Small Firm Life

RIP Audioblogger

2006-10-08T20:52:00.000-04:00

Well, while killing off Small Firm Life, I found this notice which related to one of my first posts about putting audio on a blog. Goodbye again!

Hello,
As of November 1, 2006, Audioblogger will no longer accept phone calls. MP3s made with the service will continue to be hosted and served but you will no longer be able to use Audioblogger to post new audio.
Audioblogger is an independent product, run by Odeo, Inc., a small startup company in San Francisco, CA. We are not affiliated with Google or Blogger except that we operate and provide the Audioblogger service.
Given our limited resources, we have to make tough decisions about what projects to focus on. And we've come to the difficult decision that Audioblogger demands too many resources, time, and money for us to continue its operation.
However, there are several other services that offer similar functionality. Odeo is not affiliated with any of these services, we only suggest them only in hopes that one or the other will be a good alternative for you.
Gabcast.com is a free service for recording by phone Hipcast.com has a seven day free trial and lots of features Gcast.com is another free service for phone recording
All of the phone posting services listed above are compatible with Odeo in that they produce podcast feeds, which can be imported to Odeo. Any audio file at Odeo can be posted on a blog by copying and pasting some embed code.
Odeo would like to extend a huge thank you to everyone who has tried Audioblogger. If you are interested in keeping up with our other blog-friendly projects, please have a look at Twitter.com and our customizable audio players.
Thanks,
The Odeo Team
Links:
Gabcast - http://gabcast.com
Hipcast - http://hipcast.com
Gcast - http://gcast.com
Odeo Importing - http://www.odeo.com/create/addfeed
Twitter - http://twitter.com
Players - http://odeo.com/channel/102054/embedded_player

Goodbye Small Firm Life

2006-10-08T15:25:00.000-04:00

If anyone's read this blog from the beginning, they'll remember that it was started to explore the possibilities of blogging and to support my column "Small Firm Life" for the New York Law Journal. Well, I've had a couple of life changes that have led me to conclude that I won't be continuing to blog under this title.

Most significantly, I joined a firm. I am partner number 14 in Dunnington Bartholow & Miller LLP. My offices are now on the rather swanky Madison Avenue and feature plush conference rooms, the largest of which has a great view of St. Patrick's Cathedral. And while arguably we are a small firm in the cosmic mix of things, my point of view no longer quite fits the title.

In recognition of the change, the title of my New York Law Journal column will be changing to "Trial and Error". I think I'll probably just write the column, rather than blog about writing it. That may change, but for now it's how I feel.

Another change is that my book, Copyright Litigation Handbook has been published by West. They've put a rather nice author profile of me on their website. The first edition of these books is like a Beta version of software. I need to write next year's update by March 15, 2007. So the race is on to try to get comments, criticism and to follow new developments in the law. I have some ideas on how I'd like to expand the work, but rather than wait until the last minute, I'd like to set myself the regular task of taking it in bite sizes. A blog seems the perfect way of doing that while it's all fresh.

So you'll find me at Copyright Litigation. I won't try to cover every late-breaking development in copyright law or new controversy that arises. But I will be looking for lessons in little-noticed decisions or little-noticed procedural goodies in famous cases that people are discussing for other reasons.

If you're a lawyer new to blogging, I recommend reading this blog (Small Firm Life) from the beginning - following my mistakes and frustrations should help you avoid a few of your own!

Copyright Litigation Handbook

2006-10-02T21:33:00.000-04:00

Well, my first book is on its way to the printer. The process, from proposal to finish took 3.5 years. It was a full year of waiting for the proposal to be approved, then two years to write it, then six months of the editing and additional writing process.

If you would like to order it, please use the OFFER NUMBER 523571. You can find it on West's website here If you use the offer Number, it helps West to track the sales and tell what strategies are working. Obviously people who live in the blogosphere will want to indicate to the company and the publishing world that a mention on a blog is just as important, if not more important, than a mention in the conventional media.

West's web site has a description of the book's contents. I think the book will be very helpful to anyone who needs to litigate (or oversee the litigation of) a copyright case. On the one hand, the book's approach is very nuts and bolts in terms of how to put together pleadings (checklists). On the other hand, I think I really take on some big substantive difficult procedural issues and make them accessible to both the beginning and advanced practitioners.

Copyright litigation is extraordinarily complex. My goal was to simplify it. I didn't succeed there, but I hope I succeeded in showing a few strategies for cutting through it all and saving time, energy and money.

Hitting Faux Cons Icons With a Calculator

2006-09-24T13:30:00.000-04:00

A lot of people I respect describe themselves as "fiscal conservatives". By that they mean that they work hard for their money. They don't like to pay more than their fair share in taxes. And they think that government is wasteful. Before Ralph Nader got involved in politics, fiscal conservatives thought he was one of them. They were right. The big news is that most liberals share the same values as these self-described "fiscal conservatives". In the Reagan era, the American populist wrath was turned upon entitlement programs and welfare mothers.

For decades now, the war on welfare mothers has provided cover for corporate CEOs and those in the top 1% to dodge taxes, amass unthinkable fortunes, rip off their shareholders, and laugh at the rest of us. HMO's and health care are a national, systemic shame and single-payer health care is not even on the political agenda. Corporations went from paying 50% of the cost of government post WWII to 7% today. Who is getting the free ride?

Author Nomi Prins has just come out with a new book "Jacked: How 'Conservatives' Are Picking Your Pocket" (whether you voted for them or not). She travelled America and examined the wallets of average citizens. A former Managing Director at Goldman Sachs, she took out her calculator and showed how soi disant "conservatives" have used our money to enrich themselves, pocket our nation's resources and rip off the average person. Does Ann Coulter know how to use a calculator? In a political version of Celebrity Death Match, my money is on Prins over Coulter 10 to 1 odds. Is Jacked potent enough to scare Rush Limbaugh straight? Send Jacked to your friend who thinks he is "conservative". The numbers don't lie, and chances are your friend with the true conservative principles that we should all respect and honor - like conservation and hating waste -- is not really part of that club, which consists of people who can't face fiscal -- and other reality. Liberal is the new conservative. Go figure. God will not be angered if you learn how to use a calculator, Ms. Coulter.

Benedictine Marketing

2006-09-23T22:05:00.000-04:00

While surfing around on a topic, I came across Eric Goldman's Technology & Marketing Law Blog. I'm not sure that the content fits the blog title, but I'm not sure that Small Firm Life's content does, either. Anyway, Eric's got a lot of interesting and intelligent posts, particularly in the copyright area. Highly recommended and very current, an excellent post on the Google Print controversy. He had a great link to the Copyright Website, a spot where Benedict O'Mahoney has collected examples of the works that were allegedly infringing and the originals from copyright cases. Smart and well-presented.

I thought it was very odd that the Google ad on Eric's blog had a link to www.worldslastchance.com, a site that predicts the current Pope is the last one the world is going to see. The crazy thing is that these Google ads are supposed to relate to the topic of your blog so that the advertiser gets views by persons interested. I've noticed ads on my blog for everything from personal injury lawyers to public service announcements.

Google should have a "no armaggedonist ad" filter. None of us really wants to disseminate hate speech, pornography or lunatic rantings, and I clicked on the link to figure out what it was through Eric's blog. Yuck!

Privatizing Air Traffic Controllers

2006-09-17T11:30:00.000-04:00

Last week I was participating in a CLE presentation in a federal courthouse in Central Islip New York. The topic was cease and desist letters in intellectual property cases and related issues of declaratory judgment actions, personal, general and specific jurisdiction and related professional responsibility issues. The CLE was sponsored and organized by the new Eastern District of New York Chapter of the Federal Bar Association.

I met a woman there who said that her husband is an air traffic controller. She said that the Bush Administration is privatizing air traffic controllers who will now be paid $8.50 per hour. Workers will be stripped of retirement benefits.

My law office, which was located at the corner of Broadway and Chambers Street was displaced by the attacks of 9/11. One of my close friends was blown up over Lockerbie, Scotland. One day on the beaches of Long Island, I saw a commercial airliner explode.

I find it hard to understand how replacing qualified, quality labor with workers willing to accept $8.50 per hour will make us safer. Will these workers be based in Pakistan? The Connecticut Congressional delegation's take is here. The "Reason Foundation" kooks who cooked up this nonsense are found here. Richard Posner and his Chicago School fanatics would argue that a few crashes would increase the market's appetite for good air traffic controllers and increase consumer demand for an investment in quality. Richard Posner and his Chicago School fanatics are sociopaths. If and when even one person is injured due to an unqualified air traffic controller, the Bush Administration officials responsible should be tried for reckless endangerment homicide. Endangering our national security by selling off key defense strategic assets to the highest bidder is a collossally stupid idea.

They'll be auctioning off the Constitution next and charging user fees to benefit from its protections.

Occam's Razor in the Law

2006-09-10T15:44:00.000-04:00

Occam's Razor is a tool of scientific and philosophic inquiry. Simply stated, it posits that the simplest theory is the best, or that the simplest explanation is the most likely to be true. Leonardo Da Vinci's riff on this theory was the aphorism: "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication"

Clicking on the above link will take you to a terrific Wikipedia page on Razor theory. I ran across an interesting reference to it reading David Liss's "A Spectacle of Corruption" - a paperback historical fiction set in seventeenth century London that I found in an airport bookstore. The book is a great page-turner and I couldn't put it down.

For years, I've been subjected to the Razor by editors, judges and juries. My tendency to present complicated facts, suggest multiple alternative theories and to consider mixed motives has at times frustrated them all. When chopping away at an unwieldy brief, my Razor has left a few bleeding victims, too.

If I'm allowed to add another riff to Razor theory: "Where the truth is complicated, you must simplify it to be credible." The Wikipedia has references to the use of the Razor in science, statistics, religion, medicine and biology (among others), but none in law. Politics is missing, too. The Razor does help to explain why the natural human tendency is to distrust and dislike the complexity of democracy and constitutions and to be drawn to the simplicity of authoritarian systems. When sloganeers wielding the Razor make it to the U.S. Supreme Court, the Constitution and democracy suffer. "The Constitution is not a suicide pact" is the rallying cry for authoritarians wishing to eliminate the complexities and inefficiences of such democratic concepts as "due process of law".

The frightening thing is that these ideologues believe that stripping Americans of basic democratic freedoms will make the world safe for democracy.

Next time you're facing the Razor and getting cut to ribbons, pick up a simple piece of the puzzle. Fit it in, move to the next piece. After three convincing pieces, your audience will trust that the fourth piece will fit.

Federal Bar Association Annual Meeting in Vegas

2006-08-27T17:29:00.000-04:00

I am sitting in McCarran Airport in Las Vegas typing away on my laptop. I am returning from the Federal Bar Association's annual meeting, which was held in a resort just outside of Las Vegas. The meeting was interesting and informative, with great CLE programs. Our chapter won an award for setting up the Second Circuit swearing-in ceremony.

The program on electronic discovery was terrrific - it was just enough information to scare the pants out of all of us. The duty to turn over native files (a file in Excel in Excel), digging through your client's computer systems before the first Rule 26(f) conference, and issued related to metadata will revolutionize the practice of law and put anyone who is not keeping up on technological issues at a further disadvantage. The presenter, George Paul, who authored The Discovery Revolution, was terrific. His thesis was that lawyers are the priests of information and that we'd all have to become technologists versed in computer systems and hire forensic experts even for run-of-the-mill cases. He also believes that much more diplomacy and statesmanship will be involved with the discovery process, since a lack of good faith can create such tremendous liabilities for both attorneys and clients.

Lots of carping about the costs of complying with Sarbanes-Oxley. A great appellate practice panel with four Ninth Circuit judges - highly entertaining and informative. I have a better insight into why Ninth Circuit decisions seem to be all over the place. Great panel on the FBI's programs involving private business.

I spent about 20 minutes talking to Bishop Pepe, whose diocese is the southern half of Nevada. He is a Canon lawyer, originally from Philadelphia. His church on the Las Vegas strip services 3.5 million visitors annually. The land is worth $11 million per acre.

La Dolce Vita

2006-08-08T22:30:00.000-04:00

Certain movies should be seen again and again. Fellini's La Dolce Vita is one of them. Fellini documents the career arc of a young gossip columnist who dreams about giving up his celebrity-chasing job and party lifestyle to write some real literature. The film is rich and full of complex human drama, of cruelty, heartbreak, vanity, perversion and self-inflicted suffering by people who publicly crush and mock their own dreams.

My cousin Bill Lacey restored the audio soundtrack. Bill is a Grammy-winning audio engineer and musician. Great music, great film.

Cases Citing Legal Blogs

2006-08-07T10:49:00.000-04:00

Ian Best of 3L Epiphany just published an updated list of citations to legal blogs:

There are now 32 court citations of legal blogs from 27 different cases.
URL: http://3lepiphany.typepad.com/3l_epiphany/2006/08/cases_citing_le.html

The citations are broken down by subject matter and by blog. Very helpful!

Copyright Code in Verse

2006-07-30T11:26:00.000-04:00

A non-lawyer from Israel named Yehuda Berlinger who keeps a blog on board games sat down and put the U.S. Copyright Act to verse. The verses are numbered by the section of the statute they describe. The poem is by turns bad, funny, insightful and brilliant. It's also an implicit critique of the ridiculously bad prose our lawmakers use for these statutes.

Yehuda claims it took him only three hours. Hmmmm.

It should become required reading for aspiring IP attorney. It's a great fun way to learn what the law is and where to find it. The Copyright Act is mind-numbingly difficult to follow and tough to navigate and cross-reference. Almost no one sits down and reads it front to back just for kicks. Of those that do, certainly few understand it.

We should all salute Yehuda's sense of fun and fearlessness. Too many lawyers think it's all a big pain to wade through all of the fine print.

The U.S. Copyright code, in verse
These verses describe
All the copyright code
Of the U. S. of A.
Written down as an ode

Copyright 2006, Yehuda Berlinger. Permission is hereby granted to copy in part or in whole along with this notice, attribution, and a link back to this web site.

Traffic Index #4 (Part 2)

2006-07-16T13:03:00.000-04:00

I just lost half of a post that I spend a good deal of time on. So I'm just providing below the raw data and haven't cleaned up the links that I'd made all tidy and lost. Blogger's "Recover Post" function simply doesn't work. And I'm not even going to finish the thoughts I started. Blogging should be short and sweet, and I went on for too long!

French Wikipedia page on the Constitutional Council http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conseil_constitutionnel_(France) 17

The Palais Royal in Paris http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palais_Royal 17

Maps of Paris (Plans de Paris) http://www.paris.org/Maps/ 44,160

French National Assembly http://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/english/index.asp 52,900

Les Journaux officials (French equivalent of Federal Register) http://www.journal-officiel.gouv.fr/jahia/Jahia/pid/1 70,793

French Ministry of Justice’s Page on Paris La-Santé (maison d’arrêt)
http://www.justice.gouv.fr/minister/DAP/Etablissements/LaSante.htm 70,959

Opera National De Paris http://www.operadeparis.fr/ 121,468

Cour d’appel de Paris (Paris Court of Appeals) http://www.ca-paris.justice.fr/ 310,122

Cour de Cassation (French equivalent of US Supreme Court) http://www.courdecassation.fr/ 425,043

Dowd & Marotta http://www.dowdmarottalaw.com/ 685,261

Small Firm Life http://smallfirmlife.blogspot.com/ 888,685

Organization for Information on European Prisons http://www.prison.eu.org/rubrique.php3?id_rubrique=1315 905,653

Traffic Index #4: Bastille Day Weekend

2006-07-16T12:09:00.000-04:00

In 1989 I worked in Paris at a law firm called Vovan & Associes. It was the summer following my first year of law school. It was also the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution. July 14 is the date that the celebration took place. I had a wonderful apartment and filled it with friends for the celebration.

The entire summer was magic. My experience working in France formed my entire career. In the United States, lawyers work in firms that are grinding pyramid schemes. In France and throughout Europe young lawyers in civil practice are grossly underpaid, but seem to get their hands on real work immediately and develop as professionals through a mentoring system.

In the United States we are going through very dark times politically. Although we are experiencing a technological and cultural renaissance, we are experiencing an almost total loss of respect for democracy, freedom and human rights. Cowards, weaklings and bullies have taken over our government and have damaged American democratic institutions. Respect for the rule of law in our country is at an all-time low. Respect for diplomacy is even lower. During the Italian Renaissance, Italy was run by weaklings, fools, madmen and religious fanatics who wreaked tremendous destruction. It is hard not to see the parallels.

In the United States, lawyers are subject to criminal penalties (sanctions) for making "unreasonable" arguments. The government is in charge of what is "reasonable". The newspapers for lawyers are full of tales of lawyers being subjected to these criminal penalties without due process of law, just for speaking on behalf of their clients. These penalties are enshrined in Rule 11 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and many state copycat laws.

It is my hope that we will remember these days as we remember the darkest days of the McCarthy era. Where lawyers were subjected to witch hunts for speaking truth to power, for advancing novel theories, and for advocating zealously as a true adversary system requires.

The French have erected an opera house where the Bastille prison once stood. It's time that lawyers started thinking about shrugging off some of these crazy laws that are used to undermine our basic freedoms and the common law rights

Everything Bad is Good For You

2006-07-05T21:42:00.000-04:00

Over the Fourth of July weekend I read a book called Everything Bad Is Good For You by Steven Johnson. Steven lives in Park Slope Brooklyn where I have roots and family. The book is terrific -- a blend of pop culture and neuroscience. Its thesis is that pop culture is getting smarter and more complex which is in turn making much of the population smarter. Steven maintains a blog.

The book reminded me of a lot of the topics that I've blogged about. He talks about the difficulty of video games and how the more advanced games force players to spend hours struggling with new interfaces, experimenting, and to both consult and compile manuals to figure out how to make it through extraordinarily difficult game based or online challenges.

This is a lot like lawyering in a small firm: figuring our way through mazes of rules, dodging monsters, causing and avoiding explosions, and constantly having to pick up golden coins along the way to recharge our superpowers. The new interfaces presented by blogging and technology present challenges that most of the population has to pay $9.95 per month to play. We pay with our daylight hours and our enjoyment level is generally much lower.

If anyone wants to start a video game called The Attorney, I can share some mazes, traps and amazing sequences. I know a few evil adversaries! My virtual hourly rate will be higher, but my avatar accepts Paypal.

In the end, I think Johnson is right. I think that we are going through an incredible cultural renaissance that is simply too close for most of us to perceive.

Book Publishing & Court of International Trade Ceremony

2006-06-26T18:52:00.000-04:00

I keep thinking that I'm going to be done with this book that I've written on copyright litigation, but more and more things keep popping up. It's an amazing experience to go through the editorial process, focus the book toward the audience's needs, and think about marketing. It's all very exhausting, but last week I was informed that the book is considered "publishable" and my editor had some very kind things to say about how it is written.

The ceremony at the Court of International Trade is shaping up nicely. You are all invited to attend on July 25 at 3 p.m. Here is an invite! If you are not sworn in to the court, the Federal Bar Association will sponsor you. We are honoring Chief Judge Restani, the first woman Chief Judge of the court. We have learned that the chief judge has fans around the country, so attendance should be fairly robust.

If you care about things like countervailing duties, gray market goods, getting your seized goods back from customs, or just enjoying some great modern architecture and learning about this important institution, please come on over!

Software: Open Content Licenses

2006-06-19T22:10:00.000-04:00

Every day busy lawyers are clicking the buttons to download software. The buttons often say "I agree with the terms of this license agreement" or simply "I agree". Is anyone reading this stuff? I certainly am not, and I'm pretty much in the field -- litigating things like forum selection, class actions, and certainly wanting to buy things that carry a warranty of merchantability. These license agreements are both onerous and odorous: as lawyers we will be arguing that they are "contracts of adhesion" and should be disregarded. Chicago school lawyers would enforce shrink wrap licenses placed on rotten sides of beef. As you can tell, Small Firm Life is generally on the Ralph Nader side of things when it comes to consumer protection.

But there's a whole group of people that have been worried about the bigger picture. "Locking down" culture is their stated concern. Academics, politicians, industry lobbyists, and copyright philosophers all have different points of view as to how much control over modifying written works a copyright owner should have. And since software counts as a written work under US copyright law, modifications to software are a major point of contention.

Licenses are contracts governing the use of software and other copyrighted works. Generally, a content owner like Microsoft asserts full copyright in its work and leverages every aspect of that copyright, including the right to stop others from modifying its software ("creating a derivative work").

Open Content Licenses are licenses to use software that allow you to modify the software, make a product, and sell the product (the new software) subject to certain conditions. In other words, the copyright owner is asserting less than all of its rights. But as a cond a ition of using the software in modifying it, you have to agree to permit others to modify the software and to sell it. The idea is that if you are a young and hungry software developer, you will take "open source" software for free, develop a great product based on it, and both the underlying software and the new product will both find a bigger commercial market. For a good explanation of what's going on, check out Lawrence Liang's Guide to Open Content Licenses. It's free, of course. Also known as the "open source movement" this is becoming big business.

Copyright Society & Network of Bar Leaders

2006-06-14T23:13:00.000-04:00

I spent a terrific weekend at the annual meeting of the Copyright Society of the USA. On the bus ride up I got to sit next to Joyce Creidy, a classmate of mine from Fordham Law school who is the mother of twins and recently landed a job with Thomson Compumark. Joyce really knows everybody and convinced me to join the intellectual property section of the New York State Bar Association. Not like I don't have enough bar association memberships!

The most interesting presentation of the weekend was on documentary films. Check out the Center for social media's Documentary Filmmakers Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use. It's really tough for documentary filmmakers to get clearances when bits and pieces of copyrighted works appear naturally in their works. Fair use is a delicate and highly controversial issue. It is highly politicized and people take very extreme positions. On the political "right" of copyright, there is no "right" of fair use, it is only a defense. On the political "left" of copyright, almost every creative work should be free and communal. An attorney from Paramount Pictures characterized the above cited Statement of Best Practices as being like Winona Ryder writing a book on best practices in shoplifting. So it was a fun panel!

My partner Dan Marotta was sworn in as President of the Network of Bar Leaders last night at a ceremony at Tavern on the Green. New York State's Chief Judge Judith Kaye. United States District Judge Eric Vitaliano (EDNY) swore him in. It was amazing - about 90 people attended. Many distinguished judges and bar association presidents were there. The best part for me was being seated next to actress Linda Fiorentino who is just the most terrific person! Dan will make a great President.

On my way to the swearing in, I ran into Jonathan Tasini. He is running for US Senator for the seat occupied by Senator Hillary Clinton. We walked together for a few blocks, had a good talk, and I complimented him on his campaign's achievements and visibility. I support his position on the war.

Court of International Trade Event & Frontpage Link

2006-06-08T22:36:00.000-04:00

I'm helping to organize an event at the Court of International Trade. It's a court of national jurisdiction located two blocks from my office (right across from the state and federal courts on Foley Square). It's a very modern floating glass block building. Chic period architecture within.

The CIT consists of nine active Article III judges and four senior judges. Although seated in New York, it is authorized to hold proceedings anywhere in the nation and abroad. On July 25, the Federal Bar Association will be honoring Chief Judge Jane Restani, the first woman to serve as Chief Judge of that court. We will also be holding in a swearing in ceremony for attorneys wishing to be admitted to the court. All judges are expected to attend, and the wine & cheese reception afterwards should be great. All of my attorney friends from Blogville are welcome to attend.

So I sat down with my partner for another Frontpage lesson. I figured out how to put a new picture of myself on the website, how to create a page, and how to add a link. I succeeded in putting an Invitation to Court of International Trade event on my website. I think it looks pretty good. When I saved a draft of this post and tried to test the two preceding links, the invitation came up, but Blogger threw me out. We'll see how the published post looks.

I'm pretty impressed with Frontpage and look forward to learning a lot more about it.

Linking A Website To A Blog - Frontpage & Class Actions

2006-06-07T19:43:00.000-04:00

My partner Dan Marotta did all of the hands-on in building our firm's website. We worked with a designer and used Microsoft Frontpage. I was involved with the design and the links that we selected to put on the site, but he learned the Frontpage program and sweated over making it look uniform and having the boxes line up. We didn't want a site that we couldn't change or understand. We were watching at the time (late '90's) how web designers were holding people hostage over making changes and locking them into crazy contracts. Over time, there have been relatively few changes to the site.

We've seen our website as place that people visit after learning about us, basically to read our resumes. For class action issues, it's a good thing to master. If a class action I've proposed gets certified, I really don't want to outsource the fairly simply process of getting the right documents onto the web to give the world notice. Probably the best website for class actions around is the Milberg Weiss website. Forms, notices, copies of pleadings, etc. Also forms on the Federal Judicial Center's site mentioned in my previous post. It's sad what's happening to them, because I think they've done so much good. Their website description:

Experts in protecting victims of corporate fraud and other public misconduct
Responsible for over $45 billion in recoveries
The most prestigious and recognized plaintiff law firm in the United States

I've resolved to dig in, master Frontpage and start using our website more dynamically. I took the very small step of installing Frontpage and sitting down with my partner and getting a lesson. In a few minutes, I added a link to Small Firm Life and learned the design and preview functions. It was very simple.

I hope to spend more time on it during my Spring cleaning. I have a feeling that my Spring cleaning of the website and blog will take place during the dog days of August at the rate I'm going. Since I'm not going to quit the day job, that's just the way it's going to have to be.

Federal Judicial Center

2006-06-06T14:38:00.000-04:00

The Federal Judicial Center maintains a website with lots of great information and free publications. It has a biographical database on all federal judges (past and present). For example, I was able to figure out that there have been 38 female chief judges who are still sitting on the bench. Search limitations (gender)(chief judges)(sitting judges only).

One indispensable free publication is the Manual of Complex Litigation (4th). Download it and velobind it if you are engaged in class action or multidistrict litigation.

The FJC's job is to train federal judges and federal court employees, but they've got a very rich website worth exploring.

New York Commission To Examine Solo & Small Firm Practice

2006-06-01T21:20:00.000-04:00

In February 2006, a Commission To Examine Solo and Small Firm Practice issued a report on how New York's court system could be improved to level the playing field for solo and small firm practitioners. The report may be found http://www.nycourts.gov/reports/ssfreport.pdf The report opens:

The vast majority of attorneys practicing law in the State of New York work in solo and small firms. More than 83.5% of attorneys in New York are solo practitioners, 14.7% work in offices of between two and nine attorneys, and only 1.8% of attorneys work in "large" firms, defined as firms having 10 or more attorneys.

This information will probably shock not only attorneys around the world who know only New York's megafirms, but also New York practitioners. We lack a certain self-awareness and are certainly not well-organized.

The report is chockablock with interesting information about the needs and interests of small firm practitioners and how the costs of litigation could be driven down by a more efficient court system. Technology plays a big role. The report comes out against mandatory electronic filing being instituted. Glenn Reynold's message that "Small is the new Big" hasn't hit us here.

Some great suggestions: abolish individual court rules, have courts serve orders by fax instead of requiring personal appearances by attorneys, promulgate forms on court websites to avoid the need to purchase expensive formbooks, permit preliminary conferences to be eliminated where parties agree on discovery issues, stagger court appearances to avoid "cattle call" motion calendars.

While this report is highly specific to New York State, it would probably be a good tool for small firm practitioners nationwide concerned about improving quality of life to take a look at. Your state may be way ahead or way behind, it's always interesting to know. The report really takes into account the life differences between urban and rural practitioners.

I did a google search and the report does not seem to have sparked much discussion on the 'net. I hope that some of the other bloggers looking at solo practice, such as Ben Cowgill's Soloblawg or Carolyn Elefant's MyShingle will dig into this rich feast. Will Arnie Herz find Legal Sanity in the report?

Or will the report, as so many other sensible and learned initiatives, die a quiet and unremarkable death? The report was commissioned by Judith Kaye, our highly-respected Chief Judge and was written by thirty solo and small firm practitioners. Bravo! In our maverick tradition, the report didn't pull any punches and may have been a more daring vision than the court anticipated.

If you care about the practice of law and the admistration of justice to real people, this report is critical. It's 95 pages, it's free - read it, talk about it and let's hope it sparks some positive change.

Copyright & Fair Use Comic - Lawyers Shouldn't Steal

2006-05-22T23:25:00.000-04:00

I get a lot of calls about fair use. "Can I use this image?" "Can we copy this article?" Fair use ("the fair use doctrine") is governed by and defined under the Copyright Act 17 U.S.C. 107. Research, scholarly criticism, news reporting . . . these are some of the terms found in the statute. Each term has volumes of cases and complicated tests interpreting it. Recently, the Second Circuit decided that a book about the Grateful Dead could use small images of Grateful Dead posters to illustrate a timeline in a biographic work about the band without licensing the rights.

Duke University's Center for the Study of the Public Domain has put together a terrific comic book explaining copyright law and what constitutes fair use. The book is directed at documentary filmmakers, but is an excellent illustration of the concerns that people (such as lawyers blogging) wishing to use copyrighted works for non-commercial, semi-commercial, or transformative uses face. It also is a great introduction, in graphic novel format, to the great cultural debates going on as described in such books as Professor Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture.

I hope that the authors and Duke University will keep up the comic book format - it's fun and contains powerful images that really drill home the practical problems facing authors, artists and educators.

Bloggers should start educating themselves on how to avoid claims that they are stealing the works of others. Tricks like using small snippets and linking back to the author, making sure the author is credited and trying to use as little of the work is necessary, and making sure that the work is commented upon are all not only good etiquette, but may bring your borrowings under the fair use doctrine. Maybe. I'm a lawyer, but I'm not giving legal advice here. As lawyers, however, no one will feel sorry for us if we are caught stealing. Be careful my friends. When sampling busted out in the 80's, it was cool and free. When it started making money, it got shut down. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

On the other hand, if you know your rights and want to take a principled stand, go for it. Just make sure it's creative expression, not laziness and plagiarism that you're going to bat for.

Stealing Content From Flock

2006-05-20T17:59:00.000-04:00

I am testing out Flock, a new open-source toolbar that is supposed to make it easy to grab web content and blog it easily.

Grabbing content to use later

From Flock Community

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Introducing the Shelf

The Shelf is a scrapbook for interesting web content that you want to blog about later. You may find that dragging text, links, and pictures on and off the Shelf is faster and more convenient than traditional cut and paste.

The Shelf is especially handy for re-blogging bits of text from web pages. When you drag a text snippet from the Shelf into a blog post, it is automatically formatted as a blockquote with proper citation.

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Using the Shelf

Open the Topbar menu and choose Shelf.
Highlight and drag interesting URLs, pictures or text snippets from any web page onto the Shelf. You can also click Add Note and type your thoughts, observations, and wild ravings to add to the Shelf.
To move highlighted text to the Shelf when the Shelf topbar is not open, right click on the highlighted item (click and hold for Mac users) and choose Send to Shelf from the context menu.
Click the Blog Editor icon (which looks like a feather pen).
Drag items from the Shelf into your blog post.

When you're done, you can make your favorites re-appear in the topbar by clicking the tiny arrow icon on the right end of the topbar.

Grabbing content to use later - Flock Community

Successful Format for Blogging Workshop

2006-05-19T23:25:00.000-04:00

Our workshop on blogging at the New York County Lawyers' Association was very successful. It was sold out. AttorneyKaiser Wahab and I made a pretty good team and I think provided pretty good perspectives on how to create and use a blog. Nuchine Nobari, NYCLA's head librarian, was very thoughtful in giving ideas on what people needed to know, in configuring the space, and in helping us generally. I'm throwing out some thoughts for anyone considering organizing a similar workshop.

It was important to show how to register a domain name. We registered the domain name www.thenewyorkcountylawyer.com for Nuchine by going through Network Solutions. Participants also were not familiar with the WHOIS search, so we showed that. If you go to networksolutions.com, and click on WHOIS, you can find information on who owns a particular website. We advised to reserve a domain name that will correspond with your blog name. It's not necessary, but it's nice. For example, I own www.smallfirmlife.com. When I get fancy, I will connect this blog to that domain name. Stay tuned.

To launch the blogging portion of the NYCLA workshop, we oversaw Nuchine as she created a blog on Blogger.com. There was almost no introduction to the topic, aside from a welcome from Ron Katter, the Chair of the NYCLA Committee on Solo and Small Practice. We had a digital projector showing how she did it. Then, on the 14 library computer stations, we walked around and helped everyone create a blog on Blogger and make a post. Since the library had a wireless connection, people could have worked from laptops. Once a laptop has logged into Blogger, Blogger will recognize the user. So I couldn't access Blogger through Kaiser's laptop. We had to disconnect and reconnect to my laptop to show my blog from the laptop. An important point for future presenters who may count on sharing a laptop: bring your own just in case.

We found that no partipants brought laptops. Also, none had started blogs. I was a little surprised at both, I thought that we might have attracted at least one current blogger.

After setting up Nuchine's blog and helping all participants set up their own blogs, both Kaiser and I gave guided tours our respective blogs, showing the range of capabilities of blogs and their purpose. I showed a few of my Small Firm Life posts demonstrating various blogging tricks like inserting links and photographs. I demonstrated the utility of Sitemeter and how Feedburner works. Kaiser showed how a Yahoo RSS reader works and how to subscribe and change the hierarchy of subscriptions.

Participating attorneys were smart, quick and practical. They put together an interesting range of creative blogs in a matter of minutes. Lots of great questions.

I think the decision to have people create blogs and then talk about them was a good one. Everyone was very psyched and completely experienced the medium's capabilities before we downloaded all of the fancy things on them. I had fun, learned a few things, met some great people and would definitely do it again. My advice to anyone putting on a similar event is to show, rather than telling. People wanted to know HOW, not WHY.

Special thanks to Olivera Medenica, C0-Chair of NYCLA's EMIPS (Entertainment Media Intellectual Property and Sports Law Section) for co-sponsoring the event, promoting it and helping to organize.

Invasion of the Killer Blogs : CSUSA & NYCLA

2006-05-17T18:11:00.000-04:00

It's 6:10 p.m. and I'm sitting in the library of the New York County Lawyers' Association. Kaiser Wahab and I are prepping a presentation and hands-on workshop on creating blogs for attorneys.

I attended a Copyright Society Luncheon today at the Princeton Club on blogging that was moderated by Prof. William Patry of The Patry Copyright Blog and featuring Marty Schwimmer of The Trademark Blog, along with Tom Kirby and Jeff Neuberger. I was fortunate enough to talk to Prof. Patry for a bit, along with the other speakers.

Blogging seems to be exploding. Tom Kirby's presentation made blogging out to be the unregulated political loophole that should make it a deciding factor in upcoming elections. He opined that corporations will finally have a voice in elections, a statement that I found troubling, since I think corporations have too many voices in our elections.

Looking forward to May 23 - The Copyright Office is coming to Fordham Law School, and June 11-13 - the Copyright Society's annual meeting at The Sagamore on Lake George.