On January 14, Judge Alvin W. Thompson of the United States District Court for the District of Connecticut awarded $120 million in attorneys’ fees and $3.3 million in costs in Carlson v. Xerox as part of one of the largest securities fraud settlements in history. The January 14 decision is of interest because it addresses [...]

Just as the word “lawyer” has, for many, come to be synonymous with BigLaw associates collecting huge paychecks in exchange for 2300+ annual billables, for many the term “contract lawyer” refers to an attorney who, unable to obtain a permanent job doing “real” legal work, sits in front of a computer screen day after day [...]

In Making Your Case: The Art of Persuading Judges, authors Bryan Garner and Justice Antonin Scalia advise lawyers to “[b]anish jargon, hackneyed expressions and needless Latin” from their briefs. You can accomplish this goal, and write more persuasive briefs, by applying the principles of plain language legal writing. Plain language legal writing refers to legal [...]

Chuck Newton is a Texas lawyer who writes Chuck Newton Rides the Third Wave, one of my favorite blogs about solo practice. Chuck’s practice is inspired by The Third Wave, a 1980 book by futurist Alvin Toffler. As Chuck explains, Toffler’s book described three different types of societies, which he referred to as “waves”. Each [...]

Joan Stewart (a/k/a The Publicity Hound) is my personal PR guru. I subscribe to her free weekly ezine, and have gotten tons of great advice from it. As a result of applying the techniques that Joan teaches about, I have had a lot of publicity success for my various businesses (including getting my pet products [...]