My firm, Shartsis, Friese & Ginsburg LLP (SFG), San Francisco, is a mid-size law firm that specializes in litigation, real estate, business transactions and other commercial areas of law. Prior to 1999, before I began working here, our firm used a calendar system that required manual calculation and research of court rules and statutes, which was extremely time consuming.
In the past several years, new technology, including video evidence presentation systems, video conferencing and electronic transcription systems, have been installed in federal and state courts across the nation. Courtrooms today vary a great deal not only in size and layout, but especially with regard to the types of technology made available. All of these factors significantly affect the presentation strategy a lawyer will use during a trial. When brainstorming presentation strategy, courtroom presenters consider the most subtle factors including, the amount of ambient light, the distance and line of sight between counsel and trier of fact and the location of monitors and screens. Most lawyers agree that it is a great advantage to argue a case in a familiar setting; something as trivial as showing a witness where he or she will sit in the courtroom prior to trial can be important.
Cases of interest to you and your practice.
You're right ' it can't possibly be tax time again, and yet ' here we are, wondering if each Easter egg constitutes a taxable capital gain. Tax time brings special problems for taxpayers affected by divorce. Should your clients file separately or jointly? Which spouse gets to claim the exemptions for the children?
Take a second look at your prenuptial agreements. Do they adequately protect retirement accounts from the reaches of ERISA? Chances are they do not. ERISA has specific requirements to effectuate a spousal waiver of rights to a participant's retirement benefits.
The U.S. Treasury Department has promulgated a final tax regulation intended to remove the uncertainty surrounding the tax treatment of stock redemptions that resulted from recent case law. Treasury Decision 9035, 68 Fed. Reg. 1534 (Jan. 10). The final regulation adopts and expands upon the proposed regulations that were issued by the Department in August 2001.
When attorneys ask mental health experts' opinions, the experience is often frustrating, and the experts are less helpful than the attorneys had hoped. In an earlier article, we outlined the qualification and background of mental health experts. In this follow-up, we explore some problems that arise between experts and attorneys ' and offer some solutions.
Recent cases of interest to your practice.
The traditional adversarial system continues to draw criticism when aggressively applied to family law cases. Apart from the inefficiencies, impracticalities and associated costs of strongly competitive approaches, the reasons for abandoning these poorly conceived methods of dispute resolution should be obvious.
A suit to force New Jersey to appoint lawyers for indigent parents before jailing them for skipped child support belongs in state court, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit has ruled. The plaintiffs had contended that Family Part judges in New Jersey violated their civil rights by failing to inform them of their right to counsel and to have counsel appointed for them based on their indigency, and that, because they remain in arrears on their child support obligations, there is a likelihood that they will again be deprived of these rights because they will be obligated to appear in future contempt hearings.
