General

The 1991 first-degree murder trial of New Hampshire teacher Pam Smart drew international media attention and spawned the Joyce Maynard novel and Nicole Kidman movie, To Die For. Smart was accusing of luring her 16-year-old lover, William Flynn, and two of his friends into murdering her husband Gregory. Smart was convicted and sentenced to…

The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court announced today that briefs filed with the full court will now be posted to the Web, available via either www.ma-appellatecourts.org or www.mass.gov/sjc. Links to the briefs may be found on each case’s docket page, just above the docket entries. (For example, here.) In an announcement, SJC…

That is not my conclusion, but the premise of writer Denise Magnell’s piece, Legal Industry Slowly Lifts the Bar to Tech Adoption, published in the Boston Business Journal. In fact, I told Denise, and she quotes me as saying, that the legal profession, overall, was ahead of other professions in using technology.…

If the conversation recorded on this YouTube video is real, then it is shocking. In it, a male lawyer seeks to convince his female client to give him oral sex — urging, “30 seconds of pleasure, big deal!” This appears to be the same recording described in these 2006 New York Post and…

According to the blog launched today, RankingsForLawyers, there are more than 700 different lists that rank lawyers in the United States. While any lawyer can name at least some of these lists — such as Best Lawyers and Super Lawyers — keeping track of all of them is an overwhelming task. That is the…

There is what looks to be a great legal marketing conference this week in Washington, D.C., and here is your chance to attend for $200 off the standard registration price. The Nov. 8 and 9 The Law Firm Marketing Strategies Conference is sponsored by the ABA Law Practice Management Section and features a…

Through The Scout Report, I recently learned of the Web site of the Legal Writing Institute, an organization that serves as a forum for discussion and scholarship about legal writing, analysis and research. Features of interest here include:

In the wildfires that spread across Southern California last week, law firms and law schools were among those forced to evacuate, as the National Law Journal reported this week. Some of the lawyers who were directly affected by the fires tell their stories on the latest edition of the legal-affairs podcast Lawyer2Lawyer. My…

As I blogged about here last week, the editor of Blawg Review kicked off a meme he called Simply the Best, in which he listed his top 10 law blogs and then asked each listed blog to list its 10 top and so on like some blogger pyramid scheme. After expressing my disdain…

J. Edward Pawlick, founder of the Lawyers Weekly group of legal newspapers, has died. He was 80. The Weston Town Crier has his obituary.

A lawyer, Pawlick founded Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly in 1972, working at first from his home. Over the years, he expanded with Lawyers Weekly newspapers in other states. In…

I am chairing a Massachusetts Bar Association panel next week, Online Dispute Resolution: How it Provides Increased Effectiveness, Efficiency and Quality. We will have two speakers who are leaders in this field:…

The market for legal technology products will continue to grow over the coming year in all areas but for one — online legal research. So says a study released today by ALM Research and Cogent Research, which concludes that the online legal research market “is approaching saturation.” I have not seen the full study,…