Being a 9-year-old can be tough. Sometimes you have to pick up the toys in your room. Sometimes you have to solve multiplication tables for homework. And sometimes you have to go in for jury duty.

Well, that’s the way it was for Cape Cod third-grader Jacob Clark, who got a summons for jury duty in the mail, even though you are only eligible for jury duty after turning 18.

His first reaction?

“I was like, ‘What’s a jury duty?’” Clark, who lives in Yarmouth, Mass., told the Cape Cod Times.

His second reaction, according to his grandmother, Deborah Clark?

“He said, ‘I don’t want to go! I don’t want to go!’” she said.

And who could blame him? So, Clark’s dad called over to the jury commission office to get to the bottom of it. Apparently the state had his birth date wrong. Someone had typed in 1982 instead of 2002.

Speaking of slips in recordkeeping . . .

A Nebraska lawyer practiced law without a license for 12 years before anyone noticed.

Read the rest of this entry »

If you love our sister blog, Generation JD, now’s your chance to show it. And I do mean NOW.  The ABA Journal is compiling its annual list of 100 Best Law Blogs and is taking nominations through Sept. 9. As in Friday, or (more to the point) tomorrow.

Here’s what the ABA says it is looking for:

• We’re only interested in blawgs in which the author is recognizable as a lawyer or law student in the vast majority of his or her posts.
• The blawg should be written with an audience of lawyers or law students—rather than potential clients or potential law students—in mind.
• The majority of the blawg’s content should be unique to the blawg and not cross-posted or cut and pasted from other publications.
• We are not interested in blawgs that more or less exist to promote the author’s products and services.

And what about On the Record? Well, thank you so much for asking (she said, blushing), but half of our bloggers are journalists rather than lawyers. That means we wouldn’t meet the first of those four criteria. I think you’ll agree, though, that Generation JD is on all fours (har).

So show some blawg love today: Click here to nominate Generation JD.  You will need its URL, which is http://thedailyrecord.com/generationjd/

Many thanks!

P.S. Talk about your generation gap: Of the three lawyers on The Daily Record’s editorial staff, two of them (JDs 1983 and 1991) got the “all fours” reference. The third (JD 2006) had never heard the expression.

Happy Monday!

• Dawn Bowie touts the use of “parent coordinators” in custody cases.
• If you (or, more precisely, Above the Law’s David Lat) eat the cookies from a hotel minibar, then replace them with the exact same cookies you bought down the street for less money, is that ethical?
• Is this good advice for gay big-firm lawyers on coming out?
• The federal government needs to stop letting the ABA accredit law schools and figure out how to control the number of lawyers flowing into a saturated market, a Washington lawyer writes. HT: Temporary Attorney.
• Check out legal humor blog Lowering the Bar‘s nominees for lawsuit of the year, argument of the year, lawyer of the year and other “of the year”s. Lots of laughs here.

Are you a Maryland lawyer or willing to become one?

Are you a Maryland resident or willing to become one?

Are you in good standing?

Do you have 10 years of progressively responsible active experience in the practice of law?

Did at least two of those years involve prosecutoral or similar legal experience before administrative or disciplinary agencies, as well as supervisory experience over other lawyers and a budget?

If you answered yes to all of these questions, you qualify for a $115,000-$130,000-a-year job that has been held by the same person since 1981.

Oh, one other thing: You must be willing to prosecute Maryland attorneys who violate the Rules of Professional Conduct.

Yes, for the first time in nearly 30 years, Maryland’s Attorney Grievance Commission is in need of a new bar counsel.

Melvin Hirshman, who has been the chief prosecutor of wayward lawyers since 1981, has announced he will retire on June 30.

Linda H. Lamone, who chairs the AGC, said the panel will conduct “as wide a search as we can” for a successor to Hirshman. The commission will post ads on the websites of the Maryland Judiciary, the American Bar Association and the Maryland State Bar Association, among other places, Lamone added.

The AGC will screen the applicants. The applicant or applicants who make the commission’s cut will be submitted to the Court of Appeals for its final approval, Lamone said.

Applications are due by 5 p.m. Jan. 4 at the Maryland Judiciary’s human-resources department in Annapolis.

Any takers?

Before two federal environmental lawyers talked about recent government victories during Friday’s ABA section meeting, Bruce Gelber discussed a recent government loss in the Supreme Court involving Superfund sites.

In May, the high court ruled Shell Oil Co. was not liable as a party that arranged to dispose of hazardous materials under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act at a contaminated California site.

Gelber, chief of the Justice Department’s Environmental Enforcement Section, said the ruling will not impact many other Superfund cases due to an “atypical fact pattern, including the contaminant not being waste or byproduct.”

“The rumor of CERCLA’s demise has been greatly exaggerated,” he said. 

 The high court also upheld a ruling that apportioned liability to another company connected to the groundwater contamination. Gelber said the government does not dispute the divisibility rule, only its application here.

The goverment will continue to resist divisibility in Superfund cases where it believes the harm is “not theoretically apportioned,” he said.

Gelber concluded with some advice for the private practice lawyers in the audience.

“Tell your clients to create a paper trail that shows you undertook some steps to show how dangerous it can be to handle your material,” he said.

ON THE COVER: Ethics and the Internet – The World Wide Web can be a great marketing tool, directing potential clients to an attorney at the click of a mouse. But a nationwide complaint alleges many lawyers using the technology might be violating ethical rules.  

It will be legal-acronym heaven in Baltimore this week, as Charm City hosts the American Bar Association’s Section of Environment, Energy and Resources’ annual fall meeting. Hundreds of lawyers are expected to discuss RCRA, CERCLA, EPCRA, FIFRA, NEPA, etc.

Breaking News: Four partners leave Whiteford, Taylor & Preston for Wright, Constable & Skeen; public defenders will meet with a board member who voted to fire their former leader Nancy S. Forster; Greetings & Readings settles a four-year legal dispute with its former landlord; and another round of litigation tees off in an ongoing dispute over a golf course development venture.

Over the defense’s objection, a federal judge in Baltimore allows DNA collected from a gunshot victim’s bloody clothes in 2000 to be used as evidence in his trial for a 2004 murder.

Verdicts & Settlements: Prince George’s County jury awards $1.3 million in wrongful-death case after deliberating for only 45 minutes.

Saying it beats driving, attorney H. Mark Stichel regularly bikes the more than 14 miles between his Owings Mill home and his Baltimore office.

Stay up to date with the Law Digest, which includes cases from the Maryland Court of Appeals and the Maryland Court of Special Appeals.

The American Bar Association has made good on its threat to sue if the FTC didn’t exempt lawyers from its Red Flags Rule, Kimberly Atkins writes for our sister paper, Lawyers USA.  The lawsuit was filed today in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C.

The rule is designed to prevent identity theft from creditors and financial institutions, but, as our own Steve Lash reported, the FTC delayed implementation for a third time last month. The current effective date is Nov. 1.

A prosecutor’s ethical duty to disclose information to the defense exceeds his or her constitutional duty, according to a new ABA Ethics Opinion. So — if the Supreme Court rejects your Brady challenge, take heart: there’s always Bar Counsel.

Greetings from Chicago and the American Bar Association’s Annual Meeting through a Maryland-focused lens!

First, just let me say, the public art and architecture is jaw-dropping, the deep-dish pizza is jaw-inspiring, and the water in Lake Michigan — well, I haven’t been in yet, but I hear it’s jaw-chilling, even in the height of summer.

Speaking of jawing, let me just give you a flavor for what’s on offer here.

One panel this morning – Hot Topics and Recent Developments in Public Corruption Investigations & Government Ethics – seemed particularly apt in light of the (re)indictments handed up this week in the Baltimore City Hall corruption cases.

Moderator Patrick M. Collins, who successfully prosecuted former Illinois Gov. George Ryan and was U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald’s corruption unit supervisor before going into private practice, kicked off the session with a video montage of seemingly endless local news coverage of the prosecution of this state’s notoriously corrupt politicos. It included a clip from The Daily Show in which host Jon Stewart, with statistical backing, claims a person is more likely to go to jail if he is an Illinois governor than if he is a murderer.

The ensuing discussion centered on the botched prosecution of U.S. Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, the recent high-profile cases here in Chicago and how prosecutors and judges should handle sticky issues like turning over Brady material and interaction with the media in such cases.

The panel unfortunately did not include any current prosecutors – the DoJ and Fitzgerald’s office were invited but declined – but nothing else about the panelists was wanting: Ed Genson, who represented Rod Blagojevich; Robert Cary, who represented Stevens; U.S. District Judges Paul L. Friedman (D.C.) and Amy St. Eve (Ill.); and Abner J. Mikva, the former five-term Congressman and D.C. Circuit Judge, were all in attendance. (Friedman and Mikva are shown in the photo above.)

Cary laid into the prosecutors from the DoJ’s public integrity unit for withholding exculpatory evidence in the Stevens case, and praised an FBI whistleblower, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and the presiding judge, Emmett Sullivan, as heroes. That kicked off a debate on Brady v. Maryland.

“I don’t think prosecutors understand their Brady obligations,” Judge Friedman said. “Judges should not accept representations that, ‘We know our obligations and we’re meeting them.’”

Friedman went on to say that while the appellate standard might be whether the information is material, “it sure as hell shouldn’t be the standard the prosecutor applies.”

“That’s looking at it pretrial through the wrong end of the telescope,” he said, a stance with which Mikva seemed to agree.

Cary and Genson support going one step further: an open-file policy. And Judge St. Eve suggested the safest course of action is to ask the judge.

Mikva would also probably approve of at least one aspect of Maryland State Prosecutor Robert A. Rohrbaugh’s conduct over the past few years in his pursuit of Baltimore Mayor Sheila A. Dixon, City Councilwoman Helen L. Holton and developers Ronald H. Lipscomb and John Paterakis. “I do not like…the prosecutor trying his case, and particularly tainting the jury pool, with a big press conference,” Mikva said, calling the prosecutor’s duty to inform the public “nonsense” given the presumptive openness of the courts. But, he admitted, “I’m not sure we can do anything about it.”

And as for the jury’s exposure to public information, all agreed that jurors conducting outside research is a big problem, especially in the age of the Internet, and that establishing a rapport with them that makes them feel invested in doing things right is the only way to check that tendency.

“Do you Twitter, Eddie?” Rollins quipped to his longtime rival.

“I don’t even know what that word means,” Genson responded to laughter.

What do you think these lawyers and judges would say about this year’s action in the City Hall cases?

– BRENDAN KEARNEY