Archive for June 2006

Dave Swanner has some great, defy-the-experts advice on starting a law firm.  The essence:  Don’t overplan, get a phone line and some business cards, and just do it.  Though Dave admits in his comments that this no frills approach may not work for everyone, particularly those with major financial commitments, he’s definitely on to something. …

Over at Legal Blogwatch, I posted here  about a recent analysis by Volokh guest blogger Andy Leipold, who found that criminal defendants stand a better chance of acquittal before a jury.  I thought that the study might help some of my readers who practice criminal law to make more informed decisions about a bench or…

At Law Firm Blogging, Nathan Burke offers this stand-out ad with the tagline “800 Pound Gorillas are great at getting your attention…but does that make them the right attorney for you?”  As Burke admits, the ad might be a bit “out there,” but the point is valid: just getting your name out there is not…

OK, as regular readers know, I’m not a huge fan of the ABA. So I didn’t feel badly to learn about this somewhat underpublicized announcement (6/23/06) about the ABA’s agreement to pay $185,000 for violating a 1996 antitrust consent decree.  From the  Department of Justice press release: The consent decree prohibited the ABA from misusing…

Though not every family law case ends up like this one, nonetheless, family law cases are often fraught with more emotion and problems than any other type of case.  Clients often come with misinformation about the process and unreasonable expectations about how much the case should cost. While trends such as collaborative lawyering may address…

It’s one thing to write about the  ethics rules relating to leaving a law firm, as I did at this post.  But the way that a law firm should treat a departing attorney and shared clients in theory and the way that things actually work in practice are often entirely different realities, as this post…