Lang, Richert & Patch is proud to recognize its 2010 Super Lawyers and Rising Stars. Every year, the San Francisco publication, Law and Politics puts together a listing of outstanding lawyers in more than seventy practice areas. These attorneys are recognized for their uncompromising work and professional achievement. Only upon being nominated by their peers and evaluated by an independent source in a multi-phase process, do attorneys qualify for Super Lawyer honors. Top up-and-coming attorneys in the state who are 40 years old or younger, or who have been practicing for 10 years or less, and who are peer nominated and reviewed may qualify for Rising Star honors. Only 5 percent of lawyers in each state make the published list of Super Lawyers while no more than 2.5 percent are named as Rising Stars.
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Fresno Attorneys receive 2010 Super Lawyer and Rising Star Honors
Fresno Attorneys receive Super Lawyer and Rising Star Honors
Super Lawyers and Rising Stars are honorary titles bestowed upon a select group of the most distinguished attorneys by the San Francisco publication, Law and Politics. Lang, Richert & Patch proudly recognizes its 2009 Super Lawyers and Rising Stars. Attorneys earn this distinction after being evaluated in a multi-phase process that involves peer nomination and third-party research, which rigorously evaluates the nominees. Renowned authorities esteem this complex process of selecting top lawyers and deem it legitimate. As a result of its selection criteria and in-depth research process, Super Lawyers and Rising Stars are among the most noteworthy, if not best, client representatives in the state and leaders in the legal community.
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“Women Helping Women” Luncheon A Great Success!
By Ana de Alba
Board member, Fresno County Women Lawyers
A call to action heard loud and clear in the legal community was answered last month during the Fresno County Women Lawyers’ “Women Helping Women” luncheon. The luncheon featured speakers Jenny Bates, Director of The Hacienda Drug/Alcohol Rehabilitation Center for Women and Deborah Torres, Director of Samaritan Women. The speakers shared stories of how their organizations help women who have been incarcerated get back on their feet. Those attending the luncheon were asked to donate career clothing, toiletries, postage stamps, and bus tokens to help these wonderful organizations improve the lives of the women they serve. Generating donations for both organizations, FCWL members took up the call to action and made the luncheon an amazing success.
General Counsel to Employees: Think Before You Send
Katheryn Hayes Tucker
Fulton County Daily Report
E-discovery rules have caused in-house counsel to take a harder line with some of the e-mails that workers think are private
“Don’t put this in writing, but … ” Those are the opening words of an e-mail that got the writer’s company in legal hot water. And there are plenty more where that came from.
“This is off the record,” started the e-mail that in fact put it all on the record.
How about this one? “We may be in breach of contract, and here’s why.”
These examples of troublesome e-mails general counsel say they’ve run across don’t include the countless off color so-called jokes forwarded to contact lists of colleagues, interested or not, or links to Web sites that are definitely not part of a corporate job description.
Virtual Worlds, Real Litigation
Roger Parloff
CNNMoney.com
June 1, 2007 – Though the U.S. Supreme Court cut back this week on Americans’ rights to sue for equal pay in the real-world workplace, our rights to sue for wrongs visited upon our imaginary selves in imaginary game worlds made some modestly countervailing gains.
“This has been one of the most important weeks in US virtual-world law in memory, perhaps ever,” says S. Gregory Boyd, an intellectual property attorney and games law expert at Kenyon & Kenyon.
US Senate Introduces Strong Privacy Bill
by Vidura Panditaratne
Press Esc
February 7, 2007: US Senators yesterday introduced a bill that better protects the privacy of citizens’ personal information in the face of data security breaches across the country.
Senators Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) co-sponsored the Personal Data Privacy and Security Act, which was first introduced in 2005 with co-sponsorship from Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) following serious data breaches at ChoicePoint and LexisNexis.
Senator Specter, who is the Ranking Member on the panel, is co-sponsoring the bill again this Congress.
Since then breaches at several other firms and within state and federal governments have exposed millions of Americans to identity theft by leaking or losing their personal data, which included names, addresses, and sometimes Social Security numbers.
FRCP Amendments: Discovery of Electronically Stored Information
By Christy M. Thornton
Lang, Richert and Patch
Introduction
Effective December 1, 2006, amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure place new obligations on attorneys using electronically stored information (“ESI”) in federal courts. The amendments force parties to address, early in the case, issues of how to best preserve, collect, and produce ESI.
The amendments were created in response to recognition that ESI raises different issues from conventional paper discovery. Characterized by an exponentially greater volume than hard copy documents, ESI presents a substantial risk of inadvertent production of privileged material. Preservation of ESI also raises an issue, since computer information, unlike paper, is dynamic; computers continuously overwrite, delete, and change stored information. In addition, ESI may become incomprehensible when separated from the system that created it. In response to these problems, the proposed amendments require counsel to address ESI issues from the outset of litigation.