To our knowledge, there is no person more knowledgeable about the health and well-being of the market for legal services in Minnesota than Mr. Brian McMahon, Managing Director of the Minneapolis office of Major, Lindsey & Africa (“MLA”). MLA might be the most preeminent legal recruiting company worldwide. Mr. McMahon circulated a report this week from Hildebrandt […]

An ultrahazardous activity in the common law of torts is one that is so inherently dangerous that a person engaged in such an activity can be held strictly liable for injuries caused to another person, even if the person engaged in the activity took every reasonable precaution to prevent others from being injured. Examples are: transportation and storage of explosives, radioactive materials, or […]

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This week, the Minnesota Chapter of the Federal Bar Association enjoyed U.S. District Court Chief Judge John R. Tunheim’s yearly update on the state of the United States District Court for the district of Minnesota. For Minnesota Litigator, the lasting message was about the stress and  the hardship of the partial shutdown of the federal […]

Just teasing. Minnesota Litigator has been known, from time to time, for its typographical lapses, of course. We’ll go a step further: if your law firm enjoys a superbly low typo rate, we would submit that your clients are paying too much. Though it is true that typos are unfortunate and, particularly to perfectionists, they […]

“Somewhere over the rainbow, bluebirds fly, birds fly over the rainbow, why, then, oh why can’t I?” You cannot fly over the rainbow for the same reason that bluebirds cannot read, I guess you might say. You don’t have wings and bluebirds’ brains are about the size of a pencil eraser. I think you should […]

We wager the speed of social change may never have been faster than it has been in the past 200 years in the United States and it seems to be ever-accelerating. Nowhere is this more obvious than in our evolving understanding and treatment of the concepts of “gender” and “sexual identity.” And caution to people, […]

Update (January 3, 2019): Pro bono work, as we all know, is legal service provided by lawyers without pay — charity. Pro nono work, is legal service provided by lawyers without pay — loser contingent fee cases, deadbeat clients, etc. Sadly, many fine lawyers have no time for pro bono work because they have too much […]

The linked order from Judge Vanessa D. Gilmore of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas has been bouncing around the internet for most of December so many Minnesota Litigator readers have undoubtedly stumbled across it already. It is a cry from the heart of a federal judge that lawyers and clients, […]

Update (December 21, 2018): It’s looking like the criminal trial of University of Minnesota law professor Edward Adams will be moved from January, 2019 to October of 2019, based on 35,000 emails seized from the professor’s Yahoo email accounts that still need to be reviewed and one of Prof. Adams’ lawyer’s maternity leave. The pressure’s […]

We have covered defamation cases on Minnesota Litigator a lot. We do so because, for the past twenty years, the “publication costs” for disseminating information have dropped by orders of magnitude to very nearly $0.00. In our view, there has been an explosion of false and harmful disinformation because of the sharp drop in dissemination […]