COLUMBUS — Senate Bill 17, the most comprehensive drunk driving law in the state’s history, has been passed by the Ohio Senate and now moves into committee in the Ohio House of Representatives. It would create a Web site with the names and pictures of all drunk drivers with five or more convictions.

It would mandate Breathalyzer tests for drivers stopped under suspicion of drunk driving after two convictions, and monitoring devices to be worn by multiple-time offenders. Repeat offenders could also have their cars impounded for one year or permanently.

“If you’re going to drink and drive and put other Ohioans at risk, we’re going to get you off the road,” said Senate Bill 17’s sponsor, Senator Tim Grendell, R-Chester Township. (Read more…)

Deane Brown started her legal career at a high-powered firm that tops many new lawyers’ lists of best places to work. But when her daughter Morgan was born in 1996, the Boston University Law School grad worked nights and weekends to meet the billing requirements, leaving her feeling cheated. “At that point, I knew I needed to go to a smaller firm,” she says. In 2002, she joined Beermann Swerdlove, working in commercial litigation and employment law. “We appreciate that people have lives outside of the office here,” she says.

Law is a notoriously demanding profession for those with ambition. To become a partner, associates typically have to charge clients for at least 2,000 hours of work a year, though that minimum can rise to 2,400 hours at top-tier outfits—or 46 billable hours each and every week of the year. The burden falls especially hard on mothers who have got kids to tend to and households to manage. Little wonder that while half of all law school grads are women, only 17.2% of partners are, according to the Project for Attorney Retention at the University of California Hastings College of Law in San Francisco. (Read more…)

New Delhi: The All India Muslim Women Personal Law Board has released the “Shariat Nikahnama” that they claim would give equal rights to both Muslim men and women.

If the board has its way, a Muslim woman would be entitled to seek divorce if her husband was found having illicit relationship with another woman.

The board has also rejected any divorce done through SMS, e-mail, phone as video conferencing, besides rejecting divorce done on provocation.

A Muslim woman can seek divorce if she is forced by her husband to indulge in unnatural sex. She can also seek divorce if her husband contracts AIDS. (Read more…)

Notary publics who scam Latino immigrants by charging them for legal advice will now face criminal penalties under a new law signed by Gov. Jim Doyle in Milwaukee on Tuesday. In Mexico and Latin American countries, a notario can have legal training, while in the U.S., a notary can only administer oaths and witness signatures.But many who advertise as notarios take advantage of vulnerable immigrants looking for a way to stay in the U.S. and charge for legal advice that raises false hopes, said state Rep. Pedro Colón (D-Milwaukee), who sponsored the measure after reports of rip-offs, especially on the city’s south side, which is largely Latino.

“Many people want to follow the law and seek counsel from people who, unfortunately, have no legal standing to give advice,” he said. (Read more…)

The already arduous road to patenting a great idea is getting even longer.

Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court raised the bar on what the law defines as the “standard of obviousness” in patent cases. In short, if a business or technique is so obvious that anyone could have invented it, it shouldn’t merit a patent.

While stricter standards may ease some of the pressure on the increasingly swamped U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, the new regulations–and more being debated in the coming months–could add costs and complications down the road, too. (Read more…)

CHICAGO (WBBM) — As the economy slows and the job market weakens, more employees will find themselves suddenly out of work. WBBM’s Regine Schlesinger has been talking with a Chicago lawyer who says workers should know their rights. Howard Emmerman, an attorney at Chicago law firm Beerman, Swerdlowe, says most laid off employees never see it coming. (Read more…)

When it comes to promoting your law firm through PR, it’s a very crowded market. You have to make sure you identify what makes you different and then shout about it to the right people.

Your first major decision is whether to hire an agency or employ someone in-house to undertake the promotion of the firm.

Bear in mind that an agency can be on board in a matter of weeks or even days, while the recruitment process for an in-house member of staff is likely to be longer. If you want an immediate PR push, then it might be best to stick with an agency. (Read more…)

Harvard Law School’s unprecedented initiative to waive the final year of tuition for students who agree to work in the public sector will provide a measure of relief for government and nonprofit agencies that struggle to attract and retain debt-burdened young lawyers, officials in those fields said yesterday.

The program, announced yesterday, will save students who commit to work in public service for five years more than $41,000 in tuition, reducing the average $100,000 debt load at graduation by 40 percent, school officials said. Those jobs include working as an assistant prosecutor or as a lawyer for an advocacy group or a political campaign.

“People say we have enough lawyers, but we don’t have enough lawyers representing vast numbers of people in our society,” said Emily Spieler, dean of Northeastern University’s School of Law. (Read more…)

Unless you already have a well-established book of business, networking is an important business development activity. If you succeed in your networking, it enables you to build a name, and it can help you stand out from your competition. If you become a good networker, you will develop a reputation as a center of influence, and you will be the beneficiary of many referrals and introductions. If you don’t focus on improving your networking skills and networking behavior, it will become a tedious and uncomfortable business development behavior that will lead to failure and frustration in the business development part of your practice. (Read more…)

South Korea remains one of the last countries in Asia to liberalize its legal services market. Currently, foreign law firms are prohibited from establishing offices in Korea, and lawyers with foreign licenses are not officially allowed to practice foreign law. Although there are approximately 400 foreign attorneys employed as “foreign legal consultants” in various Korean law firms, they are not permitted to work independently and there is no formal registration system recognizing their status as foreign lawyers. But the landscape may be about to change.

Korea’s Ministry of Justice announced in July 2007 that a draft bill of the Foreign Legal Consultants Act will be put before the National Assembly in the near future. The bill was originally introduced in November 2006, but was withdrawn in view of free trade agreement negotiations with the United States. The act is the first measure the Korean government has taken to comply with the free trade agreement signed between the United States and Korea in June 2007. According to the Ministry of Justice, the government expects to have the act instituted before the free trade agreement becomes effective. (Read more…)