Temporary Restraining Orders

Temporary Restraining Orders frequently arise in disputes arising from the use of confidential material or intellectual property. This may be because it is difficult to quantify the damage arising from improper use of confidential material and so a money judgment may not properly compensate a plaintiff.

Release

In a settlement negotiation, the defendant's main objective is to get a release from the plaintiff. A defendant usually offers the plaintiff money in exchange for a promise by the plaintiff not to sue and to end any existing litigation. But the defendant usually also wants a release from the plaintiff because it legally ends the threat of any future litigation by the plaintiff on the subject of the dispute.

Confidentiality

If someone finds the filings and publicizes them further, it is usually too late to do anything about it. Newspapers and other media often scour filings to look for scandalous claims to publicize. And sometimes search engines can capture them and the filings can get captured by internet searches. There is virtually nothing that can be done to stop people from talking or writing about something that is already in the press or captured by search engines.

Defaults

If a defendant does not respond before the deadline, then the plaintiff can ask the court to award it a default judgment. A default judgment is (in most ways) the equivalent of a judgment that a plaintiff would have gotten if it had proved its claims at a trial.

Document Discovery Basics

Document requests are often very broad because the lawyers making the request at the start of a case do not know what evidence the opposing party possesses. Accordingly, they often ask the opposing party for all of the documents it possesses on various topics that are relevant to the dispute.

E-Filing

How do you start a lawsuit? The answer in a lot of places and under many situations is by electronically filing a document!

Demand Letters

A demand letter will rarely convince someone that they are wrong, because few people ever believe that they are wrong. But if a letter contains a good explanation of the relevant facts and law, it can help the other side's lawyer explain to their client why it may be better to settle than to litigate.

Depositions

Depositions are interviews by a lawyer, usually in a conference room, in front of a stenographer (also called a court reporter, even though they do not work for the court) who takes down a word-for-word transcript of the discussion. One major purpose for a deposition is for the lawyer to learn information from a witness, and to know what the witness will say if she is called at trial. The lawyer can also use this transcript as evidence to support an argument before trial, or as evidence at trial if the witness under certain circumstances.

What is this Blog?

I tried for awhile to come up with a catchy and clever name for the blog. I wanted a name that reflects the challenge of a demanding and technical job, that portrays me in a positive light, and that is funny enough to make people laugh and want to read more. But instead I went with “Unpredictable” because it is the word I use frequently to describe the job.

Case Law Research

Making good search terms is a true art that I think only gets better with practice, trial, and error. I am far better at it now than I was when I was in law school or a junior associate. But it's not uncommon to make a search like this if you are looking for a case concerning reasonable reliance in a bank fraud case that was dismissed because it was in the wrong court: (reasonabl! /s rel!) AND ("forum non" /5 (deny or deni!) AND (bank or finan!)