Features

• • Swimming Upstream: 20 Mistakes to Avoid When Starting Your Practice
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  • Starting a law practice requires a lot of planning, decision making, and hard work. Here are some common mistakes attorneys face and tips on how to avoid them and build a successful law practice.
• • Taking a Different View: Explore Mutual Interests with Facilitative Mediation
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  • When clients seek help resolving disputes, put another option on the table. Facilitative mediation can leave them more satisfied than litigation, and at a lower cost.
• • Noncompete Agreements: A Suspect Expansion of Employers’ Rights
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  • Employers that use noncompetition agreements should avoid relying on a recent appellate decision that gave the employer-litigant wide berth to restrict an employee’s postemployment activities. The opinion’s nonprecedential status and its conflict with published Wisconsin cases make it a shaky and likely short-lived leg on which to stand.

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Features

• • Home Safe Home: Wisconsin’s Castle Doctrine and Trespasser Liability Laws
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  • Soon after passing concealed-carry legislation, the Wisconsin Legislature enacted two other laws to clarify state residents’ right to use weapons in self-defense and land possessors’ responsibility to trespassers. Although the castle doctrine law and the castle doctrine law and the trespasser liability act became effective Dec. 21, 2011, questions remain as to their provisions.
• • As I See It: James Bond or Jay Gatsby? An ‘Operation’ to Recover a Judgment Abroad
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  • The operation began with a Wisconsin judgment for past due legal fees, but serving the former client in Honduras quickly became an adventure for an intrepid lawyer and legal team. Read how the author tried to recover a judgment from a former tax client who skipped out on his family, his business, his creditors, and his lawyer.
• • PDF Tools for Lawyers: An Apple-to-Apples Comparison
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  • The State Bar’s Law Office Management advisor reviews four PDF products with law-firm-appropriate features and describes their highlights and drawbacks. Don’t miss the helpful chart ranking the products in different categories.

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Features

• • Internet Keyword Advertising: Not a Violation of Right to Publicity
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  • Wisconsin privacy law and intellectual property law protect against the use of an individual’s name for trade or advertising purposes. However, the Wisconsin Court of Appeals in Habush v. Cannon found that such protections did not prevent a law firm from using two competing attorneys’ names to generate advertising on Internet search engines.
• • Revised UCC Article 9: Compliance Tips for Creditors and Debtors
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  • Amendments to Article 9 of the Uniform Commercial Code, which deals with security interests in most types of personal property and fixtures, took effect on July 1, 2013. The authors describe the types of property and transactions to which Article 9 applies, explain key terms, and provide tips to help you counsel your creditor and debtor clients.
• • Patrick Fiedler: Seizing the Moment
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  • Patrick Fiedler has practiced law in a score of settings. During his year as State Bar president, he’ll draw on those experiences as he works with the Board of Governors to arrive at decisions that are in the best interests of the Bar’s members and the legal profession as a whole.

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Features

• • DNA Extraction on Arrest: Maryland v. King and Wisconsin’s New Extraction Law
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  • Law enforcement officers now must obtain DNA samples from all persons arrested for felonies, but questions remain as to the law’s constitutionality in practice, despite a U.S. Supreme Court decision unholding a Maryland law against a Fourth Amendment challenge.
• • Casting a Wider Net: Health Information Privacy Is Not Just for Health Lawyers
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  • Not only lawyers who concentrate on health care law but also many lawyers whose work merely brings them in contact with health information must understand new HIPAA regulations that rigorously affect privacy. New HIPAA regulations are effective Sept. 22, 2013.
• • Doing Business Overseas? Don’t Run Afoul of U.S. Foreign Corruption Laws
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  • A company doing business outside the United States might be tempted to rely on the knowledge of local business people and agents, but doing so without caution and policies in place might result in the company violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act – a U.S. law that bars bribing foreign officials.