Editor’s note: This story appears in the February 2016 edition of North Carolina Lawyer.
By Russell Rawlings
The North Carolina State Bar and LegalZoom.com Inc. took a giant step toward resolving their longstanding differences when the parties signed a consent judgment on Oct. 22, 2015. The highly publicized agreement gave the State Bar consumer protections that it was seeking while clarifying LegalZoom’s right to provide documents to North Carolina citizens via the Internet.
As we all know (or should know) the purpose of mediation is to maximize the chances that our client’s case will settle before they are forced into a potentially unnecessary trial. In order to facilitate this process it is imperative that we, as attorneys, arrive prepared to resolve our client’s issues.
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Encryption is a process to store your data so that only you can access it. There is an encryption “key” (essentially a password) that you keep to encrypt and decrypt the data. When the data is encrypted, it is converted to ones and zeros so that it can be stored securely, and if the encrypted data falls into the wrong hands (the bad guys or the NSA) it can NOT be read. You hold the only encryption key, and your data can only be decrypted (unlocked) and read by you.
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I welcome evidence to the contrary, but I don’t think that most courts appreciate surprises in briefs. Courts have limited time; they want to use that time to make the right decisions. The sooner you can tell a court why you should win, the better.
Put another way, the introduction to your brief matters a great deal.
Why, then, do so many introductions to briefs create surprises—or otherwise frustrate a reader—rather than provide a roadmap?
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Members in Focus highlights NCBA members’ special talents and hobbies. Jim Siemens is currently a Family Law Specialist with Siemens Law Group in Asheville.
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Editor’s note: As we look forward to the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday and other opportunities to serve, an NCBA member reflects on why service matters.
An undergraduate degree. Three years of law school. The bar exam. Debt, stress, hard work, and strains on our personal lives. We’ve sacrificed a lot and dedicated ourselves to earn the privilege of practicing law. Our pens are more than ink and plastic, our signatures more than markings. We have the trust of society to rewrite the lives of those around us. Our entire profession, in fact, is dependent on society’s trust based on our education, licensing, and code of professional conduct. Our pens, set to paper to draft a motion or sign a pleading, transform into tools of the law, and it’s a transformation that is exclusive to us.
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In the gloaming, silhouetted on Norway’s famous Besseggen Ridge, with no trail signs or anyone else in sight, a lone hiker is not sure he is on the trail. He is sure that his knee is acting up, and that he is bone weary. And he has miles to go.
Each time I sit down to write a punctuation column, I find myself second-guessing the topic. Do readers really want to read about commas, or dashes, or apostrophes? Shouldn’t I be able to think of something more stimulating to write about?
But I am always pleasantly surprised at the number of readers who contact me to thank me for these punctuation refreshers and to suggest additional punctuation-related topics. Recently, I received a couple of requests for a column covering the proper use of colons and semicolons, and I am happy to oblige.
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Learning from the mistakes of others is far better than learning from your own follies. The work of the Mecklenburg County Bar’s Fee Dispute Resolution Committee allows its members to see patterns of conduct which end up in disputes between attorneys and clients. Hopefully, the members use this experience to develop procedures and practices which will help avoid fee disputes. We thought it may be good to share with our associates some of the insights we have learned through our service as members of the Fee Dispute Committee. Read more
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Welcome to a new year of Administrative Law Section activities and events. My name is Jennifer Morgan, and I am an attorney at Williams Mullen law firm in Raleigh. My practice includes a focus on alcoholic beverage distribution and regulation, as well as a focus on utilities regulation. I am honored and excited to serve as chair of the section for the 2015-2016 year.
