Over on LinkedIn, Megan Wade, who writes “A Brief Review – A Connecticut Appellate Law Blog” and recently launched an appellate litigation practice in Connecticut, asked the question of at what stage of a case trial counsel should associate in appellate counsel. I thought I would answer this from the perspective
I love these stories on big firms, who are used to billing by the hour, using contingency fee cases to boost the bottom line. When I say that, I am not taking pot shots or being sarcastic – instead, I appreciate the fact that, on a large scale, they are doing what smaller predominately billable
I did not intend to return, yet again, to the summary judgment opinion in Sellers as gist for a blog post. Something about it that I haven’t touched on yet, however, keeps overlapping with other developments which caught my attention because of their relationship to long standing interests of mine related to trial work, discovery
I have somehow managed to escape the trap many litigators find themselves in, of being almost exclusively a plaintiff’s lawyer or instead a defense lawyer. Over the past 35 years, I would guesstimate my practice has totaled out to about a two to one split, favoring defense work. Personally, I like both types of work
This is a terrific article by Crowell and Moring’s Paul Haskel on the use of alternative fee arrangements, particularly contingency fee arrangements, by large law firms to supplement the revenue generated by traditional billable hour defense work. The author makes three points: first, that large firms have been doing this for years but it is
I like to call my shots when I can. So for instance, I am on record as saying Gunnar Henderson will win an MVP award within five years, the Orioles will win the World Series this year and that neither Bill Belichick nor anyone on his coaching tree will ever win a playoff game now
It is one of my favorite words – spoliation. It just slides right off of a litigator’s tongue. I have been litigating, either as direct claims over destruction of evidence or as an evidentiary inference, the concepts of spoliation for decades. If memory serves, the first time I handled it was defending a direct claim
When I recommended in a recent pair of blog posts that insurers and plan sponsors should make it a universal practice to try excessive fee class actions to conclusion, I wasn’t being flippant. I have probably spent 25,000 hours over the past thirty years advising insurers on when to try cases to conclusion – or
People often ask – well, sometimes ask – why I am still on Twitter, and the answer is it’s for the dog videos. But every now and then you come across something smart that is worth thinking about, and for me that happened today, when I read an appellate lawyer’s tweet that:
FWIW,
On the Fid Guru Blog, Euclid Fiduciary’s Daniel Aronowitz has an excellent deep dive on the question of jury trials in breach of fiduciary duty litigation under ERISA, asking the questions of, first, whether they are really coming and, two, if so, is that a good or a bad thing (his take clearly appears to