Minnesota Litigator
News & Commentary
Do not consider the blog to be a substitute for obtaining legal advice from a qualified attorney licensed in your state.
“More Pink Slips for Partners Expected as Work Dries Up”
I have been repeatedly documenting and lamenting the horrible prospects for U.S. lawyers in recent years (here and here, for example). Altman Weil, Inc. is a Pennsylvania-based legal consultant. Law360 is an on-line legal industry publication, which disseminated the results of an Altman Weil survey this past week in an article by Melissa Maleske. In […]
A Thirst for Justice Quenched on Reconsideration…
Update (May 20, 2016): Below, I noted a rare granting of a motion to reconsider. It is not all that surprising when a court agrees to change its decision after it has already agreed to “reconsider” an earlier decision. That happened here. Congratulations, again, to ADM counsel, Curtis Ripley of Stinson Leonard. As a bonus, ADM counsel was […]
Unconditional Thanks & Kudos
Critics are relentless in their criticism but they are stingy with their gratitude. After all, people enjoy critics because critics voice opposition. Having said that, if a critic does not acknowledge progress in those whom he criticizes, does the critic not become a mere nattering nabob of negativity? Is there not a big and important line […]
Employer Cannot Use Computer Fraud and Abuse Act against Departing Employees
Update (May 11, 2016): You hire a kid while he’s still in business school, you give him a summer internship, you give him work during his last year of school, and you give him a full-time job upon graduation. About six months later, he abruptly resigns to join a direct competitor after having allegedly: accessed your […]
$4,269,585 Worth of Worthless TVs
What does Minnesota’s beloved Target Corporation do with “unsaleable TV’s”? Why, it sells them, naturally! Not to retail customers, of course, but to a salvage company that agrees to pay Target 36% “of the original retail price” for product returns, regardless of the condition of the returns. At least, that mutually beneficial arrangement was the hope […]
Police Gentility
For obscure reasons, Seth is allowing me to post here again. The piece below originally appeared in 2012 in the American magazine 5AM and is noted by a British critic in a generous review of my first book, here. It depicts a problematic encounter between law officers and a civilian behaving strangely. There’s way too much evidence these days […]
A Case of 21st Century Cattle Rustling?
Dairy farms rent their cows? I never gave it much thought but it seemed to me to be a given that dairy farms would buy their cows. This week, I got straightened out, thanks to the newly filed lawsuit, Sunshine Heifers v. Twin Creeks Dairy (assigned to Sr. U.S. District Court Judge Richard H. Kyle, Sr. […]
Minnesota Litigator Profile: Roshan Rajkumar of Bowman & Brooke
I recently had the opportunity to sit and talk with Roshan Rajkumar, a partner with the Bowman and Brooke law firm. He’s a perfect candidate for a profile because his civil litigation expertise is specialized, narrow, and deep. So he might not be broadly known in the Minnesota civil litigation bar, but he should be. […]
Let Freedom Ring! Unpaid Lawyers Liberated from Deadbeat Clients!
Update (April 27, 2016): That didn’t take much time. The liberation of unpaid lawyers from their servitude to dead-beat clients is proceeding now that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit clarified the standard. This is good news not only for Minnesota civil litigators, but also their paying clients and their pro bono clients, for whom […]
A Timely Interview With Hennepin County Judge Ivy Bernhardson
This week, the Star Tribune reported a “rare contest” in the election of the next Chief Judge of the Hennepin County District Court. For a long time, it seemed that Judge Ivy Bernhardson, Assistant Chief Judge, would slide into the Chief Judge job unopposed, succeeding Judge Peter Cahill (whom I previously interviewed here). But Judge Tanya Bransford recently […]