickman — Good ques­tion. Although the FTC can­not endorse a par­tic­u­lar solu­tion we met and reviewed our sys­tem. DM for info.

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UPDATE
Please take a moment and read Scott’s and Rick’s posts. I severely abridged their posts to the point of ruin­ing their mean­ings, and I apol­o­gize about that.
This post has been mod­i­fied in response to Rick’s com­ment below.

ester­day brought another inter­est­ing post from Scott Greenfield’s Sim­ple Jus­tice. He had been made aware of a blog by a new law school grad­u­ate with hopes of enter­ing the world of crim­i­nal defense. The author mono­logued about the moral dilemma a defense attor­ney has when rep­re­sent­ing a “guilty-as-charged” client. Her ulti­mate answer to it was that a defense attor­ney has a duty to tell her client’s story in order to achieve a fair outcome.

   Scott, lodged in a les­son about the dan­gers of blog­ging (Loose blog posts Sink egos, or some­thing of the sort), explained that there is no moral dilemma. A defense attor­ney is there to beat the pros­e­cu­tion and win free­dom for his client. It is, after all, an adver­sar­ial sys­tem. (Dis­claimer: This is my sum­mary. Read his com­ment.)

That was yesterday.

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had an idea the other day for a ser­vice twit­ter should offer to corporate/registered accounts.
One thing peo­ple have noticed is that twit­ter seems to have very high search engine rank­ing; so that if I were to Google my name, one of the top links is my twit­ter page. That has raised some con­cerns in the past about how a lawyer can be viewed by poten­tial clients who look the lawyer up online.
My idea is to allow firms to lever­age this strong search engine rank­ing of twit­ter. A firm can have its own twit­ter ID, but, as any social media guru will tell you, it’s bet­ter to have an indi­vid­ual face peo­ple can relate to. So a firm will appoint an indi­vid­ual to be the face of the firm on twit­ter (and what­ever other social net­work it deems nec­es­sary). That’s pretty darn straightforward.

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ear World,

Social Media.
Social.
Media.
   Why do these two words con­fuse the hell out of so many peo­ple? I don’t just mean con­fuse in the whim­si­cal way your par­ents might be con­fused about how to open a file in an email. I mean con­fused — to the point where peo­ple end up doing things com­pletely bass-ackwards and screw­ing them­selves over.

   Yes­ter­day, Scott Green­field and Brian Tan­nebaum posted excel­lent, some­what related and extra­or­di­nar­ily rel­e­vant state­ments regard­ing the need for lawyers to sub­scribe to and fol­low an eth­i­cal guide­line. The over­lap between them lies in a lawyer’s online pres­ence, and since I am so obvi­ously steeped in online real­ity that I instantly asso­ci­ated those verbs as online col­lo­qui­alisms (“sub­scribe” to a feed and “fol­low” on twit­ter) I will focus mainly on the online aspect of the issue.

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cott Green­field at Sim­ple Jus­tice adds to an ongo­ing dis­cus­sion regard­ing trans­parency in the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem.
   The orig­i­nat­ing post came from Doug Berman who sug­gested the idea there should be reg­is­tra­tion for all con­vic­tions in the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem.
   The next sally came from Bobby Fred­er­ick who raises the very valid con­cerns of mis­takes and poor representation.

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ith apolo­gies to Jeff Foxworthy.

• If the joke you heard last night about Arti­cle 9 of the UCC had a punch­line based on Jus­tice Frankfurter’s opin­ion on stomach-pumping under the 4^th Amend­ment… you might be in law school.
  • If you got the joke and laughed… you are def­i­nitely in law school… and you’re a geek.
• If, some­where in your sub­con­scious, you feel guilty when you’re not car­ry­ing roughly 200 lbs of text­books… you might be in law school.
• If you have dreamed of a § key on your key­board.… you might be in law school.
  • If you even know what the § sym­bol means… you might be in law school.
• If you have ever com­plained that Bar­Bri is a monop­oly… you might be in law school.
  • If you know that Bar­Bri was a monop­oly… you might be in law school.
• If you have a stated pref­er­ence between West­law and Lex­is­Nexis… you might be in law school.
  • If you have run the exact same search through both… you are def­i­nitely in law school.
• If you think a para­graph feels naked with­out the word “how­ever” or the phrase “in regard to”… you might be in law school.
• If you have ever been asked a ques­tion which has no cor­rect answer… you might be in law school… or you might just be married.

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n case any­one who reads this blog is unaware, I’m a non-traditional law stu­dent. I work full-time and attend classes in the evening. The nor­mal time­line for evening stu­dents at my school is 4 years until grad­u­a­tion; I’m an impa­tient type, so I opted to take a full course load each sum­mer as well. This deci­sion — not nec­es­sar­ily good for my san­ity — cuts down the time it will take me to grad­u­ate by 2 full semes­ters (roughly one year).

Now that that’s out of the way, allow me to get to the point: I par­tic­i­pated in my schools Intel­lec­tual Prop­erty Clinic this sum­mer. For­merly based in an incu­ba­tor (it has since moved to a school cam­pus), the clien­tele ranged from authors to web-based busi­ness to bio-engineers to finan­cial audit­ing contractors.

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