Friday, October 15, 2004

Build it and They Will Come!

No more ambulance chasing is necessary, at least not for a Southwest Houston law firm. Read about the drunk driver who crashed into the law office building around 2 AM yesterday morning (right around closing time)!

Posted by Le-Gal at 11:13 PM | |

Friday, October 08, 2004

Is Not -- Is Too (Snot Stew)

What This Blog Is This blog is a secondary blog, where I will write specifically about legal items of interest to the legal secretary, observations I make as a legal secretary (I'll spare you the general snark, and save it for my "real" blog).

You'll find links to cases, to court rules, Word tips and tricks pertaining specifically to legal documents, legal technology items, and other general legal or technical links.

What This Blog Is Not This blog will not be a rant board where I air personal gripes against the world (or at least my 9-to-5 corner of it). I won't be griping about my bosses, my co-workers, the firm where I work, or any thing else. That's not to say I won't be griping at all, just that I will confine those rants to their appropriate place: The pass-word protected portion of my main blog, under the category Annoyances.

Posted by Le-Gal at 1:19 AM | |

Thursday, October 07, 2004

Changes to Fifth Circuit Internal Operating Procedures

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit has posted its proposed changes to its IOP here, in PDF format. In summary, they're streamlining the certificate of service so that you don't actually have to recite that you are serving a paper copy and a PDF copy on disk. (Guess they got really tired of kicking back all those non-compliant certificates of service.) You know, when you are in a hurry to get a brief out the door, you can forget to state the C/S accurately, especially if you have developed the Very Bad Habit of copying OLD documents.

Oh, and speaking of PDFs and disks, the Fifth Circuit is also clarifying that not only can a brief arrive on a floppy disk but it can arrive on CD now as well. (What a waste of 690 MB of space, though, eh?)

And speaking further about PDF files, the Court is putting its judicial foot down about scanning the electronic document into PDF format rather than scanning the printed version into a PDF document. The reason? Unless you run Adobe Acrobat Capture on the PDF file that was scanned from a hard copy then there is no text searchability. Which kinda defeats the purpose of having the thing in PDF format, IMHO. Plus, I don't know about you, but I've seen some really hastily copied PDF files come across my desk with blurred and skewed pages. What's up with that?

They're also finally getting around to insisting that counsel pay shipping costs for the Record on Appeal. Since I work in a very large firm, this has never been an issue with us. We just provide the clerk with our Federal Express account number and they happily ship the record to us.

Oh, and does this mean what I think it means? Please say "No"!

The Internal Operating Procedures (IOPs) following 5 CIR. R. 35.6 and 40.4 are amended to reflect the court?s long established principle and practice that the filing of a petition for hearing or rehearing en banc does not constitute or operate as a stay of execution in capital cases, nor does such a petition preclude carrying out an execution. Additional procedures for voting on en banc matters in capital cases also are set forth in the IOP following rule 35.6.

(Emphasis mine.) Criminal law practitioners, take note. Is that a big "Oops, we goofed" or what?

Posted by Le-Gal at 10:02 PM | |

File THIS!

I'm not rendered speechless very often, heaven knows. But I sure was today. The Bossette had filed a motion in the trial court over a week ago and set it for submission this past Monday. Not wanting to pester the Court, she told me not to check on it until today. So when I called to the judge's chambers, the clerk had no clue what I was talking about.

Turns out, since this case has gone on to the appellate court, and this motion in the trial court was a housekeeping motion, the clerk at the intake desk apparently saw that it was closed for their purposes and tossed it somewhere. So it never made it to the appropriate court's chambers. This tells me that these people who man the intake desk aren't even looking at what they receive, much less comprehending it. What utter laziness. I mean, we took the time to prepare the motion, sent it down there to be filed, and set it for submission. We obviously wanted the court to act on it.

So I had to get another set of documents, with the file marking on them, down to the clerk of the court today. We simply cannot bill the client for this and, personally, I don't think the Firm should eat that bill either. I really think it ought to come out of the clerks' office party slush fund or someone's wallet (they know who they are). But not us.

To quote a line from one of my favorite movies, Top Gun,

I want BUTT and I want it NOW!

Well, what I really want is a big fat box that I can put under my desk and casually lob papers in there. It doesn't matter what. Filing, original court documents, checks, client documents. Just toss it in the box, don't even give it a care, and hope to hell no one ever wants it ever. Again. Sheesh.

Posted by Le-Gal at 1:20 AM | |