Law Practice
Top 10 tips for preparing and presenting your opening statement at trial
By Byron J. McLain
As you stand before a jury delivering your opening statement, the last thing you should feel is that you can’t win. Every tria...
Environmental & Energy, Government
Voluntary agreements will avoid years of disputes over Bay-Delta
By Ryan Bezerra, Jennifer Buckman
Water litigation often involves decades of conflict. Judicial and administrative litigation about the American, mainstem San J...
California Supreme Court, Labor/Employment
California's relentless effort to expand contractor 'misclassification' laws to joint employment and franchising
By Michael J. Lotito, James A. Paretti
The debate over the Supreme Court of California's 2018 Dynamex decision - in which the state's highest court adopted the so-ca...
California Supreme Court, Constitutional Law, Criminal
Courts shouldn’t punish those who can’t afford to pay fines
By Timothy D. Reuben
Does due process require an ability to pay before imposing criminal fines? Is it fundamentally unfair to impose assessments to...
Admiralty/Maritime, Government, Law Practice
The government lawyer (part 1)
By Myron Moskovitz
As a young government lawyer, It didn't take me long to learn that politics can override good policy.
Corporate, Labor/Employment
SB 826, California’s ‘woman quota’ law, is plainly unconstitutional
By Anastasia Boden, Daniel Ortner
California’s law dictating the number of women who must be hired to the boards of publicly traded California corporations (whe...
Judges and Judiciary, Letters
Challenge to Napa County Judge Langhorne is a head scratcher
By Brenda Harbin-Forte
I have long been scratching my head over Napa County Superior Court’s contested judicial election, in which Judge Monique Lang...
Roger Stone will have his place in history, but not merely for his role as a gadfly in the president’s once-inner circle. More...
Prosecutors in the Roger Stone case lied to the attorney general about their sentencing recommendation.
Ethics/Professional Responsibility, State Bar & Bar Associations
Ethical duties to clients remain paramount to other obligations for departing attorneys
By Jessica Beckwith, Kenneth C. Feldman
TA recent ethics opinion from the State Bar discusses the ethical obligations of both an attorney departing a law firm, akin t...
Ethics/Professional Responsibility, State Bar & Bar Associations
Nonlawyers giving legal advice: Madness or prudence?
By A. Marco Turk
This question was raised recently in opposition to proposals by the State Bar of California regarding fee-sharing and nonattor...
Alternative Dispute Resolution, Family
Mediation magic at the dependency courts
By Stacey Lisk, Sidney Kanazawa
There is magic happening at the Los Angeles County Dependency Courts in Monterey Park and Antelope Valley, California. These a...
Jessica Stern’s new book ‘My War Criminal’ documents her encounters with an architect of genocide
Legal Education
Ensuring legal extern compliance with cyber protocols
By Grace A. Parrish
People receive notifications about another data breach that may have affected their personal information daily. Although large...
9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, California Supreme Court
9th Circuit biometric privacy case denied, but others on the way
By Michael Zeller, Ari Herbert
The U.S. Supreme Court recently declined to review a 9th Circuit decision involving a class action under the Illinois Biometri...
Administrative/Regulatory, Civil Litigation, Corporate, Intellectual Property
Family feud: US Antitrust enforcers on opposite sides of high-stakes battle in FTC v. Qualcomm
By Noah A. Brumfield, Jonathan (Jack) Klaren
The 9th is set to hear oral arguments in FTC v. Qualcomm on Thursday. This appeal of District Judge Lucy Koh’s groundbreaking ...
With over half of our returns being prepared by someone else, it is no wonder that many taxpayers may feel tempted to not even...
Administrative/Regulatory, Corporate, Intellectual Property
FTC v Qualcomm: Where do you SEPpose we go from here…?
By Brian Scarpelli, Alexandra McLeod
We need to unleash the unparalleled innovation capacity of America into our new markets without the constraints of Qualcomm’s ...
The FAIR Act and mandatory arbitration
By Twila S. White
The federal Forced Arbitration Injustice Repeal Act would prohibit pre-disbute arbitration agreements that force arbitration o...
Corporate, Criminal, Government, Securities
2nd Circuit abandons insider trading ‘personal benefit’ test
By Matthew E. Sloan, Emily Ludmir Aviad
A recent ruling sets a lower burden for bringing insider trading cases under Title 18 and will likely encourage prosecutors to...
Constitutional Law, Criminal
Face-to-face confrontation: Who should connect the dots?
By Brian M. Hoffstadt
The Sixth Amendment right to confront entails, among other things, the right to have a witness “physical[ly] presen[t]” in cou...
Antitrust & Trade Reg.
A deep dive into the antitrust claims against Facebook
By Daniel Bitton, Angelina Whitfield
Four app development companies recent filed a class action suit against Facebook in the Northern District of California, alleg...
“Do you believe how America is reacting to the coronavirus is racist?” More than one friend has asked me, a Chinese-American, ...
9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Criminal
The 9th Circuit ducks its judicial obligations in ruling
By Kent Scheidegger
The law is clear, and this manner of resolving the case is clearly wrong.
Corporate, Intellectual Property, International Law, Mergers & Acquisitions
What California businesses should know after Brexit
By Matthew Levitt, Neil Coulson
The regulation — through legislation or antitrust enforcement and merger control — of platforms and of data-rich tech companie...
The Senate has spoken, and President Donald Trump was acquitted on Feb. 5, by a majority vote — far short of the two-thirds ma...
Civil Litigation, Labor/Employment
California tipped workers may now challenge “service charges” as deprivation of compensation
By Samuel L. Goldsmith
You have probably seen it on a restaurant bill: a notice that a percentage is added to your bill as a “service charge.” But al...
Civil Litigation
Becerra v. Dr Pepper/Seven Up: A victory over the space aliens
By August T. Horvath
As last year drew to a close, the 9th Circuit affirmed a district court’s dismissal of a false advertising case challenging th...
Entertainment & Sports, Intellectual Property
Merger: When do the disparate parts of a musical become one unified work?
By Laura Lamansky
In watching a musical, you encounter numerous different elements coming together to form one unified story. Those elements may...
Criminal, Government
Package of bills will help victims of human trafficking find legal counsel
By Michael W.M. Manoukian
The California Attorney General’s office estimates that human trafficking is an approximately $150 billion-dollar-a-year globa...