Thread of legal hubbub

tifosi77
Posts: 51456
Joined: Wed Mar 25, 2015 1:07 pm
Location: Batuu

Thread of legal hubbub

Postby tifosi77 » Thu Oct 21, 2021 1:49 pm

This also goes to the discussion we've had in the shooty thread about how you go about informing a cop you have a weapon in the car.

dodint
Posts: 59088
Joined: Wed Mar 25, 2015 1:39 pm
Location: Cheer up, bіtch!
Contact:

Thread of legal hubbub

Postby dodint » Thu Oct 21, 2021 2:43 pm

"I'm a CCW holder and there is a firearm in the door panel" is what has worked for me. Every time it's been completely uneventful; never has a cop shouted "CAN YOU PROVE IT" and arrested me. :lol:

MalkinIsMyHomeboy
Posts: 29109
Joined: Wed Mar 25, 2015 1:45 pm
Location: (=^_^=)

Thread of legal hubbub

Postby MalkinIsMyHomeboy » Thu Oct 21, 2021 2:56 pm

the dude's name is Basel Soukaneh. I'm guessing he's not white and I wonder if that's a reason why the cop was being a ******

Tomas
Posts: 3444
Joined: Sun Apr 05, 2015 10:28 am

Thread of legal hubbub

Postby Tomas » Fri Dec 10, 2021 1:26 pm

Would any 5AF legal experts care to comment whether Peloton (PTON) has a potential claim against HBO? PTON stock price has declined dramatically over the last two days. Partially because of an analyst downgrade, but partially because HBO showed one of the main characters on one of their shows dying after exercising on PTON bike.

As much as I enjoy the spectacle (and irrationality of people who do not understand that hard exercise can easily kill you, especially when you are 65+), I think it was a dickish move on the part of HBO, which may cost PTON employees and investors big bucks.

So, I am wondering why nobody would show AA, Delta, UA or any real airline crashing one of their planes in a fictional movie, but why HBO could get away with putting PTON product in a bad light (especially since the situation could have been so preventable - by simply showing a fictional exercise company)...

dodint
Posts: 59088
Joined: Wed Mar 25, 2015 1:39 pm
Location: Cheer up, bіtch!
Contact:

Thread of legal hubbub

Postby dodint » Fri Dec 10, 2021 1:28 pm

Either way, PTON is a discount right now. But I'm stuck in an airline stock, go figure.

Shyster
Posts: 13034
Joined: Wed Mar 25, 2015 6:08 pm
Location: Nullius in verba

Thread of legal hubbub

Postby Shyster » Fri Dec 10, 2021 5:31 pm

There's no cause of action recognized anywhere in the US for "your TV show makes our product look bad." If there were, imagine how many gun companies could sue because, for example, the Bad Guy in the movie is shown carrying one of their company's products.

MalkinIsMyHomeboy
Posts: 29109
Joined: Wed Mar 25, 2015 1:45 pm
Location: (=^_^=)

Thread of legal hubbub

Postby MalkinIsMyHomeboy » Mon Dec 13, 2021 1:23 pm

saw a news story that Kim Kardashian passed Cali’s “baby bar” exam. How does it different from the bar and it’s gotta be pretty easy if she can do it, right?

dodint
Posts: 59088
Joined: Wed Mar 25, 2015 1:39 pm
Location: Cheer up, bіtch!
Contact:

Thread of legal hubbub

Postby dodint » Mon Dec 13, 2021 1:35 pm

It's an extra test people in California have to take when they are trying to take the bar exam without going to an accredited law school. It's a competency check at the first year law school level and doesn't mean anything beyond fulfilling the requirement.

If someone with her resources couldn't pass that would be really bad.

willeyeam
Posts: 39523
Joined: Wed Mar 25, 2015 12:49 pm
Location: hodgepodge of nothingness

Thread of legal hubbub

Postby willeyeam » Mon Dec 13, 2021 2:14 pm

It wasn't easy or handed to her, k?


Tomas
Posts: 3444
Joined: Sun Apr 05, 2015 10:28 am

Thread of legal hubbub

Postby Tomas » Mon Dec 13, 2021 2:45 pm

It wasn't easy or handed to her, k?
Since I read somewhere that she failed her first THREE attempts,... :)

tifosi77
Posts: 51456
Joined: Wed Mar 25, 2015 1:07 pm
Location: Batuu

Thread of legal hubbub

Postby tifosi77 » Mon Dec 13, 2021 2:45 pm

This is the legal equivalent of a GED, and it was her 4th attempt.

The full proper CA Bar exam is considered one of the hardest tests of any kind in the world. The most recent exam (July) only had 53% pass, and that's after they recently lowered the minimum passing score. That includes first-timeers and re-takes; I've worked for or directly with a total of only like 3 or 4 attorneys who passed the CA Bar on their first go.

MalkinIsMyHomeboy
Posts: 29109
Joined: Wed Mar 25, 2015 1:45 pm
Location: (=^_^=)

Thread of legal hubbub

Postby MalkinIsMyHomeboy » Mon Dec 13, 2021 3:01 pm




two things:

1. what is the second bar she's referring to? The actual Cali bar?
2. She was told by top lawyers. Who? Top lawyers.

tifosi77
Posts: 51456
Joined: Wed Mar 25, 2015 1:07 pm
Location: Batuu

Thread of legal hubbub

Postby tifosi77 » Mon Dec 13, 2021 4:20 pm

She is a dope. Can we leave it at that?

There is only 1 Bar exam. She is trying to big herself up, and it's underscoring the fact that I totally have no problem believing she failed three times.

dodint
Posts: 59088
Joined: Wed Mar 25, 2015 1:39 pm
Location: Cheer up, bіtch!
Contact:

Thread of legal hubbub

Postby dodint » Mon Dec 13, 2021 4:50 pm

Wonder how many times she'll fail the MPRE. Ethics can't be a strong suit of hers.

Shyster
Posts: 13034
Joined: Wed Mar 25, 2015 6:08 pm
Location: Nullius in verba

Thread of legal hubbub

Postby Shyster » Mon Dec 13, 2021 9:09 pm

There's a joke in here. I'm thinking, "Legal profession prepares to accept yet another shameless whore to its ranks."

I can believe that the Cali "baby bar" has a very low pass rate. IIRC, California is one of the few (only?) states that permits people to sit for the Bar who have not graduated from an ABA-accredited school. That means it's one of the few (only?) states that even has non-accredited schools. A degree from any of those schools is not going to carry over to any other state; you're limited to practicing in Cali only, forever. That means that the folks who attend those non-accredited schools are, shall we say, not exactly the cream of the crop, because just about anyone who can get into an ABA-accredited school will go to an ABA-accredited school.

Tomas
Posts: 3444
Joined: Sun Apr 05, 2015 10:28 am

Thread of legal hubbub

Postby Tomas » Wed Dec 15, 2021 1:21 pm

I found this fascinating (from today's Money Stuff post by Matt Levine @ Bloomberg):
Insider trading?
If your brother-in-law is a senior accounting executive at a public company, and that public company is secretly in negotiations to be acquired at a premium, and your brother-in-law is working on the deal, and you talk to him regularly while the deal is being negotiated, “including by phone, at [your] daughters’ basketball events, and at multiple family gatherings over the Christmas holidays,” and after each time you talk to him you buy some short-dated out-of-the-money call options on his company’s stock, and you call your son and tell him to buy call options on the company’s stock, and you take out a loan on your car to buy even more call options on the company’s stock, and you make up 100% of the volume in those call options on some of the days you trade, and then shortly after Christmas the company announces the merger and the stock shoots up and you (and your son) make a ton of money on your call options — is that illegal insider trading?
I don’t know! It has the main hallmarks of insider trading:
1. Short-dated out-of-the-money call options on a merger target, and
2. Brothers-in-law. (“The brother-in-law’s role” in American culture, I once wrote, “is to insider trade on his brother-in-law’s information.”)
But notice that, in my litany of suspicious events, I did not actually say “and your brother-in-law told you about the merger negotiations.” Sure he was working on the merger, and sure he kept seeing you at basketball events etc., and sure each time you saw him you went out and bought call options. But maybe you just talked about basketball! Maybe seeing him reminded you that his company existed, and you went off and did fundamental research and traded without any inside information from him. Or maybe you saw him looking stressed, or happy, or he rushed in late to basketball practice, and you thought “hmm something might be cooking at his work” and bought options without a tip from him.[1]
Still, given that list of suspicious signs, it’s a safe bet that the Securities and Exchange Commission will bring an insider trading case. And in fact it did: This is a real case, the person who traded is Christopher Clark (who made $243,000 of profits; his son made $53,000), and his brother-in-law is William Wright, an accounting officer at CEB Inc., which was acquired in 2017. The SEC sued last December. Last month, Wright settled without admitting or denying the charges, agreeing to pay a fine of about $240,000 and to be barred from serving as a director or officer of a public company for two years. But Clark went to trial, and this week he won:
A federal judge in northern Virginia on Monday dismissed the civil fraud case against Christopher J. Clark, whose bullish and risky trades just before a 2017 acquisition were spotted by regulators’ high-powered surveillance databases. The SEC alleged Mr. Clark’s brother-in-law, a former corporate accounting officer, told him days before the deal that Gartner Inc. would buy CEB Inc.
U.S. District Judge Claude Hilton dismissed the SEC’s claims after regulators presented their evidence and before the case was sent to the jury. “There’s just simply no circumstantial evidence here that gives rise to an inference that he received the insider information,” Judge Hilton said Monday, according to a transcript. …
Mark Cummings, a lawyer for Mr. Clark, said the outcome underscores that regulators can rely too much on statistical evidence, such as trades made just before an event that caused a company’s stock price to rise or fall. Data alone isn’t sufficient to support a civil or criminal case against a trader, he said.
Mr. Clark, 53 years old, refused to settle the SEC’s lawsuit because he had good reasons for believing CEB shares would rise, Mr. Cummings said. His research had nothing to do with his brother-in-law, William Wright, who had worked as CEB’s corporate controller.
“The lesson here is suspicious trading is not necessarily illegal trading,” Mr. Cummings said. “Just because the circumstances look bad, there can be an equally innocent reason for the activity.” …
“The government can speculate that he made a little too much money, he was a little too successful or more successful than he ought to be, so therefore he’s getting insider information,” Judge Hilton said, according to the hearing transcript. “But there’s no evidence of it.”
Notice that what happened here is not that the SEC presented all its suspicious evidence, Clark testified “no I did my own research and it’s all innocent,” and the jury went and deliberated and decided that they believed him. Instead, what happened here is that the SEC presented all of its suspicious evidence and the judge said “nope, there’s nothing here even worth bothering a jury with.”[2] Believing Clark’s explanation has nothing to do with it; he didn’t even present his explanation. The judge just decided that the facts I laid out in my first paragraph — brothers-in-law, basketball games, mergers, short-dated out-of-the-money call options — couldn’t possibly be enough, on their own, to find someone liable for insider trading.
That will make life harder for the SEC! This is just one district judge’s decision in one case, and I would not exactly call it The Law, and in any case nothing in this column is ever legal advice, but I will say, if you find yourself in the fact pattern in that first paragraph — if you have been trading short-dated out-of-the-money call options on a merger target after seeing your brother-in-law who is working on the merger — and the SEC comes after you for insider trading, don’t give up hope. “What, all of this is nothing,” you can say to the SEC, and to a judge, and if nobody has any proof of what you talked about it might work.
Also I can’t believe Wright settled and has to pay the SEC $240,000. He didn’t make that money trading call options; Clark did, and Clark beat the charges. I know what Clark should give his brother-in-law for Christmas this year.

[1] I am not totally sure that version would be legal. It is analogous to what I’ve called “insider guessing”; the SEC has gone after cases like that — where people *inferred* non-public information from context clues at their jobs — and lost.
[2] The judge dismissed the case under Rule 50 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, which lets the judge dismiss the case “if a party has been fully heard on an issue during a jury trial and the court finds that a reasonable jury would not have a legally sufficient evidentiary basis to find for the party on that issue.”

robbiestoupe
Posts: 11543
Joined: Thu Apr 30, 2015 3:27 pm

Thread of legal hubbub

Postby robbiestoupe » Wed Dec 22, 2021 4:05 pm

I got a slap on the wrist from my boss today about an email I wrote (internal). To summarize, a customer sent a failure report of a part we make and said replace it with a new part. I looked at the photos sent and realized it was most likely due to a customer design flaw rather than ours. So I responded back to our team only, saying we need to look into "pinning" the issue on the customer.

Was that bad wording that can be used against me in a possible lawsuit? Not that I think this will ever get to a situation where my email is being reviewed as part of a lawsuit, but my boss took issue with it. Could be because we just went through training on this sort of thing and maybe my boss was erring on the side of caution. But I didn't think it was worthy of reprimand. We've been raked over the coals on this project with basically no blame being taken by the customer, so it was written out a little frustration.

tifosi77
Posts: 51456
Joined: Wed Mar 25, 2015 1:07 pm
Location: Batuu

Thread of legal hubbub

Postby tifosi77 » Wed Dec 22, 2021 6:38 pm

I don't know about getting into trouble but without complete context that feels like verbiage I wouldn't want to hit 'send' on.

Shyster
Posts: 13034
Joined: Wed Mar 25, 2015 6:08 pm
Location: Nullius in verba

Thread of legal hubbub

Postby Shyster » Thu Jan 06, 2022 11:45 pm

The Allegheny County Court of Common Pleas has announced that jury trials are stayed until January 31. Which means that Covid should have now relieved me from reporting for jury duty a second time (the first was in 2020).

Probably not the right forum, but - what is the likelihood that a US citizen will be called for jury duty in his/her lifetime? (I really do not want to serve, but since you have been asked twice already....)

I've been summoned for jury duty three times in the last 10 years or so. How often one might get summoned is hard to say, because it depends on the population of the county and the number of cases going to trial. I don't know if other stuff is going on, either. For example, my brother has been living in Allegheny County even longer than me, but he's never been called, while I've been called three times.

Getting summoned and actually having to show up would be a major waste of time for me, because no lawyer would want another lawyer on their jury, so I'm going to get stricken anyway.

tifosi77
Posts: 51456
Joined: Wed Mar 25, 2015 1:07 pm
Location: Batuu

Thread of legal hubbub

Postby tifosi77 » Fri Jan 07, 2022 12:41 pm

I've only been summoned twice in my life, and only called to the pool once. On that day, my bus broke down and I wasn't able to get to the courthouse on time; so I was dismissed. I'd like to serve on a jury at least once, just for the experience.

My mom served on a medical malpractice jury in the late 80s. She did not care for it.

Shyster
Posts: 13034
Joined: Wed Mar 25, 2015 6:08 pm
Location: Nullius in verba

Thread of legal hubbub

Postby Shyster » Mon Jan 24, 2022 4:25 pm

This is one of the most :shock: judicial decisions I've seen in quite a while, and I think it proves that some judges will sign anything.

Court Bars Health Care Workers from Switching Jobs
https://reason.com/2022/01/24/court-bar ... ching-jobs
Ascension, a health care company with locations in Wisconsin, recently hired seven workers specializing in interventional radiology and cardiovascular work. All of them used to work for the competing health care provider ThedaCare, and they represent a majority of the latter's formerly 11-member team.

Now ThedaCare is using the courts to stop the former employees from taking their chosen new jobs. Last week Outagamie County Circuit Court Judge Mark McGinnis insanely agreed to legally prevent these workers from starting their new jobs. None of these Americans were barred contractually from leaving the old job at will or from taking a new one.

The court's temporary restraining order stated that Ascension must "Make available to ThedaCare one invasive radiology technician and one registered nurse of the individuals resigning their employment with ThedaCare to join Ascension, with their support to include on-call responsibilities or…Cease the hiring of the individuals referenced until ThedaCare has hired adequate staff to replace the departing IRC team members."

To be clear, the workers are not breaking any contracts by switching jobs, and neither are they subject to any non-compete agreements. Many of the workers even went to ThedaCare management and gave ThedaCare the ability to try to match Ascension's offer, but ThedaCare didn't do so. Instead, ThedaCare went to court and just argued that it would screw ThedaCare over for those people to move over to Ascension. And the judge signed an order barring them from doing so. Judge McGinnis' order offered no legal reasoning or precedent for telling people subject to no legal or contractual obligations that they can't take a new job because their old employer "needs them more." I certainly can't think of any argument that would be legal. I mean, Lincoln freed the slaves; people under at-will employment can quit any damn time they want to.

dodint
Posts: 59088
Joined: Wed Mar 25, 2015 1:39 pm
Location: Cheer up, bіtch!
Contact:

Thread of legal hubbub

Postby dodint » Mon Jan 24, 2022 4:26 pm

Yeah, that blows my **** mind. I thought maybe I was missing something but when I read into it, nope, just straight up indentured servitude, basically.

MalkinIsMyHomeboy
Posts: 29109
Joined: Wed Mar 25, 2015 1:45 pm
Location: (=^_^=)

Thread of legal hubbub

Postby MalkinIsMyHomeboy » Mon Jan 24, 2022 4:28 pm

I always want to believe that judges are hyper intelligent and purely just but then I’m reminded that they’re idiots like the rest of us

dodint
Posts: 59088
Joined: Wed Mar 25, 2015 1:39 pm
Location: Cheer up, bіtch!
Contact:

Thread of legal hubbub

Postby dodint » Mon Jan 24, 2022 4:29 pm

They're kind of like police in that they *should* be held to a higher standard and *should* be accountable when they make poor choices. But they're not.

tifosi77
Posts: 51456
Joined: Wed Mar 25, 2015 1:07 pm
Location: Batuu

Thread of legal hubbub

Postby tifosi77 » Mon Jan 24, 2022 4:46 pm

That........ how can that be? That ruling is insane.

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: genoscoif, Morkle and 36 guests