A township lawyer in New Jersey is facing the wrath of an animal rights group after he used the C-word to describe one of its demonstrators. Lawyer Richard Shackleton now faces an ethics grievance and a privately filed criminal complaint as a result of the Feb. 20 dustup outside the…
A comedian has won a lawsuit filed against her claiming jokes about her mother-in-law and other members of her husband’s family were defamatory. A federal judge in New Jersey ruled Friday that the jokes by stand-up comedian Sunda Croonquist were statements of opinion protected by the First Amendment, the Associated…
A 120-lawyer New Jersey-based business firm is venturing away from the East Coast to plant its flag in Texas. Cole Schotz Meisel Forman & Leonard is opening a new office in Fort Worth with three bankruptcy lawyers from the dissolving WarnerStevens firm, reports the Dallas Business Journal. “The addition of…
Because a defense expert retained by a New Jersey law firm consulted for 15 minutes in 2007 with the plaintiff’s expert, before suit was filed in a legal malpractice matter, Bressler, Amery & Ross is conflicted out of continuing to represent the defendant, a state-court judge has ruled. The Bressler…
A New Jersey defense lawyer and former prosecutor accused of participating in a variety of criminal acts up to and including murder will not face three racketeering charges, a federal judge in Newark has decided. Paul Bergrin still faces 36 other counts, reports the New Jersey Law Journal in an…
In a decision that is expected to help shape the definition of journalist, a New Jersey appellate court ruled Thursday that a blogger who wrote comments online about a software company that supports online pornography sites is not a journalist covered by the state’s shield law. The court likened Shellee…
A federal judge in New Jersey is giving a former lawyer for Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom a chance to prove that it was her idea to use thalidomide as a cancer drug. Chappaqua, N.Y., pharmaceutical lawyer Beth Jacobson claims in a $300 million lawsuit that she gave Celgene…
Disbarred in New Jersey in 2004 for taking money from another law firm (it was later repaid), ex-attorney Charles Epstein has been put on probation for five years for stealing $12,500 from an Edison firm while he worked there. He pleaded guilty earlier this year to third-degree theft and admitted…
The Da Vinci Code was a public relations disaster for the Catholic organization Opus Dei, with its portrayal of a fictional, murdering monk. A lay member of the organization, Seton Hall law professor John Coverdale, told the Washington Post that a goal of Opus Dei is to offer Christians a…
Law student Brian Govern says he was searching for law books on Amazon.com when a suggestion popped up that he might like a particular T-shirt. Govern wrote a tongue-in-cheek review, setting off like-minded reviews and boosting the shirt’s popularity so that it is now one of Amazon’s hottest selling items,…
Updated: Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan Jr. has not exactly faded into oblivion since his 1997 death, having been memorialized in busts, buildings and, last year, a U.S. postage stamp.
The New Jersey Supreme Court has ruled that attorney-client privilege protects e-mail discussing a possible employment lawsuit that was transmitted on the corporate laptop of the would-be plaintiff. Sending and receiving personal, password-protected e-mails on a corporate laptop did not eliminate the attorney-client privilege that protected them, the court ruled…
Larry Loigman has a general practice in New Jersey. But the 55-year-old Middletown practitioner is best-known for what amounts to volunteer work litigating against local government, reports the Asbury Park Press. From alleged fiscal mismanagement by government officials to illegal duck crossings, Loigman doesn’t hesitate to step in and file…
Two New Jersey judges have been reprimanded for making remarks in the courtroom that touched on race, ethnicity or physical disabilities. One of the judges, James Citta of Ocean County, ridiculed a defendant’s English-speaking skills and compared another to O.J. Simpson, according to the New Jersey Law Journal, NJ.com and…
A journalist who was embedded with his three-man unit during the Iraq war to write an article for Playboy, wound up making him look bad, a soldier says, by reworking it into a screenplay for The Hurt Locker that falsely portrayed him as a “messed up” bomb disposal officer. In…
