The Profession | Wednesday, September 1, 2010

• Survey: Grim Revenue Picture for Small and Midsize Firms in 2009. Rough economic winds battered small and midsize firm revenues during 2009 -- though cuts in expenses helped those firms eke out small increases in profits. Go to The National Law Journal


• E-Mail Isn't as Ethereal as You Might Think. E-mail is simple. But because there's so much of it in so many different locations, and because enterprise e-mail resides in complex database environments integrating layer-on-layer of useful metadata, it's easy to lose sight of e-mail's inherent simplicity. Go to Law Technology News


• Computer Forensics Experts, Who's Your Daddy?. In 2001, Jessica Bair was serving as an expert computer forensic examiner in a statutory rape case being prosecuted largely on the basis of digital evidence. As is common in such cases, the defense challenged the validity of the computer files by attacking the credibility of her reports and conclusions. But Bair says one thing helped tip things in her favor. When being qualified, she mentioned computer forensic certifications she had earned while in the military. As soon as she mentioned her certifications, she says the judge stopped her mid-answer and asked her to repeat each certification slowly, so he could write them down in his notes. "At the time, only military or law enforcement could get certification like this," says Bair, who later co-created a certification program for Guidance Software. "Computer forensics examiners can have a hard time defending themselves in court without some sort of validation they can point to." Go to Law Technology News


• Litigators Losing Love of Arbitration Argue for Trials. Large-scale commercial contracts often include arbitration clauses in the hopes of avoiding large-scale commercial litigation. But litigators are starting to find the quicker, cheaper, more private aspects of arbitration have turned into lengthy, expensive and often public quasi-trials. Go to The Legal Intelligencer


• Failure to Notify Bankruptcy Court of Discrimination Suit Knocks Out Damages. In a novel approach to applying the doctrine of judicial estoppel, a federal judge has ruled that a plaintiff in a pregnancy discrimination suit who failed to inform the Bankruptcy Court of her pending discrimination claims must be barred from seeking any compensatory damages in that case, but should still be allowed to pursue declaratory and injunctive relief. Go to The Legal Intelligencer


• Who Represents America's Biggest Companies. Welcome to our annual report on the outside law firms that corporate America turns to — for bet-the-company litigation, or patent prosecution, or more mundane matters. Go to Corporate Counsel


• Tips on Becoming a More Effective Legal Writer . Lawyers are famous for redundant writing and using long words where shorter words would suffice. In today's practice, the written word is a lawyer's prime currency. For the firm, its written work is its face to the world, and its reputation could hang on a phrase in any brief, memo or even e-mail. Thus, there can only be one answer to the question, "does good lawyering require good writing?" -- a definitive and emphatic, "yes!" Go to The Recorder


• Professor: Change Law School Faculty to Improve Practical Training. Law schools can't make legal education more practical and relevant if they continue to hire professors with little real-world experience who are focused on esoteric scholarship. That's the conclusion Georgetown University Law Center adjunct professor Brent Evan Newton advances in "Preaching What They Don't Practice: Why Law Faculties' Preoccupation with Impractical Scholarship and Devaluation of Practical Competencies Obstruct Reform in the Legal Academy." Go to National Law Journal

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