Conquering Law School in One Easy Lesson.

Posted by Cliff Tuttle

“If only I knew then what I know now!”

A common lament. Yet, so true. That includes law school, an experience intended to transform the student’s mind into one that “thinks like a lawyer.” Early in law school, we are told that we will not be taught answers or even solutions. We will be taught how to analyze, but not like Aristotle. In order to reach this ephemeral goal of “thinking like”, the Socratic method will be employed, but not like Plato.

If this sounds like a lot of Greek, you now have an idea of the state of mind of the typical student commencing law school. But, not to worry. For around $1,000 and a week, Law Preview will bring professors from top law schools to tell you enough of what you’ll know then to increase your grades significantly. Law Preview says the median class rank of its alumni is 20.7%, while, of course, the median of all law students is by definition 50%. As Law Preview’s ad patiently explains, class rank, especially in the first year, is the prime determiner of what kind of first job you will be offered, which in turn influences your entire career. QED.

Skeptics might observe that similar claims were once made by prep classes for the Law School Aptitude Test and the Bar Exam. In time, whatever edge bar review classes might have given was erased with near universal enrollment. Where does that leave the decision to take Law Preview? It means that you had better take the damn course to stay even with everybody else. Then again, who’s to say that the students who go to class with Law Preview aren’t the same group who will work harder and longer than everybody else anyway — the super-motivated.

Old timers who went to school before Law Preview are left to muse: could it have been that easy? Could we, in the words of Law Preview, have “conquered law school” with one more week of focused preparation?

Those of us who didn’t rank in the top 20.7% will never know.

CLT

Category: Uncategorized

Fair and Biased — Strike That — Balanced.

Posted by Cliff Tuttle

The First Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the decision of a United States District Court in Maine in a libel suit against Fox News. In Levesque v Doocey, announced on March 19, the Court held that the repetition of inaccurate news reporting from a blog did not constitute libel against a high school principal. The story involved an incident where a bag containing boiled ham was placed on the table in the cafeteria where a group of Somali Muslims were seated. In the blog piece, the bag of ham became a ham sandwich and quotes lifted from a factual local newspaper account were livened up with fictitious quotes.

CLT

Category: Uncategorized

Backtalk Requested: Bonusteria.

Posted by Cliff Tuttle

If there is anyone on earth who thinks that it was justifiable for AIG to pay its last round of bonuses, that person is being very, very silent. The public rage was instantaneous, unanimous and monumental.

So, answer a few simple questions:
1. How did the AIG employees who earned bonuses qualify for them?
2. What benefit did AIG derive from the efforts that earned the bonuses?
3. Are the people who received the bonuses earning more money for AIG than the value of the bonuses? How much more or less?
4. Can AIG find people to replace the bonus-earners who will make as much or more money for AIG without being paid a bonus?

What? Not a clue?

Then why are you so outraged?

The AIG bonus babies might be the geese that laid the golden eggs. Remember that story about Ross Perot? He reportedly earned the maximum annual commission on sales in January and then, rather than be paid nothing for the rest of the year, quit.

Ask questions. Get the evidence.

Then, go ballistic.

Back Talk requested.

CLT

Category: Uncategorized

New Government Website on Refinance and Modification: Making Home Affordable.

Posted by Cliff Tuttle

MakingHomeAffordable.gov is the new website launched today by HUD and Treasury to provide information on federally funded modification and refinance opportunities. It offers “interactive self-assessment tools” to determine eligibility for government-sponsored programs.

CLT

Category: Uncategorized

Twittering away the Idle Hours on Jury Duty: Forget It.

Posted by Cliff Tuttle

If you have to report for jury duty, it may be a good idea to leave your iphone or Blackberry behind. No one has made any public announcements, at least not to my knowledge, but don’t be surprised to see the tipstaff collecting electronic devices at the door. Word has been going around the internet for a while, and now the main line news about jurors causing mistrials by getting and giving out information on the web during trial. The New York Times picked up the stories I’d seen on the web and added a few more in an article that appeared today, March 18.

Judges have been directing tipstaves (yes, that’s the correct plural form) to confiscate cell phones that ring in court for years. The first time it happened to me, I worried about getting it back. Last December, the tipstaff at a Magisterial District Judge’s Office announced to the daily overflow crowd of litigants that a fine would be collected for the return of ringing cell phones, with the proceeds being used to finance a Christmas party for orphans. Nice touch.

With the near universality of cell phones, mass collection at court houses presents a host of problems to the owner. What are you to do if your cell phone or electronic device is not there when you come back for it? Perhaps somebody else, who owns an identical device, claimed it by mistake. Perhaps someone just grabbed it. And perhaps someone is listening to your voicemail and reading your email.

It is not too hard to imagine emails being read while an electronic device is in temporary custody. This raises ethical concerns for lawyers who typically have emails from client that can be accessed from their iphones or Blackberries. If you are a criminal defendant at a Magistrate’s office, the tipstaff could hand your device to the arresting officer to peruse during the interminable wait for the case to come up.

Pack some quarters and use a pay phone to call for your ride home. They still exist and can usually be found in or near court houses. Ask the tipstaff. He or she may even let you use the land line phone on a nearby desk.

CLT

Category: Uncategorized

Post-signing Attorney Review of Real Estate Contracts Is an Idea Worth Importing into Pennsylvania

Posted by Cliff Tuttle

New Jersey and New York have had statutes for some time that permit residential sellers and buyers to have their attorney review the agreement of sale and rescind it for any reason or no reason for a period of three days. It was a good idea then. It is a better one now.

Institutional sellers of foreclosure properties have introduced draconian contract provisions — risky deals NO ONE should sign.

Why do buyers sign them? Because they think they are getting the deal of a lifetime. But it isn’t true. They are only getting to buy at market value. You see, these days, market value is so low most sellers cannot afford to offer it. Once the sales price gets lower than their mortgage balance, they have to drop out. But foreclosing lenders can afford to sell at a price willing buyers will pay. Then they sweeten the deal by taking advantage of overeager buyers in other ways. Do you know how to say forfeiture, Boys and girls?

But even in ordinary transactions, there is a need for a little lawyering. The Pennsylvania Board of Realtors standard agreement of sale does not adequately protect buyers against losing hand money when the lender attaches unreasonable conditions to a mortgage commitment. Buyers fail to consider the terms of standard agreements in the rush to get an offer in and see whether it is accepted. This is a function of low market values which must be tested to see how low the seller is willing to go.

Yes, its true that some sellers or buyers will use lawyer review as an opportunity to continue to shop or to grab a better deal that surfaces right after the papers are signed. But, three days are over before you know it, and a cancelled deal is better than a very bad one.

CLT

Category: Uncategorized

Read to me, O Robot!

Posted by Cliff Tuttle

As a great lover of audiobooks, I’ve been waiting for a device that will read any book I choose aloud. That day is coming and the Kindle2 from Amazon.com just brought it closer.

Kindle is an electronic device to which books and a host of other electronic media can be downloaded directly and wirelessly. It is not the first such device, but it is probably the best — at least for now. Kindle solved many of the technical problems that the fledgling electronic book industry had been struggling with for some years. Now, Kindle2 appears to have solved a few more of them.

While robotic reading has been around for a while, it has not been offered to the general public as part of a high-end electronic book package until now. However, this offering was greeted by rage from publishers and authors who urged that it infringed upon the audio rights which might be sold to others.

Now, audiobooks have been a long time in coming, too. Books on tape have served a limited audience for a long time, but they have not attracted a sufficient following to be considered a big moneymaker until the era of the ipod. The claim has been made that robo-readers infringe upon the author’s or publisher’s right to sell the audio-rights separately.

A post in the Madisonian, a patent law blog with a focus on new technology edited by Pitt Law Professor Mike Madison, casts some light on the subject.

As more than a few commentators have pointed out, the robotic voices of auto-readers are not compete with the robust, expressive reading voices of professional actors, some of whom have become celebrities of the audio literary world. However, it is feared that this may change.

The post in Madisonian states that the system amazon is installing in the Kindle2 does not appear to infringe upon intellectual property rights of anyone. Nevertheless, Amazon told publishers to decide whether to curtail electronic reading. Lets hope that too many works are not prohibited by publishers from being read aloud by Kindle 2

CLT.

Category: Uncategorized

Adams Drafting Addresses the Art of Writing Contracts

Posted by Cliff Tuttle

Welcome to the PLBT Blogroll another high quality legal blog with a specialized focus: Adams Drafting. Contract drafting is an important legal skill that receives too little attention. Poorly drafted documents are the source of a great deal of litigation. Everyone agrees that contracts should be written clearly. But the nuts and bolts of “clearly” are another matter. Plain language drafting is one approach and generally speaking, seeking simplicity and directness brings clarity. But plain language is not always sufficient to capture the nuances of a specialty with unique terminology and concepts. Contract drafting also requires the drafter to constantly ask how a provision is to be enforced. Likely disputes must be imagined and a plan devised for a speedy resolution.

Contracts are formal documents with their own specialized language and rules. The selection of the word “shall” over “will” means something different than in a letter, a magazine article or a conversation. Someone needs to keep track of the significance of such word and phrase selections. Ken Adams is that person.

Adams says: “Contract drafting suffers from two significant problems. The first relates to quality, the second relates to process. I’m doing my best to help address the first problem; I’d like to be involved in addressing the second.” To read what he has to say about these two subjects under “Goals”, click here.

CLT

Category: Uncategorized

Q: How can a Property be Disruptive? A: When the Dog Gets Loose.

Posted by Cliff Tuttle

We obtained our first glimpse of the future and it wasn’t pretty.

The City of Pittsburgh sent out the first batch of warning letters under the disruptive property ordinance, passed late last year. The report in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette indicated that the list included quite a few petty matters and is likely to cause a great deal of trouble to a great many people without any tangible benefit.

According to the PG article, 14 of the first batch of 39 notices were for drug offenses, three for gun violations and 18 loose dogs.

It might seem that, dog violations aside, the ordinance is striking a blow in the war against drugs and illegal guns. However, a little thoughtful analysis dispels that myth.

Drug dealers and drug users have to live somewhere. If he is evicted by his landlord, he will soon find somewhere to live. Landlords who use criminal record checks will tell you that this is not adequate to screen out a determined and devious applicant. Friends and relatives, wives and girlfriends, or “business associates” with no criminal record are increasingly making rental applications for units that turn out to be occupied by persons who the landlord wouldn’t have approved. Or, more commonly, the undesirable tenant just camps out here and there with friends. With City enforcement of the disruptive properties ordinance in the picture, this kind of conduct can be expected to become commonplace.

So, a landlord evicts a drug convicted tenant after receiving one of these poison pen letters from the City. The next tenant throws trash in the yard, leading to a citation and conviction. Letter number two comes and tenant number two is evicted. The next tenant has a dog who likes to take unauthorized walks. Strike three. After all, it is the property not the tenant that is “disruptive” under the ordinance. While the ordinance says that a strike will not be assessed if a landlord is in the process of evicting a tenant, there is nothing in the ordinance that states that past violations are erased when the tenant is evicted.

After that, the landlord will receive a bill for the City’s services. The only escape for the beleaguered landlord is to go to a hearing before a special appeals board and hope that the board dispenses mercy. Perhaps the appeals board will erase strikes when the tenant is changed as a matter of course. If so, an appeal and a session before the board will still be required. This could be a very busy appeals board.

Does the strike count go back to zero when the property is sold? Again, nothing in the Ordinance says so. Will the City provide a prospective buyer with a report of how many strikes a property has — ever had? Who would want to buy a property with two strikes? Who would want to buy a property where multiple strikes had occurred over the years and been removed? On the other hand, if the City doesn’t provide such a report, who wants to buy into this kind of risk?

What are the unintended consequences of this disruptive properties ordinance? Properties that can’t be sold? Streets full of boarded up properties? Purchasers of rental properties avoiding the City? Tenants avoiding the City? All of these bad outcomes seem likely. All of these bad outcomes would be more disruptive than the problem the ordinance is trying to solve.

CLT

[See a related post on rental property registration by clicking here.]

Category: Uncategorized

Pittsburgh Legal Back Talk Turns 100 (Posts)

Posted by Cliff Tuttle

Another milestone. I posted my 100th piece on this blog early yesterday morning. The first was in July 2008. It wasn’t long before I started receiving real comments. One of the first was from a Magisterial District Judge who pointed out a missing piece of information in a post on landlord-tenant statutes. We’ve grown steadily since then. Today, after just 100 posts, we’re ranked number 245 in traffic on the Avvo Top Legal Blogs List.

What brought the most response among the first 100 posts? Most likely, it was the series on the LandAmerica 1031 bankruptcy. At the time I posted the first in the series, just before Thanksgiving, nobody had quite told the story, at least not on the web sources that I was reading. Title industry people who worked for the companies involved said that they had been told nothing about the merger at work. If you joined us late or just weren’t interested at the time, here’s the series in order:

LandAmerica Bankruptcy – No, Not Over Claims or Market Decline; Its All About Like Kind Exchanges under IRS Code Section 1031! (November 27, 2008) [Fidelity National rejected the acquisition of LandAmerica because its 1031 subsidiary was defaulting on its obligations, so LandAmerica filed bankruptcy and entered an agreement to sell Lawyers Title and Commonwealth Title to Fidelity.]

A Tale of Two Citadels: the Fall of Guaranty Title and Trust and the Shoring up of Commonwealth and Lawyers Title. (November 28, 2008)[While a small Ohio title insurer was defaulting on coverage, Fidelity reinsured all of the policies issued by Lawyer’s and Commonwealth as a show of financial soundness.]

LandAmerica Update. (December 20, 2008)[Merger proceeds apace with expected approval by the Bankruptcy Court on December 22.]

LandAmerica 1031: The Missing Link Lost but Then Found! (January 6, 2009) [A reader told me that the link at the end of my first post to a LandAmerica 1031 website post, warning against the potential for 1031 agent’s default, had been pulled. I recovered and reposted it.]

FNF Takes Some Heat on the Commonwealth-Lawyers Acquisition (January 15, 2009) [Fascinating account of how the Fidelity PR conference call got out of hand and revealed that the job of bringing Commonwealth and Lawyers into the Fidelity family would be a difficult one.]

LandAmerica 1031 Pingbacks v.the Zombie Bots. [I received almost as many pingbacks (14) from 1031 companies to my Missing Link post as I get in zombie bots on a busy day.]

A few of my favorites:

Ashley Anger is on the Loose! (February 3)

Poor Richard on Courts. ( December 13, 2008)

The Original Blogger: Poor Richard Still Has It. ( December 16, 2008)

One Person . . . One of a Kind . . . a Force. (January 17, 2009)

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Welcome

CLIFF TUTTLE has been a Pennsylvania lawyer for over 45 years and (inter alia) is a real estate litigator and legal writer. The posts in this blog are intended to provide general information about legal topics of interest to lawyers and consumers with a Pittsburgh and Western Pennsylvania focus. However, this information does not constitute legal advice and there is no lawyer-client relationship created when you read this blog. You are encouraged to leave comments but be aware that posted comments can be read by others. If you wish to contact me in privacy, please use the Contact Form located immediately below this message. I will reply promptly and in strict confidence.

Pittsburgh Legal Back Talk

Legal topics of interest to lawyers and consumers with a Pittsburgh and Western Pennsylvania focus.

1410 Posts and Counting

Categories

Conquering Law School in One Easy Lesson.

Fair and Biased — Strike That — Balanced.

Backtalk Requested: Bonusteria.

New Government Website on Refinance and Modification: Making Home Affordable.

Twittering away the Idle Hours on Jury Duty: Forget It.

Post-signing Attorney Review of Real Estate Contracts Is an Idea Worth Importing into Pennsylvania

Read to me, O Robot!

Adams Drafting Addresses the Art of Writing Contracts

Q: How can a Property be Disruptive? A: When the Dog Gets Loose.

Pittsburgh Legal Back Talk Turns 100 (Posts)

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