MyShingle : Solo and Small Law Firm Management and Marketing

At Illinois Trial Lawyer , Evan Schaeffer shares a wonderfully valuable resource, The Center for Criminal Justice Advocacy.  The Center was formed as a free, non-partisan training resource to assist new lawyers in becoming competent criminal practitioners.  And one of the Center's missions is to provide newly licensed sole practitioners with materials to provide a structured analytical approach to planning and conducting a criminal trial.   The site is chocked full of resources, including sample opening statements, witness interview forms and even law office management tips for solos setting up a criminal practice.

The CCJA site will help far more solos than those who specialize in criminal work - and in fact, arguably provides a more significant service for those who don't necessarily seek to focus on criminal work.  In my view, whether you want to practice criminal law or not, handling criminal cases on a court appointed basis offers an excellent way for solos to build skills and make some money at the same time.  When I started my firm, I was adamant about getting into court so I signed up for DC's court appointed panel.  Within two years, I'd argued several suppression motions and had a couple of bench trials, two jury trials and sentencing hearings.  I earned some money (enough to pay rent, at least) and acquired the experience that I'd craved.  But I was fortunate:  the DC Public Defender's office offered a two day training program that taught new court appointed lawyers exactly what we needed to do from arraignment through appeals.  That course, combined with a $60 handbook on DC Criminal Practice and a couple of days of court-watching gave me enough of a foundation to actually procure pretty good results, considering my lack of experience.

The CCJA site provides much of the background that I received in my DC training course (though of course, the information is more general rather than jurisdiction specific).  Nevertheless, with a resource like this, new solos who want to sample criminal work either to make some money or get courtroom experience can do so more readily, while still serving clients with the level of competence they deserve.

• Print
• Comments (1)
• Trackbacks

Like Barry Kaufman, I'm a huge fan of the law library and recognize that it's an indispensable tool for solo practitioners.  Which is why I'm thrilled to be able to offer this Guest Post, Eight Reasons Solo Lawyers Should Use Law Libraries  from Mary Whisner, the assistant librarian for reference services at the Gallagher Law Library of the University of Washington School of Law.  Mary also runs Trial Ad Notes, a blog about trial advocacy. 

Eight Reasons Solo Lawyers Should Use Law Libraries

One. Librarians.

    * Libraries employ people whose job is to help you use the library and figure out your research puzzles. Law librarians specialize in legal materials and the needs of legal researchers. Many are legally trained. We keep up with new sources and techniques and can often save you hours in your research. What's more important to you than your time?

    * Librarians also create online guides to help you with your research. See my library's collection of guides, for instance. So we can help you with your research without ever meeting you - even at 2:00 a.m., if that's when you're looking for some research pointers.

• Print
• Comments (2)
• Trackbacks (4)

David Swanner posts this excerpt from a rehearing petition that's likely to lose.  Read it and see if you can figure out why:

Statement of Issue Presented for Review: The Court of Appeals committed a major error in affirming the dismissal. The Court did not address the facts of the case. The Court has a warped perspective of the Rule of Law.

Conclusion: The Court Administration should have the case reviewed by competent individuals.

I had to read the post carefully to make sure it wasn't some kind of premature April Fool's joke, but it appears that the petition was actually filed.

• Print
• Comments (1)
• Trackbacks

Casemaker, a free legal research service included in participating state bar membership fees is a trend we've been following for a long time.  As this article fom bizjournals.com (1/20/06) reports, New Mexico is the 23d state to join the Casemaker consortium.
New Mexico Bar joins legal research consortium, hich according to the article, now serves 424,000 American lawyers. 

I'm a member of the New York, Maryland and District of Columbia bars, none of which participate in Casemaker.  So I'm publicly asking why not?  And you should do the same if your bars haven't joined either.

• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

This article, Curb Your Editorial Urges When Describing a Court's Actions, Kenneth Oettle (NJLJ) (10/5/050)  finally clarified for me the subtle differences in verbs like recognized, observed, ruled, held and others that describe how a court acted.  As a general rule of thumb, here's how the author feels about some of these verbs:

    Affirmed -- double meaning

    * Asserted -- too forceful; Court has no need to assert

    * Averred -- word is rarely used

    * Declared -- grandiose

    * Explained -- didn't, really

    * Opined -- true, but probably too formal

    * Remarked -- too casual 

So, just another thing to obsess over in writing a brief.

• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

Via Tom Mighell at Inter-alia comes a link to weblog that's been published since March 2005 but is new to me: Wayne Schiess' Legal Writing.  Wayne's site offers examples of poor legal drafting, tips on legal writing and a list of articles that he's written. 

What was most interesting to me though was that Wayne's photo looked awfully familiar - so when I took a look at his background, I learned that he was in the class behind me at Cornell Law School.

• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

This article, Law Library Offers Virtual Services (Cincinnati Business Journal 8/29/05) reports on some of the new, free computerized research services offered by the Cincinnati Law Library Association.  The services include computerized legal research by Fastcase.com and a journal service, HeinOnline.  (as an aside, I've used Hein Online at the American University Pence Law Library and it's a fabulous tool for locating law review articles, including many that have been de-listed by LEXIS). 

• Print
• Comments (1)
• Trackbacks

With so many legal research tools available on line, most lawyers neglect the lowly law school library as a resource.  But in my view, there's nothing as valuable for research as a good law library.  In the jurisdiction where I practice, American University Washington College of Law Pence Law Library tops my list as an outstanding resource for practicing attorneys.   Here's why:

1)  Open Admission The Pence Library is open to the public without charge and at all times, except during law school exam periods.

2)  Resources  Obviously, the Pence Library, like all others, has many legal resources including treatises, journals and how to guides.  Most practitioners overlook these general sources of information which are frequently good shortcuts when researching a new area of law. 

Truth be told, the law library is not particularly strong on energy regulatory resources which is one of my practice focuses.  But it has research terminals where patrons can access Westlaw keycite and Hein Online (for law reviews) at no cost and those resources often make it worth the trip.

3) Location and Hours:  The Pence Library is a short fifteen minute hop from my home office and probably about the same distance from downtown.  But the library is open until midnight most weeknights as well as on the weekend, which means that I can access it afterhours.

• Print
• Comments (4)
• Trackbacks

Add Florida to the list of jurisdictions with free legal research services, as reported in this  article.  Florida is using Fast Case for its service which provides access to US Supreme Court Cases, Florida Supreme Court cases and Florida statutes and regulations.  I've always thought that free legal research is one of the most valuable tools that the bar can provide to improve the quality of legal service.   Isn't it time that all bars made some online legal research available for for free?

• Print
• Comments (2)
• Trackbacks

Ernie the Attorney reports that the Louisiana Bar is offering Fastcase, a legal research service, free to its members.  Louisiana thus joins the twenty other bar associations that offer Casemaker, another free research service.  What I noticed about Fastcase is that it includes access to district court decisions dating back to the 1950's.  This impressed me because district court cases are hard to locate online and thus, for fee services can usually charge a premium when they include them in their data bases.

Ironically, at the same time of Ernie's post, I also noticed that Lexisone is celebrating its fifth anniversary - though there's no mention that the primary reason for Lexisone's birth was that Lexis finally realized that the Internet might enable competitors to provide the same type of legal research service available for free.  Now, it looks like Lexisone might be right after all.

• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

AJ Levy of http://www.outoftheboxlawyering.com lists a bunch of libraries in several states (AK, MN, NV, NJ, NY, OH, TX and WA) where you can access Westlaw for free.  I was happy to learn about this resource though clearly, it's cheaper for me to sign up for Westlaw on a per-search basis than to travel to New York to get it for free.  But even more, my same burning question remains:  why aren't LEXIS and Westlaw free in every single law library in the country?  It's not as if paying customers (like large law firms) will give up their LEXIS service because it's free at a law school library.  Most lawyers enjoy the convenience of LEXIS on their desktop too much to travel to get it free.  The only people who'd benefit from free LEXIS and Westlaw are attorneys who don't have the service to begin with - and the reason they don't is because they can't afford it. 

• Print
• Comments (1)
• Trackbacks