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Recent Blog Posts
Quote of the Day
Police officer to me: "I do have some questions for your client, but I'm not goofy enough to think you're going to let him answer them."
On Blogging Ethics
Popehat got comment spam. Ken wrote an entertaining post blasting the lawyer whom the comment spam was touting. The lawyer responded to the post in comments, explaining how he wasn't really responsible for the comment spam, and Ken updated the post to remove identifiable references to the lawyer.
I have mixed feelings about that.
I'm full of loving kindness and hopes of redemption for those of God's children who have fallen short of perfection. It's an aspect of the job for which I'm naturally suited.
So I have some sympathy for the lawyer who hires an "expert" to design and promote his website, and unwittingly winds up the victim of unethical marketing practices like astroturfing, comment spam, and blog scraping.
Some.
But as Miami bar discipline lawyer Brian Tannebaum will tell you: When you're a lawyer everything is your fault.Judgmental? It may be. Lawyers are in the judgment business-not judging people, but exercising judgment by making the right decisions based on limited information. People's futures, their freedom, and sometimes their lives depend on our judgment. Our bad judgment calls will land our clients into prison just as quickly as our malice would.
No Easy Cases (Please!)
Dan Hull of What About Clients asks: Does client service mean "being nice" to clients?; he has some interesting observations about the differences between good clients and bad clients. (And if you don't already know the answer to Dan's question, you don't know Dan.)
Now, Dan's practice is very different from ours: while his firm's ideal client is a large business with general counsel, and while I welcome the GC's calls when he needs to refer an officer or employee of the business to a criminal-defense lawyer, I've got zero interest in representing corporations. I'll leave the "bet-the-company" litigation to Hull McGuire.
But I like his reasoning; like all good reasoning, it has applications outside its original context:
These types of "clients" who come to your firm don't "get" good lawyering. They can't distinguish your firm from the generic, uninspired, cookie-cutter, go-through-the-motions but well-meaning law firm down the street. They don't "get" business generally.
Cute. That's what you're going for?
Sad to say: If your political opponent fired his political consultants, and you hired them, you'd both be better off.
Blog Problems?
One of my readers complains that the front page of Defending People doesn't show the latest posts. I suspect that the problem is that Greenfield needs to clear the cache on his ZX-81, but let's humor him. Please go to blog, and if the first post is from before September 14, 2009, email me a screen shot.
Thank you.
Blatant Shoutout to Three New Blogs
Mike at Crime and Federalism wrote back in July about How the Legal Blogosphere Has Changed:
The modern legal blogosphere sucks because it's been overrun by legal marketers, and because people who might be able to engage in actually-interesting conversations are too busy sucking up to their e-friends and e-colleagues.
Mike's been doing this a long time. (When I had my first blog (2004?), Crime and Federalism was already well established. Mike called me up and invited me to guest blog. It never worked out-I stopped blogging then after about five posts because I knew this blogging thing would never catch on.)
I can't speak to whether the modern legal blogosphere sucks more than the ancient legal blogosphere. There has to be more marketing noise now than there was then, but I suspect that, in absolute numbers, there are also more excellent writers having interesting conversations now than there were then. And absolute numbers are what matter-if there are enough quality legal blogs to fill all of your available time, it doesn't matter how much junk you're ignoring.
The “Expert” Also Known as “Lunch”.
I've suggested before that a lawyer can know as much about the narrow subject of an expert witness's testimony that hurts the defense than does the expert himself. Even when it's brain surgery, it's not rocket science. Being a trial lawyer means being able to learn enough about the topic at hand that ignorance is not a handicap.
But despite my ability to quickly get up to speed on the state of the art in a very narrow area of, say, medicine, I have never held myself out to be an expert in knife wounds (to give one example) or postmortem distribution of alcohol throughout the body (to give another).
Cue Adrianos M. Facchetti, guest-blogging at blog for profit:
Let me be clear. I believe I became an "expert" on the subject in less than 6 months because I studied it like crazy and few people knew anything about it. However, I certainly became an expert within 6 months because Google said I was.And one thing is for sure: You are what Google says you are.
Jail Hell
Randall Patterson's Houston Press article on conditions inside the Harris County Jail, based on inmate interviews. If you believe the government, this must be a vast conspiracy of defamation conducted by inmates. If you believe the inmates, federal crimes are routinely committed by jailers.
Which story is more credible? Considering that the inmates aren't even organized enough to keep themselves out of jail, it's highly unlikely that they could maintain a concerted false story.
(For the record, I think that the truthers and the birthers are equally nutty, and only a pendejo would think that challenging the government based on earnestly-held belief in either was unpatriotic.)
The most likely scenario, in my view (having never been on the wrong side of the glass in the jail), is that inmates aren't lying when they describe "unsanitary conditions, a lack of medical care[,] and guard violence." Which is part of Randall's summary of the DOJ's June Findings on jail conditions. When the DOJ agrees with jail inmates, it's hard to credit the County's claims that there's nothing dirty going on.
Jury Selection: Simple Rule 16: The Herd Rule
The last rule for right now (it is an evolving list)....
I've talked about how the jury panel is a group and the jury is a group. Why? Because people like to be in groups. Most people will, given a choice between being in a big group and being in a small group, choose the big group. Another evolutionary relic? Safety in numbers? I think probably so. If I stay with the bigger group, we'll be safer from predators.
So Simple Rule 16: The Herd Rule:
Remember that you are dealing with herd animals.
I've given examples of questions for the jury panel in other simple rules:
"Do any of you... " versus "How many of you..."
The second question presumes that there are some people who..., and is therefore more likely to get responses than the first question, which doesn't.
If you want to find as many people as possible who share some opinion that won't be helpful in your jurors, or if you want the jurors to commit to a basic and uncontroversial principle, ask the question the second way: "How many of you agree with Mr. Jones that Fred is probably guilty?"
Jury Selection: Simple Rule 15: The Bat Rule
If the rules were in some particular order, this would have received much higher ranking.
Simple Rule 15: The Bat Rule:
Ping, then listen. Or fail.
Because bats, you know, use echolocation: ping! and detect food and obstacles by the signal that bounces back. A bat that doesn't ping doesn't eat, but neither does a bat that doesn't listen.
Your ping is a question. You have to ping. If you don't ask any questions, you don't get any information. But if you ping and then immediately start thinking about your next ping instead of listening to the signal that comes back to you, why ping at all?
You don't get any information by asking questions. Ping, then listen. Or fail.
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