By Khanh “Kenny” Glatzel
Trademarks are essential assets of any business. Customers identify products by trademarks. Historically, trademark law has been a federal issue. Trademarks are registered with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), and as a result, trademark litigation typically takes place in federal courts. That is, until cannabis commerce blooms.
By Gary Schons
The California Attorney General recently issued an opinion addressing both the attorney ethics and legal conflicts implications posed when an attorney who serves as an elected public official — in the case at hand, a city councilmember — has a client whose interests are adverse to the city.
By Ernest Kuo
We’ve all heard it: Websites need to be ever more responsive in order to meet the shift in users doing their research on mobile devices. But there’s more to creating a responsive website than ensuring that content is structured for easy mobile access. In particular, is the content on your website that users are coming to most frequently as strong as it should be?
By William Marshall
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is the European Union’s new data protection law. It was passed in the spring of 2016 and following a two year grace period, and enforced on May 25, 2018, replacing the current Data Protection Directive in effect since 1995. The purpose of the GDPR is to provide a single uniform law governing the protection of personal data across the European Economic Area (the EU plus three other European countries) replacing the individual national laws passed under the 1995 Directive. The GDPR was also intended to clarify, strengthen, and modernize data protection, particularly given the profound changes since 1995 in how personal information is collected and processed on the Internet and otherwise.
Courtesy of LawPay
Practicing law for the first time comes with its fair share of stressors and unknowns. One of the first things you’ll need to determine is how much you can expect to charge for your services. Will you be able to set an hourly rate that’s reasonable for an attorney in your area, and provides enough income to meet your needs?
By Anne Rudolph
Pursuant to Business and Professions Code section 6068, subd. (e), an attorney must maintain inviolate a client’s confidences. The only exception in that statute is that an attorney may, but is not required to, reveal confidential information to the extent that the attorney reasonably believes the disclosure is necessary to prevent a criminal act that the attorney reasonably believes is likely to result in death of, or substantial bodily harm to, an individual. But, the Evidence Code and applicable case law provide that the rules applicable to disclosure of a client’s confidences change after the client dies.
By Jenna Little
According to a 2016 ABA study, out of 13,000 attorneys surveyed, 20.6% experienced problem drinking, 28% experienced depression, and 19% experienced anxiety.
By Eric Deitz
The utility, portability and convenience of laptops, tablets and smartphones make them an integral part of our daily practice lives, but our reliance upon and the ubiquity of these devices requires us to be mindful of the ethical considerations affecting their use. This is particularly true when an electronic storage device contains privileged or confidential client information and is lost or stolen.
The “blue light” emitted by our devices is known to interfere with sleeping patterns. Our brains have been wired to adhere to wake and sleep cycles associated with sunlight. Our eyes are used to seeing cooler “blue light” during mornings and a warmer orange light in the evenings (when the sun sets). You may (or may not!) have noticed that it can be difficult to fall sleep right after tearing yourself away from that last look at Facebook or while plugging away at a brief (more likely, right?). This restlessness may be due to that emitted blue light which is signaling our brain that it is actually time to wake up. This is where Night Shift feature comes in – it’s been available on iPhones since iOS 9 – the goal is to filter that sleep-interrupting light and replace it with a warmer, more soothing orange light.
If you’ve updated to Sierra, you can now activate this feature on your Mac. You’ll find Night Shift settings in two places: in your Notification Center and with more options in System Preferences (Displays > Night Shift tab).
For many transactional attorneys, reusing an old operating agreement template or a buy-sell agreement from a prior deal years back is more appealing than starting from scratch. But after hours of working in Microsoft Word to remove formatting flaws or wrestle with making similar sections uniform through styles, starting from scratch sometimes seems like a better solution. Here are the top five tricks when trying to rehabilitate templates with unwanted formatting issues:
Microsoft provides several Paste Options when Copying + Pasting language in a new document:
If the new document reflects a similar style to the old document, select the first option. If the two documents have significantly different formats and you would like to maintain the new document’s formatting, select the second option. If formatting is giving you trouble altogether, select the third option and all formatting will be removed. Many attorneys merely allow the default Paste Option to apply (Keep Source Formatting) and then struggle for hours trying to make the entire piecemeal document look uniform. Help yourself out by toggling through these three options to match the format most similar to the new document.
Control + Home will jump you all the way to the top of your 150 page agreement without the time consuming scrolling.
