Hot Topics In The Legal Profession 2012

Current important events in the U.S. legal profession and legal ethics, with useful research and analysis of the rules and the profession's current status, are explored by Tulane law students from an advanced ethics seminar. The collection is edited by Tulane legal ethics professor Steven Alan Childress, and he previews in his Foreword the students' explorations of the big stories of 2011. Purchase of this book benefits Tulane's Public Interest Law Foundation, a nonprofit student group that funds public interest placements and indigent client representations throughout the country. The timely topics include: prosecutorial relationships with public defenders, bar discipline for behavior outside the practice of law, false guilty pleas, the capital defense of Jared Loughner, Justice Scalia's seminar for conservative congressmembers, sensitivity to "cultural competence," legal outsourcing and competition, the dilemma of student debt in a slowed legal economy, the practice of law by legal websites like LegalZoom, and the advocate-witness rule.

Current important events in legal ethics, with up-to-the-minute research, are explored by Tulane students and a legal ethics professor in his Foreword. Purchase of this book benefits Tulane PILF, a nonprofit student group which funds public interest and indigent client representations. Topics include social networking and ads; judicial bias and Caperton; ancillary businesses; and negotiations.

Medical practice is not only a specialist occupation but also a business. Practice finance and law are complex matters and it is becoming increasingly difficult to run a successful practice in the present climate. With the pressures facing GPs and practice managers at an all-time high it is now essential to work ‘on’ as well as ‘in’ the practice. To do this practices need to reorganise to create time to undertake these hugely important tasks. This compendium of hot topics around accounting, banking and legal issues will be of enormous use to practice managers and GPs. The topics have been carefully selected to be as up to date and applicable to current issues as possible. The topics include: changes to the GP contract and their financial impact, tax returns, partnership roles, disputes and changes, incorporation, practice mergers and federations, GP property ownership, loans, security and overdrafts, recruitment of partners, salaried GPs and locums, retirement and pensions, the types of private work available. The easy-to-read topics are support by worked examples and tables throughout. This book will assist with the success of a practice in terms of earnings, quality of life and indeed patient care. It will help GPs and practice managers find and take the time to work ‘on’ as well as ‘in’ the business.

Economic globalization is transforming practically every service sector. The legal industry that has long remained insulated too has not remained untouched by the effects of globalization. The outsourcing of legal services in the past one decade has transformed the legal landscape. Legal outsourcing to India is becoming increasingly popular among U.S. and European law firms and corporations. This book broadly seeks to discuss three main topics surrounding legal process outsourcing (LPO): its emerging trends, the legal challenges it raises and the hitherto unrecognized potential it holds. Firstly, this book clarifies concepts of LPO and its operating models practiced by U.S. and U.K. law firms and corporations. Secondly, the outsourcing of legal services creates significant challenges for ethics rules including conflict of interests, attorney-client privilege, supervision and fee sharing. Thirdly, this research explores the hidden potential of LPO to improve access to justice. This book develops an altogether new proposal where Indian LPO professionals could help alleviate the access to justice problem among indigent and low-income populations of the United States.

Drugs Law and Legal Practice in Southeast Asia investigates criminal law and practice relevant to drugs regulation in three Southeast Asian jurisdictions: Indonesia, Singapore and Vietnam. These jurisdictions represent a spectrum of approaches to drug regulation in Southeast Asia, highlighting differences in practice between civil and common law countries, and between liberal and authoritarian states. This book offers the first major English language empirical investigation and comparative analysis of regulation, jurisprudence, court procedure, and practices relating to drugs law enforcement in these three states.

Taking up the study of legal education in distinctly biopolitical terms, this book provides a critical and political analysis of resistance in the law school. Legal education concerns the complex pathways by which an individual becomes a lawyer, making the journey from lay-person to expert, from student to practitioner. To pose the idea of a biopolitics of legal education is not only to recognise the tensions surrounding this journey but also to recognise that legal education is a key site in which the subject engages, and is engaged by, a particular structure—and here the particular structure of the law school. This book explores the resistance to that structure, including: different ways in which law’s pedagogic structures might be incomplete, or are being fought against; the use of less conventional elements of cultural discourse to resist the abstraction of the lawyer in students’ subject formation; the centralisation of queer and feminist discourses to disrupt the hierarchies of the legal curriculum; the use of digital technologies; the place of embodiment in legal education settings; and the impacts of posthuman knowledges and contexts on legal learning. Assembling original, field-defining essays by both leading international scholars and emerging researchers, this book constitutes an indispensable resource in legal education research and scholarship that will appeal to legal academics everywhere.

"This collection of articles is an effort to create a greater understanding of the empirical issues that lie behind the debate over whether in the practice of law the ideals of professionalism have been replaced by the demands of commercialism. This book is the most systematic attempt so far to examine what professionalism means in the various arenas of legal practice in the United States. It also seeks to advance the theoretical interpretations that lie at the heart of the scholarship on professionalism and establish a framework for analyzing the issues that is more grounded than previous idealist accounts, yet retains some of the ideas of contingency and changeability that structualist accounts have ignored"--Preface.