When a lawyer has possession of an illegally-obtained recording, what is she to do?Not a new story; this is from 8 March 2011:Just before Duke’s first unsupervised visit, Dianna bought a small digital recorder online. Dianna unstitched a bit of her daughter’s favorite teddy bear—known as “Little Bear”—and stuck the recorder inside, stitching the animal back up afterwards. The recorder never left the bear’s guts after this,

The two choices for President-Elect of the State Bar of Texas are San Angelo personal-injury lawyer Guy Choate and Tyler criminal-defense lawyer Buck Files.I know what you're wondering: what do they say about the recent rules referendum? In interviews with the Texas Bar Journal, Files said:In every office that I have visited while campaigning, I have heard concerns voiced about the recent referendum — and the comments

To those like who want the practical blawgosphere to be the Happysphere, with no unkind words spoken about anyone (unless, as Tannebaum points out, there are no names mentioned, which makes the Happysphere more than a little passive-aggressive), the Joseph Rakofsky story should provide an object lesson. Joseph Rakofsky's online marketing is a parade of horribles: Yodle site? Check.*1 Fraudulent trustworthy grey-haired lawyer pictures (courtesy of Yodle)?

Last April Fools Day the New York Times got punked by New York blawger Eric Turkewitz, who announced that he was going to become the official White House law blogger. You'd think they would have learned, non? Nooo. With the help, as I understand it, of a vulnerability in its iPad app, The Gray Lady has again been set up, and has again fallen for it (Center

Paul Kennedy asks, “How do you react when a judge asks a defendant entering a guilty plea whether or not he believes in Jesus?”* If you’re not from ’round these parts, that might seem like a strange question. But if you’re not from ’round here, you likely don’t have judges like John “Years of Trial Experience” Clinton. Paul introduced the story last Thursday: Judge Clinton, who has

Apropos of TSA, I wrote here that "it’s self-evident that one’s chances of going to prison for child molestation increase dramatically when one spends every day groping strangers."In Live-Free-or-Die New Hampshire, the chances that a stranger-groping TSA goon will go to prison have been ratcheted up a tiny bit: the state's legislature has before it a bill that would make it a sex assault, subject to registration,

Colorado District Attorney Carol Chambers, who AmJured in ethics, has done Montgomery County's Brett Ligon (edit: and Harris County's Pat Lykos) one better: she "is offering financial incentives for felony prosecutors who meet their goals for conviction rates at trial." "It is hard to find performance standards by which to measure trial attorneys," Chambers explains to the Post. "This is the standard I think best meets the

Here are a few ideas I've had for subjects that our criminal-defense skunkworks could inquire into:Facial emotion recognition as a tool in trial (see Unmasking the Face: A Guide to Recognizing Emotions From Facial Expressions);Turning the tables: criminal-interrogation techniques in cross examination (see Criminal Interrogation And Confessions);Applying the lessons of aikido to trial (see Aikido and the Dynamic Sphere: An Illustrated Introduction);Mitigation experts in non-capital cases.These are

My vision for our criminal-defense skunkworks is that each of us will choose a discipline that interests him or her, review the literature, attend classes or seminars, and try applying it in trial, all the while collaborating with the rest of us (who will have chosen different disciplines to investigate).You know about the Trial Lawyers College, where Gerry Spence teaches psychodrama to lawyers. That's a great example

I'm looking for a few good criminal-defense lawyers to advance the state of the art in criminal-defense trial lawyering. Together we will seek disciplines that have not hitherto been widely applied to the trial of criminal cases for the defense; investigate and experiment with these disciplines; share among ourselves when and how they are useful and not useful; and document our studies for posterity. This gig is