As filming of the second season of “Jersey Shore” continues, footage from the first season has been the topic of discussion in a New Jersey courtroom.

A Superior Court judge on Monday allowed a lawsuit to proceed alleging the show’s producers “engaged in a ‘criminal enterprise’ by profiting from showing fights that cast members deliberately provoked,” AP reports.

The decision came after Judge Joseph R. Foster dismissed part of the lawsuit Friday that tried to stop MTV from distributing DVDs and video clips of the first season. The judge held the three plaintiffs were not shown in a false light because their faces were blurred out on the show. The next hearing in the case is set for May 28.

NOTE: If you’re not a “Jersey Shore” fan, you can stop reading right now. Otherwise, you’ve been warned.

The plaintiffs, not surprisingly, were all involved in incidents with Ronnie. Two were the married couple  who engaged in the back-and-forth with Ronnie and Sammi on the boardwalk, which ended with Ronnie and the husband wrestling. (You can see part of the fight in the video accompanying The Asbury Park Press story.) The third plaintiff is the guy Ronnie knocked unconscious with his infamous, “That’s one shot, kid! That’s one shot!”, which put Ronnie in jail for a night.

In other Jersey Shore legal news, here’s one situation The Situation shouldn’t find himself in anytime soon.

We ran an item in our On the Move section yesterday on land use lawyer Erica Leatham moving from the small Rockville firm Meyers, Eisler & Leatham to the Bethesda office of Ballard Spahr. This caught my eye because I recalled that Leatham was featured a couple of years back in a Legal Times story about young female lawyers who were fed up with big law. Leatham talked about having left Holland & Knight to help start what was then Stark, Meyers, Eisler & Leatham because she was miserable with the pace at the large firm and felt it was very difficult to balance work and family there. She told the Legal Times reporter that she was working just as hard at Stark Meyers, but at least she could set her own schedule.

When I saw that Leatham had gone back to big law, I was curious to find out why, so I called her. She reiterated that life at a small firm was extremely busy. Instead of working exclusively on legal work, though, she had to take care of administrative tasks, too. What’s more, land use is not an area of the law well-suited to working in a small shop, she said. Leatham said she isn’t sure how her schedule and workload will work out at Ballard, but she can only hope that since her last stint at a big firm, she has become “more efficient and more practical about what I choose to do and not to do.”

She said there is “no good answer” to the problem of unrealistic work hours for ambitious attorneys who also want to have a family. “I thought maybe I’d found it,” she said.