Court Filings, Decisions and Legal Articles : JD Supra : Cases, Briefs, Documents, Forms

Here's a round-up of some of our the newest members who started sharing their work on JD Supra this past week:

	Levin & Perconti - a Chicago  "law firm concentrating in all types of personal injury, medical malpractice and wrongful death litigation . . . Levin & Perconti has recovered more than $250 million in verdicts and settlements for [their] clients, many of them in high-profile cases that received national media attention."
	Richard Farkas - whose firm, "based in Sherman Oaks, California, is a practice engaged in general civil, commercial and corporate litigation in all California State and Federal Courts, business planning, insurance and computer law. The firm has been actively involved in complex, multi-party business litigation, civil appeals (State and Federal), as well as wrongful termination, business organization and maintenance, and commercial and corporate transactions."
	Ellyn Law LLP - "a Toronto business litigation, commercial litigation, shareholder litigation and enforcement judgments."  The firm is "a member of the International Network of Boutique Law Firms (INBLF) and of the Association of European Lawyers, a global legal network with more than 400 legal offices."
	William Walzer - "head of the Real Estate practice at Roy P. Kozupsky & Associates, LLP. The firm negotiates and documents sophisticated real estate matters, including sales and acquisitions, financing, construction anddevelopment, retail, office and industrial leasing, property management and multi-party, tax-deferred exchanges.
	Kenneth Fink of Cheriff & Fink, PC - a New York firm that "offers a wide array of legal services including civil litigation, real estate, corporate and business law, estate planning, and entertainment law." The firm "is driven by the twin guiding principles of providing effective professional representation and establishing and maintaining long lasting attorney-client relationships."
	PCT Law Group, PLLC - a law firm with offices in Washington, D.C. and McLean, Virginia. The firm's "practice focuses on providing legal counsel and representation in the complimentary core areas of: Corporate, Intellectual Property and Litigation.
	Simons & Wiskin - a New Jersey firm that "concentrates its practice in the area of customs, export, international trade and related transactional law.
	Teresa R. Martin - owner of a "New York based Real Estate, Bankruptcy and Foreclosure Defense Firm representing purchasers, sellers and investors in all aspects of the real estate transactions including asset protection and litigation. Additional service areas include credit restoration and real estate education and consulting services."
	Ryan, Swanson & Cleveland, PLLC - a Washington state firm which provides "legal counsel and representation for businesses - small and large, privately-held and public, domestic and international."

A simple definition of marketing: "Getting someone who has a need to know, like, and trust you." (Italics are ours.)

The language comes from marketing coach John Jantsch (author of Duct Tape Marketing) by way of Joe Pulizzi in a post yesterday at Pulizzi's excellent Junta42 blog.

Pulizzi recently attended a presentation by Jantsch; yesterday's post is a recap of the event, a must-read not only for small business marketers and entrepreneurs, but for anyone who is interested in making the most of online technologies to reach new clients. To reach someone with a need.

Despite the slightly awkward construction, we like this simple explanation of marketing - it brings your audience front-and-center: "someone who has a need." And it focuses on your job in the transaction: "getting [them] to know, like, and trust you."

In our particular context "someone who has a need" is easy to understand: people have a daily need for legal information and legal services. (You know this already.)

So the question becomes: how do you get all of those people to notice you?

Share your work. It speaks for itself as one of the best examples of your excellence and expertise.

And cast a wide net. Don't simply build a profile, upload two documents from a recent project, and wait for something to happen.

Be proactive - it's how to stand out in an online crowd. The more you share the more you increase your odds of making a connection with someone looking for legal information. That is the nature of content marketing. That is how to start a relationship with someone (a colleague, a new client, a referral)  that potentially leads to being known, trusted, liked - and we should add: employed.
 

So many of our contributors have interesting and distinguished histories. Here are just a few of them:

J. Hue Henry - "Some highlights of Mr. Henry's appellate practice include a case of first impression establishing a client's right to access his attorney's files, and other cases of first impression recognizing torts in Georgia for embracery (jury tampering) and breach of hospital bylaws. The appellate decisions resolving those issues are posted on this site [JD Supra]."

Thomas H. Clarke, Jr., Senior Partner at Ropers Majeski Kohn & Bentley - who previously served as Principal Consultant (Chief of Staff) to the Assembly Committee on Criminal Justice and worked for President Carter in the Executive Office of the President, Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ).

Michael Hamden - former executive director of North Carolina Prisoner Legal Services and co-editor, The Law & Policy of Sentencing & Corrections (7th ed. WestLaw American Case Law Series, 2005).

Gary B. Freidman, partner at  Greenfield Stein & Senior, LLP - former appellate law assistant to the Justices of the Appellate Division of the New York Supreme Court, Second Judicial Department.

G. William Hubbard of Hubbard Business Counsel - formerly an infantry officer in the U.S. Army in Berlin and, after law school, as a Staff Judge Advocate in Augsburg, Germany, where he prosecuted more than 100 courts-martial and managed the law office. Author and co-author of numerous publications in his field of practice, as business legal counsel to primarily closely held corporations.

Kristen Patty - legal ghost writer who clerked for for the Hon. James A. Pusateri of the United States Bankruptcy Court for the District of Kansas in Topeka.

Jay Bernstein of Kirsch, Gelband, & Stone - former legal clerk for the Ministry of Justice, State of Israel, in Jerusalem, and original founding member of the NJ Mass Disaster Legal Response Program, which has served families of the 9/11 Terror attack, and hurricane and flood victims in the region, giving free legal aid and services.

Jimmy L. Verner, partner at Verner & Brumley - former law clerk to the Honorable William C. Keady, Chief Judge, United States District Court, Northern District of Mississippi.

Stephen J. Hyland -  appointed by Governor Jon Corzine to the New Jersey Civil Union Review Commission, for which he is the Secretary. He was also appointed by the New Jersey Supreme Court to serve a two-year term on the Family Practice Committee of the Administrative Office of the Courts. In December 2007, Mr. Hyland was honored with a Distinguished Legislative Services Award by the New Jersey State Bar Association Board of Trustees.

David Newdorf of the San Francisco City Attorney's Office - earlier in his career took a one-year hiatus  to clerk for Judge Charles A. Legge in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

Michael W. Dolan - former law clerk to Judge Catherine B. Kelly, District of Columbia Court of Appeals.

Over the last few days we've seen a number of newsworthy filings and decisions in the Hot Docs pages of JD Supra, covering topics as diverse as our contributors. Here are a few:

US SUPREME COURT DECISION ON CHALLENGE TO VOTING LAW:
Yesterday's United States Supreme Court decision, which struck down a challenge to a voter ID law in Indiana. In a 6-3 opinion, the majority said the state interests “are both neutral and sufficiently strong to require us to reject petitioners’ facial attack on the statute,” and the burden imposed on voters was “minimal and justified.” JD Supra contributor EPIC had submitted an amicus brief detailing problems with the law. "Not only has the state failed to establish the need for the voter identification law or to address the disparate impact of the law, the state's voter ID system is imperfect, and relies on a flawed federal identification system." Justice Souter seemed to agree, as he wrote in dissent, “this statute imposes a disproportionate burden upon those without” government-issued photo IDs.

PETITION TO CANCEL FACEBOOK'S TRADEMARK:
A petition before the US Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO) to cancel the FACEBOOK trademark presently attributed to Facebook, Inc. The petition alleges that Think Computer Corporation, which posted the document on JD Supra, has been using "FACEBOOK," "FACE BOOK," "UNIVERSAL FACE BOOK," and "FACENET" as trademarks since as early as September 19, 2003 "in association with on-line information services featuring information regarding, and in the nature of, collegiate life, classifieds, virtual communities and social networking."

CHALLENGE TO GOVERNMENT EXCLUSION OF POST-1968 RESIDENTS FROM BEACHES:
A first amended complaint challenging Nevada's Incline Village General Improvement District's  exclusion of some District resident's access to a District  owned beach, allegedly in collusion with the developers of Incline Village pursuant to a 1968 "sweetheart deal." Submitted by attorney Steven Kroll, who has filed the suit on his own behalf (and clearly took note of Jordan Furlong's Tips for writing document summaries for the JD Supra Hot Docs pages).

USDOL AGENT ORANGE CLAIM ISSUED FOR THE DEATH OF A US FEDERAL CIVILIAN EMPLOYEE
JD Supra contributor James R. Linehan shares this decision - which, he states, is the "only documented OWCP claim issued by the USDOL for the death of a US federal civilian employee due to Agent Orange."  According to James, after argument in this case, the "United States finally conceded and admitted that the claimant was indeed exposed to Agent Orange as a federal civilian employee in Vietnam and died as result of exposures to Agency Orange. Following the government's admission of liability, an internal U.S. Government Accountability Office document report (GAO-05-371) revealed that the current Administration is well aware of these past toxic exposures of American civilian employees but continues to deny their existence or liability for same."

We are pleased to announce (for those of you who may have missed it) that The New York Times covered JD Supra and our contributors in an article entitled "Lawyers Open Their File Cabinets for a Web Resource" in the Business section of yesterday's paper.

The article featured a great picture of JD Supra contributor Mitchell Matorin, as well as comments about the site and its benefits from Mitchell, Marc Stern, and Elena Garella. It brought lots of new visitors to the site, many of whom joined our growing community of contributors, sharing court filings, decisions, and articles on diverse subjects of use to all of us. (Keep an eye out for an upcoming roundup of new contributors and documents). 

As the Times article noted, JD Supra:

• helps people who want more background on a legal issue, or who would like to find and contact lawyers with expertise in a particular area;
  
• provides a resource of lawyers (who can search the database for work by other legal professionals involved in similar cases).

And, not surprisingly, yesterday many more visitors searched the JD Supra documents and profiles for information about the law and the people behind it. Not surprisingly, the contributors who have shared the most documents received the most exposure.

We are keenly aware that JD Supra is only as good as the lawyers who participate and the content they share. The many visitors who emailed us over the past 48 hours, clearly found the site useful and the content compelling.

For example, a company seeking a class action firm to file suit relating to the mortgage crises wrote:

"Thanks for setting up this service. It will certainly help all who need access to legal expertise and opinions"

Another, who was seeking an attorney for advice on changing his estate plan wrote:

"I want to find an attorney with a specialty in estate planning, but one I can first research on your database. Thank you."

And yet another wrote:

"This is very close to the best thing that can be done for the public and for clients and lawyers in the US."

So, from the entire team at JD Supra, please accept our most sincere THANK YOU to all of you who have crafted such professional profiles and shared your high quality work!

Jason "The Content Librarian" Eiseman recently called attention to a March Newsweek piece speculating on the future of user generated content, titled Revenge of the Experts. As Jason so succinctly puts it:

The gist of the article is that the current trend of user-generated content is on the way out in favor of a renewed interest in expert-vetted content.

The report has generated discussion (read some of it here at Lost Remote). Jason disagrees with the thesis; a point of view he expresses in no uncertain terms.

It is frankly difficult to agree with a piece of journalism that declares "The expert is back" (did the expert ever really go away?) but we are always pleased to see conversation around the topic of user generated content.

Filtering (vetting) matters; we imagine few people would argue with that. (How truly useful to most of us is an unconstrained fire hydrant of raw information?) Luckily, innovations over the years - layer upon layer upon layer - have provided Internet users with outstanding alternatives to the kind of filtering once done solely by news editors in an "old media" world. We suspect there's no going back - and that there is room for everyone.

Filtering is, among other things, a way of determining value. There are many ways to make that determination - expertise, authority, popularity, and peer review are just a few taking center stage online today.

At JD Supra, our particular brand of user generated content is valuable because it is the work of experts - lawyers and other members of the legal community. The content in our directory arrives online with the credibility of having been generated by professionals who are, in essence, already vetted. (Look at their case decisions and professional and academic credentials for more on this.) And every piece of work is attributed to its credible source - court filings, briefs, articles, and alerts are linked to professional profiles, and vice versa.

The value of the work is obvious - which makes the value of sharing it obvious, too.

JD Supra founding contributor, Havkins, Rosefeld, Ritzert & Varriale, recently opened a new office in White Plains, New York. They wanted everyone to know about it, and, especially, to get the word out about the partner leading their new office - Tara Fappiano.  Sure, they issued a press release. But HRRV didn't stop there. They also created a JD Supra profile for Tara, listing the new office location, and posting documents (an article and decision) that demonstrate Tara's experience and success in her practice area of insurance defense for construction accidents. 

Smart. Long after the buzz generated by the press release dies down,Tara's JD Supra profile and her growing record of documents will continue to announce the existence of HRRV's White Plains office.

Congratulations to HRRV and to Tara Fappiano on their new office and their marketing savvy.

The New Jersey Supreme Court has ruled that Internet users have a constitutionally protected privacy interest in the disclosure of their identities when surfing the web. (This from a case in which JD Supra contributors EFF and EPIC jointly filed an amicus brief.)

The Court based its decision on the state Constitution - which the New Jersey courts have interpreted to provide greater protection than the federal Constitution - and the factual finding that "Internet users today enjoy relatively complete IP address anonymity when surfing the web." (Read the entire decision here.)

Interestingly, the Court also noted that "if one day new software allowed individuals to type IP addresses into a 'reverse directory' and identify the name of a user . . . today's ruling might need to be reexamined." 

Is the Court saying that companies can eliminate the right to privacy recognized by this decision simply by finding ways to violate it? This seems a bit circular to me. What are your thoughts?

We've been thinking lately about this question posed by Anita Campbell of Small Business Trends: when did online marketing become so complex?

To simplify matters, Ms. Campbell experiments with an explanation of online marketing that relies on a series of concentric circles - the high priority options are in the middle, lowest priority on the outer edges. (Forgive the easy jest, but for a moment it occurred to us that anyone already confused by this topic might just see something akin to Dante's Inferno. And we don't want that, now do we?)

We think that the circles make sense from the point of view of many businesses. (Website at bullseye; that's where most of their online efforts start.) But what seems more important is the point of view of the consumer.

And from the consumer's point of view, things aren't especially concentric.

How does a prospective client piece together an online picture of your business? If they don't know your web address (or maybe even if they do), they search. It may be a search of your firm's name, an attorney's name, or even of a subject relevant to your practice. And, the search may even be started on one of the websites listed in Anita's outer circles.

Consider a page, or the first few pages, of search results. (For example, use the results generated by a query on your firm's name.) For one thing, there's nothing circular about the listings. For another, your website might be included in the early results (might not be), but we're betting that not everyone goes to it first.

What else is included in those results? If you've been casting a wide net online - participating in a number of places - it's likely that some of Ms. Campbell's outer-circle marketing options also appear on the early pages. Depending on the search term and other factors, possibly even above your website. That makes them high priority opportunities.

Think like a consumer. It's another way to begin to understand the online marketing options available to you. Do you have a compelling presence in all the places your prospective clients might find or in which they might go looking? If your website is your most valued online marketing asset, the center of your efforts, what do you do to make them want to visit your website when they get to these places, and do you make it easy for them to get there?

We're grateful to Carolyn Elefant at MyShingle for including us in her post on the subject - a thoughtful take on it all, with legal marketing in mind.

Ms. Elefant uses the term "landing point" and this seems right. The nature of the web today is such that your site is actually just one of several landing points for people looking for information about you or the subjects in which you specialize. (Luckily, you have the ability to cover yourself by participating in many of them, even connecting them to each other, and to your own website.)

If what happens during the course of online discovery can be described using a series of circles, that's fine - but the seekers determine what goes into each circle depending on where they land first and click next; they will only end up at your virtual door if there are compelling paths from each of their landing points to lead them there.