Designer knock-offs might be bad for business, but blatant designer knock-offs are always good for a laugh. A Rolax watch? A Pollo shirt? There’s more funny there than you can fit into a Louis Veeton bag.

Which brings us to a story from Georgia about counterfeit Air Jordans, the iconic Nike brand. An officer pulled over a car and noticed the smell of marijuana. A search of the car yielded 78 boxes of Air Jordans.

Except the serial number on the tongues of the shoes didn’t match the one on the box. And the Nike logos peeled off.

And because Michael Jordan’s hand had six fingers.

The two women in the car have been charged “for having forged or counterfeited goods,” according to a local news report.

No word if the women will attempt the “Antonio Alfonseca” defense.

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Apologies in advance for the ALL CAPS to come, but I was forwarded a press release that makes me want to SCREAM.

Seems there is a company based in Oklahoma that has created GripeAtMe.com, which is pretty much what it sounds like. You pay money TO YELL at a complete stranger about whatever you want. If you can complain about it, a “complaint specialist” will listen. (Yup, a COMPLAINT SPECIALIST.)

One of their sample calls is from a man who asks why women tend to “get more” in divorce and custody cases. His theory? The women’s liberation movement. Bet they didn’t teach you THAT in law school.

But wait — there’s more! You can also ask the specialist to take the opposite view of yours. That’s right, you can pay to ARGUE with a COMPLETE STRANGER.

The website offers a few suggested subject areas, including culture and “go green” (quotation marks are theirs, not mine).

“Sometimes, it is nice to have someone there just to listen while you decompress about all that life has handed to you,” the site states.

Thanks, but I have those people already. They’re called FRIENDS AND FAMILY. I’d rather spend the $10 on beer with them than calling you.

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On a day Baltimore (and beyond) remembers William Donald Schaefer, perhaps it’s fitting a comprehensive, statistical report about the city he loved was released.

The verdict of the Baltimore Neighborhood Alliance-Jacobs France Institute at the University of Baltimore? The city is “right-sizing.” I’ll let Matthew Kachura, the author of “Vital Signs 9,” explain:

“Right-sizing” means that the city’s expectations are in line with what can and should be expected of it. Baltimore’s population is not going to bounce back to its post-war highs, and the kind of industry boom we saw here in the 1940s and ’50s is not going to return. Instead, we’re showing resiliency by strengthening our neighborhoods in ways that improve the quality of life, whether it’s a program to rehab vacant houses or an effort to encourage high school students to graduate on time. In an era of limited resources, the city has managed to stay viable by these and dozens of other strategic investments. Based on what we’re seeing in the data, Baltimore has been experiencing some improvements during these tough times.

Not sure how the former mayor would feel about that assessment. Nevertheless, here are some of the numbers from the report:

• The city’s population was more than 635,000 in 2009, down 2.4 percent from 2000.
• The number of homes in foreclosure jumped 60 percent between 2008 and 2009, and the total is double the number from 2005.
• The teen birthrate fell from 83.3 teens out of 1,000 in 2000 to 60.1 teens per 1,000 in 2009.
• Median household income increased nearly 30 percent between 2000 and 2009, although it fell between 2008 and 2009 to just under $39,000.
• The violent crime rate fell, from 26.2 violent offenses per 1,000 people in 2000 to 15.3 in 2009.
• Juvenile arrests on drug charges declined between 2000 and 2009, as did the number of high school students who dropped out of high school.

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Frank Gorman of Gorman & Williams was in Las Vegas last week for the annual Consumer Electronics Show. On Friday, the intellectual property lawyer offered an overview of the expo. Today, he provides a list of gadgets and products that grabbed his attention.

CES 2011 ended Sunday. More than 130,000 registered attendees walked through 1.5 million square feet of exhibit space looking at a wide range of consumer electronic products. While it is impossible to see everything CES has to offer, each person comes away with a sense of what’s hot, what’s not, what’s unique, and when to pass.

1. LG’s Smart TV. This wall-mounted, flat-screen, high-definition TV incorporates all the streaming entertainment and social networking features of your PC or laptop. The TV has a USB and RJ45 ethernet ports. You can download apps, send e-mails, stream a Netflix-provided movie, etc.

No keyboard is provided, but you could use a wireless keyboard or use an app that makes your iPhone keyboard work on the TV. There were several CES exhibitors promoting these “Smart TVs,” and this term has become generic. Check out LG’s offerings here.

Meanwhile, what happened to 3D TV?  It was the star of CES 2011 and was promoted again this year, especially by Sony, but 3D has not taken off the tarmac.

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Frank Gorman of Gorman & Williams is in Las Vegas for the annual Consumer Electronics Show. It’s Gorman’s first time at CES since 2007, although he attended for most of the Aughts.

The Baltimore lawyer says he goes “to see and keep up with technology,” which helps in his intellectual property practice. He is also an enthusiastic advocate of courtroom technology.

Gorman has graciously offered to write a few dispatches from Vegas. Today is an overview of CES; Monday he’ll have a look at some of the cool gadgets that are the hallmark of the event.

Gadgets aside, the big-picture story at CES 2011 is the increasing competition among the major players in the industry as they use existing technologies to create new products and services.

CES 2011 is big and sprawling, as in previous years. There are more than 2,700 exhibitors with booths in the Las Vegas Convention Center touting an incredible variety of consumer electronic products and services. There is a full array of conferences, presentations, and keynote speakers. There are thousands of registered attendees. Lots of deals will be made. In short, the excitement in Las Vegas this week is the event itself.

CES this year, however, is not a showcase for breakthrough technologies that permit consumers to do things they could not do before. In previous years, the excitement came from dramatic changes: broadband replaces dial-up; streaming digital content from its source eliminates the need for CDs and DVDs; Voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP) ends the monopoly of keyboarding and permits consumers to communicate over the Internet by voice; wireless frees consumers from cords.

Instead, CES 2011 is the arena for the competing products that have resulted from high-level market competition in the industry. Software giants Google, Microsoft, Apple are each innovating and maneuvering to gain dominance in markets previously dominated by the others.

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The Huffington Post reported last month that the Susan G. Komen for the Cure has filed trademark infringement lawsuits against other charities that use “for the cure” in their names. The story alleges Komen spends a $1 million a year in donor funds on such litigation.

The foundation has more than 200 registered trademarks, and I didn’t even know you could protect a phrase like “for the cure,” hon.

Even though the HuffPost story was published in December, I first heard about it Monday night from Stephen Colbert. Enjoy his take here.

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Judging by the reader responses to news that the word “Hon” has been trademarked, some Baltimoreans might have a new name for Cafe Hon owner Denise Whiting: Atilla.

The great John McIntyre explains why this touches a nerve:

What leads to the raised voices is the question of ownership of language. And with that question come all the overtones of social class, local history and culture, and personal likes and dislikes that crowd in on discussions of language and ensure that such discussions will never be neutral or unemotional.

Coincidentally, The New York Times had a story yesterday about athletes trademarking their catchphrases. I did not know that Nike owns the right to the name “LeBron.”

The lesson? I better call a lawyer now about the legal rights for “pulling a Danny.”

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A “new normal” continues to take root at law firms, according to a survey showing increases in the use of alternative fee arrangements.

Almost three in 10 in-house lawyers said they used more alternative billing arrangements in 2010, and 53 percent said they used strictly flat-fee billing on a case or project, up from 48 percent in 2009.

It’s a revealing peek into the state of the economy, and while it doesn’t mean the death of the billable hour it does underscore the ongoing debate about it — we’ve written about it here, here, here and here in recent months.

The Association of Corporate Counsel and The American Lawyer magazine do say, however, that the results of their survey show a reluctance to revert back to “the way we used to do it” when it comes to paying for legal counsel and services.

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Two items of interest from the November Issue of the ABA Journal (at least to me):

• The cover story is about how a 33-year-old solo practitioner in Cleveland named David Mills will be arguing his first case before the U.S. Supreme Court on Nov. 1. The story provides a blueprint of sorts for building an appellate law practice. To say Mills was a longshot is putting it kindly:

“His law office is located in a spare bedroom in his apartment. He has no staff, except for his part-time paralegal, Elisabeth, who goes by another title: Mom. His client, for payment, offered him the title of her Jeep and made him an afghan.”

• Some people aspire to have buildings named after them. Me, I’d rather follow the lead of Bruce Freitag, who had a portable toilet named after him. Freitag served as longtime counsel for Porta-John Industries; the Freitag Comfort Station has hardwood floors, a skylight, working sink and ceramic toilet that flushes. The company’s CEO said they named it after the “classiest guy” they knew.

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There’s alternative billing, as my colleague Danielle Ulman wrote about in Monday’s paper, and then there just might be Glenn C. Lewis’ alleged billing practices.

Lewis had days with as many as 71 billable hours, and in a 16-month period in 2003 and 2004, he billed clients for “3,620 hours, or an average of 226 hours per month, or 7.4 hours a day, 365 days per year,” according to a story in Sunday’s Washington Post.

Lewis told the Post the 71 hours in a day billing was “block billing,” where he entered his hours for many days at once, and that he works night and weekends.

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