Poor Charlie Brown
I’ve mentioned Anders briefs before. It’s the defense-lawyer equivalent of licking your master’s hand in submission. A creative lawyer can always find some issue somewhere, and filing a brief more or less saying your client should’ve been found guilty based on the record is just embarrassing. If you aren’t sold on not filing Anders briefs solely because they’re humiliating to any competent lawyer, Arizona’s court of appeals recently provided another reason. In an opinion last week, the court disagreed with an appellate public defender’s assessment that only frivolous issues existed on appeal. The lawyer apparently reviewed the record enough to set forth a sufficient background to reveal potential issues, but he didn’t see at least one issue that the court saw. I can’t imagine much worse for a … Read entire article »
Filed under: Arizona Cases, Courts
Time = Money
I’ve noticed an interesting phenomenon among many lawyers who’ve recently gone out on their own. I suspect it’s a result of the lawyers viewing solo practice as a way to avoid working long hours. These lawyers, never the most financially successful ones, love to complain whenever they’re stuck working more than a few hours a day. They never make the obvious connection between their lack of motivation and their lack of disposable income. I imagine the root of the problem is the way most solos bill. If you don’t keep track of your time, flat fees feel a lot like found money. Someone comes in and pays you, but you haven’t done anything yet. All of a sudden you’re richer, and all you had to … Read entire article »
Filed under: Marketing, Solo Practice
The Conveyor Belt
There’s a dead person. That’s what starts the conveyor belt. People don’t just die anymore. Unless you’re a hundred years old with cancer and dementia and doctors gather around remaking about how incredible it is you’ve held on so long, death is murder. People are murdered by their greedy next of kin. They’re murdered by corrupt businesses. They’re murdered by drugs that are fun or helpful, occasionally the drugs that stop the murderers themselves from suffering. People are always murdered by an enemy of some kind. The enemy can be disease or lightning, but if it isn’t, the enemy is a person. When it is, we often still look for a person to blame. The person we find is guilty. The person must die too. The person needs … Read entire article »
Filed under: Death Penalty, Government Rants, Practice in General
Does He?
I’m bad about checking Google Analytics to find out how people reach this site. I hear that tracking such a thing can make a lawyer rich and famous, but I’ve never had the discipline to look regularly. Luckily, I have a funny friend who may just get me hooked on it. This gem showed up in the search overview a little while back: Adrian Little looks like my lesbian aunt The tough thing is figuring out what’s more awesome: 1) that someone finagling those search terms can end up here (it works on my office computer but not on my home computer…no clue why that is); or 2) that someone came up with those search terms to amuse us. … Read entire article »
Filed under: Marketing
What Firing Benjamin Zander Says About Us
Benjamin Zander is an inspirational guy. He’s the founder and conductor of the Boston Philharmonic, an exceptional, world-renowned public speaker, and has been affiliated with the New England Conservatory of Music, my undergraduate alma mater, for over four and a half decades. If you don’t know much about him, I suggest you watch his TED talk to get a feel for what he’s all about: I was fortunate enough to play in orchestras under his baton more times than I can count, and I owe many of the most incredible musical experiences of my life to him. There may be conductors out there with better technique, but there’s no one else on earth who cares more about bringing out the best in the people he directs. He … Read entire article »
Filed under: Sex Crimes
Carbon Copy Criminal Defense
Arizona has pretty good discovery rules. The state has to disclose quite a bit fairly early in the process compared to many jurisdictions. The defense also has a duty to disclose, which mostly consists of providing the state with a list of witnesses, exhibits, and defenses that may be offered at trial. Courts generally don’t enforce the rules as they should, but they’re still quite helpful. At the very least, the defense gets enough to prevent nasty surprises in most cases. The notices themselves contain a lot of boilerplate language. Writing a disclosure notice from the ground up would waste time. Plus, things like diagrams of the scene and maps of the area aren’t normally the first thing a lawyer thinks about when mounting a … Read entire article »
Filed under: lawyers
Peaking
Networking events bring out all kinds of lawyers. For the most part, they bring out normal lawyers looking to connect with other normal lawyers. They also bring out great lawyers at every stage of their careers. What’s the fun in writing about those kinds of lawyer though? It’s the outliers who make for the best discussion. Events bring out the young lawyers with no jobs, wandering around like zombies clutching stacks of business cards with “Esq.” after their names but no firm name or physical address anywhere to be found. Some only list a cell phone with an Illinois area code and a Gmail or Yahoo email address consisting of a cutesy name followed by a few odd digits. As smart as some of them … Read entire article »
The Grand Jury
The first rule of grand jury is that you don’t talk about grand jury. Luckily, the first rule doesn’t apply to state grand juries generally, just to specific grand juries. I can’t tell you anything about any of the poor folks currently being judged in their absence by a group of randomly selected residents in secret proceedings led by an agent of the state, but I can at least tell you a little something about the process in general. As you can probably guess from the first rule, grand jury proceedings are held in secret. In Arizona, it’s a crime to disclose the fact that an indictment has been found or filed before the accused person is in custody or has been served with a summons. It’s also a … Read entire article »
Filed under: Courts
Screening Comments
February 2nd, 2012 | 3 Comments
The blog was getting way too much spam. Now, people leaving comments have to answer a simple math problem. It’s usually something like 1 + 1 = ?, but it sometimes involves subtraction and even multiplication. Not tough stuff. Someone recently sent me an email complaining about the math. He (or she, possibly, as the email address was quite androgynous) apparently had a brilliant comment but couldn’t get past the equation. He sent an email requesting that the administrator post the comment for him because he was vexed by the difficult calculations necessary to offer his two cents. I refused to do it. How good a comment could it be, after all, if the author struggled to complete some basic arithmetic? He didn’t even think … Read entire article »
Filed under: Uncategorized