If you are a blogging lawyer, and you want to be read by other bloggers, know that being read by other bloggers includes being taken to task publicly when you write something dumb or silly or ill-considered or even just vapid. If you don't want to be read by other bloggers, if you are blogging for profit or to build up your practice, please let me know

I've been thinking more about University of Texas Medical Branch's practice of renting out mentally ill prison inmates for cops to practice their phlebotomy against, and it seems to me that UTMB, TDCJ's medical services provider, is missing out on several other great opportunities to make money on the backs of "consenting" (consent is easy to obtain in prison—just offer a little extra privilege, something to make

I admit it: I was wrong. For a decade I've been encouraging young lawyers and soon-to-be lawyers to start their criminal defense practices right out of law school. With hard work, intelligence, and humility, I thought, they could do well without hurting anyone; the question, I thought, was not whether they would provide perfect representation, but whether they would provide better representation than the other people who

"UTMB’s Correctional Managed Care program has an agreement with Lone Star College involving its Law Enforcement Phlebotomy Program. The participating Houston police officers at the units were there as part of the Lone Star College course they were taking. Having blood drawn is part of the standard intake process at TDCJ and mentally ill offenders were given the option of having a police officer or a staff

I suspect that there are tens of thousands in the U.S.: disaffected young men and women who like to see themselves as willing to kill for their beliefs, whatever those beliefs. Most of them don't hold beliefs including violent jihad. They believe, instead, that abortion is murder, or that Barack Obama is a Muslim, or that America is controlled by a secret cabal or a thousand other

Today's Houston Chronicle has an interview with Erica Rose, a Houston socialite who is going to law school (she's a 3L at my alma mater, University of Houston) to advance her career in reality TV. (I'll link to it when a link is available.) The last line of the article: Q: What's next for you? A: After graduating from law school, I plan to pursue a career

Apropos of today's earlier post about collaboration (and, ultimately, strategy) in federal drug cases: Tactics is knowing what to do when there is something to do. Strategy is knowing what to do when there is nothing to do. —Savielly Tartakover, chess grandmaster That, and many other criminal defense chess quotes here.

Texas criminal-defense lawyers of old could talk to their jury panels about the Bible, and safely assume that they were talking about a common cultural framework. Modern culture is electronic, and much more ephemeral. It's harder for a lawyer to find a cultural hook that catches most of the jury panel. Once upon a time there was Murder One, but realistic TV dramas with innocent defendants have

"Not a team sport." That's how the federal prosecutor described federal drug defense practice after a hearing in which two colleagues and I had shown a certain unity of purpose on behalf of our clients. Divide and separate is the name of the game for federal prosecutors (that and, I can bribe witnesses but you can't). It's much easier to convict four people when they can be

"When you get to the end zone, act like you've been there before."     — Darrell K. Royal Too few lawyers heed  Royal's admonition. Every dismissal becomes an excuse for a victory dance. They post to their blogs, tweet on twitter, have their buddies laud them on the listserves. Does it help get them business? Maybe so. But to their peers, it looks like they've never been there