Just as desperate times deserve desperate measures, overly broad advance waivers of conflicts deserve overly broad relief in the form of disgorgment of legal fees, held the California Court of Appeals (Second District) earlier this year Sheppard, Mullin v. JM Manufacturing, 244 Cal. App. 4th 590 (January 2016). The dispute arose after Sheppard Mullin
Though some solos are perfectly happy to operate as an army of one, others look forward to the day when their workload and revenues justify hiring that first associate. But even when that day that a solo can afford an associate’s salary is tantalizingly close, once they sit down and do the numbers — tacking
Here in Washington D.C., restaurants aren’t just a way for lawyers to spend money on expense account lunches. For a few enterprising lawyers, the booming restaurant business is also a way to make money by pursuing wage law violations — often on behalf of immigrant and lower-income workers — against the restaurants that hire them,
On December 9, 2016, I will celebrate 14 years of blogging at MyShingle. Or perhaps observe is the better word. Because these days, this blog brings me as much sadness as joy as I grieve for my life and the world as they were back in those optimistic days when I unleashed my blog into
This Thanksgiving, for the first time in years, I am thankful to be a small firm lawyer. On the cusp of a new administration where civil liberties may be eviscerated and private property rights may fall victim to private infrastructure development , as a lawyer, I have the skills to fight the erosion of these
In the practice of law, time is money. Ask any lawyer what he or she looks for most in legal technology, and the answer will immediately be efficiency. Having everything you need in one place, without having to switch platforms, is not simply a convenience, it’s a necessity.
Although the 2016 presidential race pitting Hillary Clinton against the Donald Trump has dominated the news for the past year, the reality is that the outcome of tomorrow’s election is unlikely to have an immediate impact on most voters. By contrast, thirty-four states have a combined total of 157 propositions on the ballot that will
In response to my earlier posts asking whether today’s clients are more demanding, one commenter observed that increasingly, clients expect lawyers to schedule appointments on evenings and weekends to avoid missing work. The commenter sought feedback on how other lawyers handle these types of requests since the commenter — quite reasonably — would rather
Veteran Chester County, Pennsylvania solo, Sam Stretton bemoans the deterioration of the attorney-client relationship in the modern world, blaming the change on clients’ unreasonable expectation of perfection combined with their lack of appreciation for attorneys’ need for privacy and the cost of legal services. Yet as I read Stretton’s piece, I wondered whether all of
When most of us think about solo or small firm law practice, what most frequently comes to mind is a firm with a local or regional scope that services clients within a particular city or maybe in a couple of counties or statewide. And while most of us are familiar with at least a couple
