ZiefBrief

Patient with XDR TB is Atlanta Attorney

CNN is reporting that the patient with XDR TB is Atlanta personal injury attorney Andrew Speaker.  Mr. Speaker was diagnosed with tuberculosis while he was in the United States, but chose to travel to Europe for his wedding and honeymoon.  While in Europe, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officials informed him that he had extensively drug-resistant TB, or XDR TB, and warned him not to fly on commercial flights.  Speaker ignored the warnings and took a flight from Prague to Montreal on May 24. You can find his complete flight itinerary on the CDC website. 

Blogging MD Defendant Exposed

If you're the defendant in a medical malpractice trial, it might be a good idea to refrain from expressing unflattering views about the jury on your blog while the trial is in progress.  But Dr. Robert Lindeman, who was blogging anonymously on drfleablog as "Flea," decided to forge ahead and give his blunt and detailed assessments of the plaintiff, the plaintiff's attorney, and the jury on his blog, and it was only a matter of time before he was unmasked.   According to this Boston Globe story, opposing counsel asked Dr. Lindeman while he was on the stand, "Are you Flea?"  Dr. Lindeman admitted that "Flea" was his blogging persona, and the next day, the case settled for what was characterized as a "substantial" sum. 

The implications of this story?  Well, for starters, litigators may need to start asking their clients whether they blog at the very beginning of an engagement.  If the answer is yes, attorneys would be well-advised to set some ground rules for their clients on what they can reveal about the litigation in which they are involved.  Attorneys should also examine clients' blog content to ascertain whether any of the existing posts could have a negative impact on litigation strategy.

If you're looking for drfleablog, don't bother.  It's been taken down, and there aren't any juicy bits from the trial on the archived pages on the Wayback Machine.

Update:  New York Personal Injury Law Blog has some excellent and extensive posts on this topic, including some posts that were written before Lindeman's identity was revealed.  Scroll through the posts tagged "medical malpractice" to read Eric Turkewitz's take on this story and to read cached versions of drfleablog.

Reading Lists and Criminal Intent

Can the prosecution use the substance of what a defendant is reading to rebut his defense that he lacked criminal intent?  According to a recent Ninth Circuit opinion dealing with an Internet sting against an alleged sexual predator, United States v. Curtin (PDF), the answer is yes.  Howard Bashman has penned an interesting editorial on Law.com, questioning the wisdom of this decision.

BAR/BRI Drama Continues

The Wall Street Journal's Law Blog reports today that Eliot Disner has been fired by McGuireWoods.  Mr. Disner was the McGuireWoods partner who objected to his firm's proposed settlement of the BAR/BRI class action suit, which we posted about earlier this week. 

Will Martindale-Hubbell Survive?

The Martindale-Hubbell Law Directory is a handy tool.  In fact, I just used it today to find contact information for an attorney who worked at a small Bay Area firm that had no Internet presence, but the firm did have a complete Martindale-Hubbell profile.  Let's face it, though.  In this day and age, we tend to search for attorney and law firm information using a free search engine first rather than turning to print or online versions of Martindale-Hubbell (for those of you who are wondering, full Martindale-Hubbell listings are available on LexisNexis).  It's only when search engines fail us that we turn to M-H. 

Law.com reports that some large law firms are balking at the high price tag of a Martindale-Hubbell profile and are pulling their listings from the venerable old directory.  In an effort to stem law firm defections from its publication, Martindale-Hubbell is trying to reinvent itself by including client reviews.  Think of it as sort of a Zagat guide, but for lawyers instead of restaurants!  I think this is a great idea, especially if it keeps Martindale-Hubbell around for awhile longer.   

More BAR/BRI Settlement News

The latest twist and turn in the BAR/BRI settlement story just appeared on Law.com.  Apparently, McGuireWoods partner Eliot Disner now agrees with some of the lead plaintiffs that the proposed $49 million settlement is insufficient, and he has authored a brief supporting this position.  However, Disner didn't file the brief.  Instead, dissenting plaintiffs received a copy of the brief from Disner, and the dissenters filed the brief with the court.  The plot thickens! 

Google's Universal Search

Google is rolling out some changes to its main search page, displaying results from its specialized local, news, video, and book search functions on Google's main results page. This new feature could be a big time-saver for researchers because it may eventually eliminate the need to run searches on the same topic on multiple Google search pages.  The SF Chronicle story  and this Google blog post both make it clear that these new enhanced search results will be rolled out over time.  And in fact, a quick test drive of Google today reveals that the "all-in-one" search results don't show up on every search.  I ran a Google search on "Amy Winehouse" and sure enough, I found some YouTube clips scattered within my traditional Web search results page.  But my search for "Frank * Easterbrook" didn't reveal any image results on my search results page, even though Judge Easterbrook's photo does pop up on a Google Image search. 

The lesson?  Google's universal search may take a bit of time to become a reality for all searches and over all Google specialized search functions.  Until then, if you're not finding what you need when you run a Google Web search, don't forget to turn to Google's separate search engines, which you can find on this handy-dandy Google page.

Seventh Circuit Wiki

The Seventh Circuit has created a wiki!  According to beSpacific, the wiki project was led by Chief Judge Frank Easterbrook.  There isn't a ton of information on the wiki yet, but you can find the entire Seventh Circuit Practitioner's Handbook on the site.  Lawyers are welcome to contribute comments by following the registration process listed here.

Law Wikis

Robert Ambrogi has an excellent piece on Law.com this week, "Legal Wikis Are Bound to Wow You," which describes how wikis are being used to promote legal scholarship and "lawyer-to-lawyer collaboration."  Ambrogi also supplies a large list of legal wikis, including the Death Penalty Wiki and the Internet Law Treatise sponsored by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.  What's a wiki?  It's a website that allows individuals to edit the content of the site collectively.  Wikis can be open to edits from the entire world, or they can be password-protected so that only particular individuals can contribute content.  What are the origins of the word "wiki"?  It's allegedly derived from the Hawaiian word "wiki," which means "quick."

Gen Y Lawyers

San Francisco magazine has a recent story about the different career paths of Gen Y lawyers who began their legal careers in large law firms, only to move on to more flexible and innovative practice settings after a few years.  The article includes this sobering sentence:

In order to hit 2,200 hours, a person has to be on the job from 8:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. every weekday and seven hours on Saturday twice a month, with three weeks of total time off a year.

Of course, this figure assumes that you'll be able to bill a good chunk of the time that you spend in the office.  But we all know that a day in the typical law firm associate's life includes some unavoidable non-billable hours, like practice group meetings, CLE lunches, summer associate activities, and client development projects and meetings, so that three weeks off sounds mighty optimistic to me!

For those of you who are graduating soon and interested in pursuing a less traditional legal career, this article is an excellent read.