Law, Strategy, and Risk in Commercial Disputes
Since 1982, California law has required contingent fee agreements between a lawyer and a "plaintiff" to meet certain tests.
Ten years after the law took effect, a California court of appeals held that the law doesn't apply "outside the litigation context." Franklin v. Appell, 8 Cal. App. 4th 875, 892 (Cal. App. 1992) (involving…
You write well. Will copying your judge's writing style boost your chances of persuading him or her? Blawgletter doubts it will.
Judges, like lawyers, vary in the quality of their prose. Rulings on merely routine matters may plod along; few decisions justify a judge's best work. And, even in the most momentous opinions, only the…
You'd think that a corporation would have to have some gall if it sued its officers and directors for prolonging its life.
Even if they defrauded lenders out of the money that kept the firm chugging far past the point of genuine insolvency.
Does the situation change if the company ends up in chapter 11 and the bankruptcy…
Working with smart, funny, and creative people brings lots of rewards.
This month, one of the smartest, funniest, and most creative people Blawgletter knows (and once had the pleasure of working with) wrote a thought piece on legal blogging — what she calls blawgging. She titled it "If a Blawgger Blawgs in the Forest…
Watch lawyers filing into a courthouse, and you won't see a great many grins. An excess of cheer seldom attends a deposition or negotiation. And lawyers don't often tell jokes well.
What accounts for that? Stress? A grim take on the human condition? Poor social skills?
Maybe lawyers seem so serious because they, more than others, want people…
An ex-judge friend of Blawgletter's said he expected lawyers to argue their clients' cases to him as hard as they could. He had little patience with advocates who conceded points in hopes of pleasing, or placating, him. And he told of instances where lawyers all but surrendered in the face of mild to moderate judicial…
Blawgletter listened this morning to part of a radio show on the home foreclosure mess. It featured the executive director of the American Securitization Forum, an economics writer, and an ethics teacher in a graduate real estate studies program.
A woman called in to tell about how she and her husband lost their home to…
You may recall Blawgletter's thoughts on "How to Negotiate a Reverse Contingent Fee". We said:
The [reverse contingent fee] agreement with the client calculates the RCF as a percentage of the savings off of a benchmark number. The benchmark reflects an estimate of the client's possible exposure.
By way of example, if the law
…
Do you have hypomania?
The New York Times printed an article on hypomania today — or, as the paper of record put it, "Just Manic Enough: Seeking Perfect Entrepreneurs".
The item says:
[A] thin line separates the temperament of a promising entrepreneur from a person who could use, as they say in psychiatry,
…
The wacky world of litigating arbitration issues keeps getting wackier.
Witness today's Ninth Circuit ruling that, no, by golly, a party needn't include in its complaint an explanation of why it doesn't have to arbitrate.
The defendant, Fastbucks, which franchises "payday loan" stores in California and elsewhere, including its home state, Texas, urged that Golden…