Jay O’Keeffe has written a nice article about appellate brief writing on DeNovo: A Virginia Appellate Law Blog. The article is titled " 10 Ways to Ruin a Perfectly Good Brief." Here is an excerpt: 1. Take shortcuts. Here’s how you write a brief: brainstorm, research, brainstorm, outline, draft, revise,…
Winning Trial Advocacy Tips continues to be a great source of information for those of us who try cases. This post, called "The Proper Use of Notes," does a fine job explaining how – and how not – to use notes at trial. An excerpt: When preparing the notes that…
According to the 2009 Commonwealth Fund International Health Policy Survey, only 46 percent of U.S. doctors use electronic medical records, compared to 99 percent of doctors in the Netherlands and 97 percent of doctors in New Zealand and Norway. "We spend far more than any of the other countries in…
Lawyer Mark Lambert , an attorney with the Cochran Firm in Memphis, has been sued by Greg Herbers, a Memphis hair stylist, over injuries Herbers says he received in an alteration with Lambert in the bathroom of a Memphis bar. According to the story in the Commercial Appeal, Herbers entered…
Here is the best summary I have seen that describes the recent changes to the FRCP. The new rules went into effect on December 1, 2009. The summary was written by the folks at Mayer Brown. Thanks to Dan Hull at What About Clients? for alerting me to it.
Winning Trial Advocacy Tips has a great post on the subject of whether you should ever call a witness a liar. An excerpt: Because we’re lawyers, we don’t have any problems believing that someone will take the stand and lie to us. But jurors don’t think like that. Maybe they’re…
Yesterday I discussed a portion of the opinion S.C. Johnson and Son, Inc. v. Morris, Appeal No. 2008AP1647 (Wis. Ct. App. Div. II Dec. 2, 2009) concerning the assertion of the Fifth Amendment in civil litigation. I wanted to bring to your attention a footnote (Footnote 1) that addressed the failure…
Defendant asserted his Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination throughout the discovery phase of a civil trial. During the fourth week of trial he attempted to waive the privilege and give substantive testimony. The Wisconsin Court of Appeals upheld the decision of the trial judge to prohibit the the witness from…
A law professor at Stanford, Lora Freeman Engstrom, has written an article published in Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics called "Run-of-the-Mill Justice." Her bio reveals that her research interest is high-volume personal injury law practices that heavily advertise and mass-produce the resolution of claims and is supported by a grant…
NHTSA has released a report concerning fatal crashes by young drivers. The report shows that Youths 15 to 20 years old represented 9 percent of the U.S. population in 2007 and 6 percent of the licensed drivers; however, 19 percent of the fatalities in the United States in 2007 were…