A recent lawsuit filed against the National Arbitration Forum (NAF) alleges that the for-profit company gives special treatment to its regular business clients. The suit, which claims age and gender discrimination, alleges that the NAF ordered arbitrators to change rulings that went against the "Famous Parties," as they are supposedly known within the NAF.
The suit also accuses the NAF of removing cases from arbitrators who ruled against the Famous Parties.
In this new post-downturn reality of a highly competitive, shrinking legal market, many lawyers have begun to branch out from the traditional methods of running a firm and are exploring strategies widely utilized in the business world to attract new clients, keep the ones they have, and manage their firms more efficiently.
The Wall Street Journal details the steps some firms and attorneys are taking to learn more about business methods and development in a pair of articles today.
Date: Thursday, May 28, 2009
Time: 1:00 PM (EDT)/10:00 AM (PDT)
Description:
The US government has launched an historic economic stabilization
program as the market meltdown triggers massive litigation and other
legal disputes. How do partners and heads of eDiscovery and Practice
Support cut processing time and costs as the complexity of litigation
increases? What new choices are available to streamline eDiscovery
processes? How can information anywhere in the enterprise be governed
to protect the ongoing interests of the business and reduce risk?
We all know that the job market for lawyers is, how shall we say, not-so-good right now. But how bad does it have to get before a JD/MBA resorts to taking up the world's oldest profession and becomes a lady of the night?
Nina C. Baccala decided that the chances of finding work at a law firm were sufficiently low to justify making the switch to prositution.
So it looks like the swine flu is on the wane. So far, swine flu hasn't turned out to be as virulent as people feared, and the precautions people took in response to early reports of the disease's spread have helped to prevent the outbreak from turning into a pandemic.
But experts urge that there is still a chance that the organism could evolve into a more virulent strain. The Southern Hemisphere is just beginning its flu season, and epidemiologists are eying the spread of the disease there with great concern.
Everywhere you look these days, it seems like someone's getting busted for running a Ponzi scheme.
Not to be left out, an internet-based law firm has apparently decided to get in on the action, according to a lawsuit filed in Los Angeles Superior Court.
Every lawyer knows that a good fee agreement is essential: it helps avoid disagreements between the attorney and client down the line, lists what the fees will and won't cover and clearly defines the parameters of the work to be done on the case.
They can be a chore to set up, though, and it's tough to know exactly how to set them up. Here, at least, is a cautionary tale showing that there are some types of fee agreements you definitely should not enter into.
