Business Conflict Blog

An attorney keeps her client files on the hard drive of her laptop.  These files include confidential and sensitive client information, and attorney-client communications.  Leaving a dentist appointment, she discovers that her car’s windows have been smashed and that the property inside the car — including her GPS and her laptop — have been stolen.  She has not yet backed-up some of the data on the hard drive and cannot now duplicate the file for the client.

The client is furious.  The lawyer is mortified.  Is she also unethical? Read more »

Tags: Lawyers, Public Policy

Prof. Thomas J. Stipanowich  of Pepperdine University School of Law has come out with a smashingly responsible analysis of the most recent Supreme Court arbitration cases.  In his article, forthcoming in the American Review of International Arbitration, Stipanowich suggests that the three recent cases — Stolt-Nielsen, Rent-A-Center and AT&T Mobility – constitute a new “trilogy” of the stature of the historic Steelworkers cases in 1960.  But he urges that the recent trilogy of cases are flawed in reason, devoid of emprical grounding, and potentially harmful to the development of reasoned and just public arbitration policy.

Stipanowich is critical of the Court’s analysis, asserting rather than deducing “federal substantive law” under the Federal Arbitration Act as the basis for its outcomes.  He suggests that these references to such “substantive law” are “divined” or “discerned” rather than being the product of clear legal analysis, and that the Court’s avowed strong public policy concern to enforce arbitration agreements at times leads to outcomes clearly at variance with the Act. Read more »

Tags: Arbitration, Public Policy

At its recent meeting in Toronto, the ABA House of Delegates approved the Resolution on Public Civility, first proposed by the Section on Dispute Resolution, calling for civility in public discourse and urging state bar groups to take the lead in advocating respectful and attentive civil dialogue.  Comes now Sara Hacala, a “certified etiquette and protocol consultant,” who has kindly offered the galleys of her forthcoming book, “Saving Civility: 52 Ways to Tame Rude, Crude & Attitude for a Healthy Planet.”

Read more »

Tags: Culture

A highlight of the 2011 ABA Annual Meeting in Toronto was a session on “Wikileaks, National Security and Free Speech.”  Moderated by Devon Chafee, Legislative Counsel for the American Civil Liberies Union, the panel boasted McInnes Cooper partner and privacy expert David T.S. Fraser; Charles D. Tobin of Holland & Knight; Professor Steve Vladeck of American University’s Washington College of Law; and Lee Williams, Assistant General Counsel to the Cable News Network Inc. Read more »

Tags: Add new tag, Public Policy