Yearly Archives: 2009

 

February 9th, 2009

Can Alex "A-Roid" Rodriguez Be Sued by 2003 MVP Runner-Up Carlos Delgado?

The question came to me from my brother via email, and I confess not to know the answer. But the question sure is intriguing.

Yankee superstar Alex Rodriguez admitted today that he used steroids in 2001-2003 while playing for the Texas Rangers. In one of those years, 2003 he took the MVP title. He said at the time:

“It means the world to me…I’m so proud. It really is a validation to all the hard work and dedication.”

Right. Validation for hard work. OK. Moving on to the ramifications.

Those titles usually carry big, fat bonuses with them. A-Roid picked up a $500,000 bonus after he won the award getting six first place votes from the Baseball Writers Association, which decides such titles, among his 240-vote total. And in second place was Carlos Delgado with five first place votes among his 190-vote total. I think it’s fair to say that A-Roid would not have received those votes if the writers knew he was getting a little chemical help.

Delgado, it seems, has a very credible claim he was cheated out of the MVP award which, depending on the nature of his contract, could have been worth a small fortune for the win. But it’s not just bonus money at stake; he probably would have received larger future contracts. There’s a lot of money in being #1.

So can Delgado bring a successful suit? Anyone with an answer?

Some sites covering the story:

  • What To Make Of A-Rod’s Admission That He Used Steroids (Fan IQ Blog)

    Well, rather then take the long, lawsuit-infested road to eventual full discovery that he did in fact use steroids, Alex Rodriguez today just decided to openly admit he used PEDs for three years as a Texas Ranger. And thankfully he didn’t say that he accidentally “ingested” something.

  • A-Rod’s Confession Is Solid Move (MLB Fanhouse)

    But regardless of the forthcoming repercussions — and there will be plenty — A-Rod’s confession on national television will go down in history as a well orchestrated public relations move. I’m serious.

  • How do you punish A-Rod? (Dallas Morning News)

    How do you do anything to admitted steroid user Alex Rodriguez? It’s no wonder he came clean. There is absolutely nothing that Major League Baseball will do.

  • ARoid: Alex Rodriguez Confesses to Steroid Use but Leak of 2003 Test May Have Been Criminal (Findlaw)

    Over the weekend, New York Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez was identified as having tested positive for steroid use in 2003. Today, he admitted to using performance enhancing drugs from 2001 to 2003. While the highest paid player in baseball history may suffer permanent damage to his legacy, the leak of his positive test in 2003 may have been a crime.

  • Playing Defense Against A-Rod’s Incomplete Contract (Dan Hoffman @ Concurring Opinions)

    Sometimes it’s tough to find a legal angle on the latest micro-scandal. Not so with the revelations that the hated Yankee slugger Alex Rodriguez tested positive for steroids in 2003.

  • MLB Great Debates: Is Alex Rodriguez’s Admitted Use of Steroids a Big Deal? (MLB Outsider)

    Fans seem to feel that cheating somehow belittles the accomplishments of past greats whose numbers no longer hold up. But when exactly did cheating in baseball start?

 

February 3rd, 2009

Video: The Future of the Legal Blogosphere (And it isn’t Twitter)

I visited the LegalTech show in New York today, sponsored by IncisiveMedia. I was invited into their booth for an interview by Jill Windwer (Vice President, Law.com). The subject was yesterday’s post on The Future of the Legal Blogosphere.

This is the video version:

Note: I am an advertising affiliate of IncisiveMedia, formerly ALM. I discussed this last July in A Personal Injury Blog Grows Up (Welcome ALM Readers)

 

February 2nd, 2009

The Future of the Legal Blogosphere

Having now trashed Twitter (Twitter and The Age of Information Overload) before using it and semi-trashed it again after using it (Twitter: A Review), and having concluded it is not the future, the question remains: What is the future of the legal blogosphere?

To figure out the future, you have to know what the present is, which is easier said than done in a fast-moving digital age. But the present information distribution seems to be dominated (for attorneys) by a few distinct forms (leaving aside static web sites):

  • Listservs, which are set up generally based on either locality or practice area;
  • Individual Blogs such as this one or group blogs such as Volokh or Concurring Opinions (both run by law professors); and
  • Social networks such as Facebook, Linkedin, and increasingly Twitter.

This will change, and if you pull up a chair, I’ll look into my crystal ball. For I see a future that blends and links together each of these three. No one has created the site yet, though someone surely will.

First, what is missing from the legal blogosphere is a group blog for practicing lawyers. While Volokh or Co-Op are possible templates for group blogs, I see something more akin to the splashier Huffington Post, except that it would be written by and for lawyers. The benefits of such a blog or webzine to the writers should be obvious: You can have 100+ contributors, who may not want to write something each week (or day) as is the custom with individual blogs. And the benefits to the reader should be equally obvious: An enormous amount of content under one roof from a wide variety of writers.

Now mix in the social element, whether this is for swapping tips and links or engaging in political discussion away from one’s own practice area. It happens to some extent in comment areas, but this is limited. It also is happening in Twitter, but the format is anything but ideal. Twitter is a crude technology, as compared to what is already available, and will not have staying power for lawyers when a better site is created. A well-located and well-designed legal forum can be significantly superior to it.

Well designed discussion boards such as those operated by The Motley Fool financial site, for example, have been enormously popular for over a decade, and the ability to write/read in threads and ignore users/threads is incredibly simple. There are no extra programs to download and no tools to learn.

Just as The Fool centers on stocks, the law forum would center on law. (Though, as testament to the power of community, you can see a vast array of other forums such as politics, and about 20 different boards related to sports at The Fool site.)

And each user of the site can have a profile page that would list, to the extent that people wanted it, contact information and links that allows for social networking and professional marketing.

This site — be it called The Motley Post, Huffington Fool, or Turkewitz Times Version 3.0 (version 1.0 was 20 years ago and this blog is 2.0) — would also have a reader base with some of the best advertising demographics in the nation. Advertising (cars, booze, travel, etc) would be an easy sell relative to other sites, as would law firm sponsorships.

Who will create this site? The logical candidates are:

Thus, a savvy entrepreneur will one day blend the desires for blogging and the desires for a legal-social element into one web location, in an easy-to-use site.

I don’t know when it will happen, but it will. And remember, you heard it here first.

(And yes, The Turkewitz Times is available for licensing. I’m just sayin‘.)

Updated: I was interviewed at LegalTech New York regarding this post, and you can see the short interview here.

Links to this post:

blawg review #198
the last time i hosted this carnival, we looked to plato for inspiration: “wisdom is the chief and leader: next follows temperance; and from the union of these two with courage springs justice. these four virtues take precedence in the …

posted by Jeremy @ February 09, 2009 7:00 AM

legaltech: trends affecting contract attorneys … and oh yeah …
we had 6 posse list members covering legaltech new york this year, trawling the vendor booths and attending several of the seminars/panels. it was the usual mass of vendors and attendees crammed into too small of a space — and spotty …

posted by mrposse @ February 05, 2009 2:18 PM

quickies and white lies
no, this post isn’t about guys who break-up with you just before valentine’s day. it contains a few follow-ups and forecasts about sex offender laws, schenectady’s felonious ex-police chief, the future of the legal blogiverse, …
posted by David Giacalone @ February 03, 2009 10:37 AM

 

January 30th, 2009

Twitter: A Review

The other day I trashed Twitter a bit (Twitter and The Age of Information Overload) because I already have so many sources for information and didn’t really see why I needed another one, and didn’t see how it was much of an improvement over existing technology. I wrote from the standpoint of someone who had not yet joined.

Well, now I have joined. My Thursday trial was adjourned, so I opened a Twitter account (@Turkewitz), downloaded Tweetdeck, and started noodling to see if my opinion would change. After two days I now consider myself expert enough to write on the subject.

There are two fundamental issues with Twitter that exist for any social networking site: Technology and Community.

Technology
I am certainly not impressed with Twitter technology and stand by the point I made the other day about listservs or other electronic forums being superior. And when I write about technology I don’t mean the geek end; I mean the user end.

I first joined the online world with Prodigy back in ’92 and have used one forum or another for online discussion since then. Twitter may be different than other current platforms, but is it better? The answer is clearly no.

Any good forum should have these critical components to allow for posting links and engaging in discussion:

  • Multiple discussion boards so that those that want to talk baseball aren’t in the same forum as those that want to talk knitting;
  • The option to follow a discussion either in threaded fashion or chronologically, or simply to collapse the thread into the heading; and
  • The option to ignore certain users because they want to talk about Mac and Cheese instead of the forum subject.

Twitter doesn’t really do this well. It’s a type of scattershot approach to social networking, but the discussion is strewn so far and it would be tough to follow any kind of conversation that might actually break out. And if you actually wanted to make a decent point in reply to an article or blog post, you would still be limited to 140 characters. (Though that might be a blessing in disguise for many.)

One of the best discussion forums I’ve seen is the one created by The Motley Fool financial site. If you look at this board for Apple, for example, you can see a neat, clean user interface. You can ignore people and threads with the click of a button. These boards have existed since the mid-90s.

A good law forum should work the same way, with the ease of dropping in links and creating bios and arguing with one another, because that’s what so many like to do. If you want to get rid of the Mac and Cheese Poster or the chucklehead only concerned with self-promotion, then poof — they’re gone.

The Motley Fool boards blow the doors off anything Twitter has to offer.

Community
Great technology is useless without users. And even crappy technology is good if you have good users.

Twitter has succeeded in attracting the legal community, in lightening speed. How fast? An article by law technology guru Robert Ambrogi on August 8, 2008 in Law Technology News reviews various social networking sites for lawyers. Twitter isn’t even mentioned.

And then there is an article in the January 2009 Trial Magazine (sub. only) about social networking for lawyers. It discusses Facebook and Linkedin and a couple others. But still no Twitter. Assuming the article was submitted a couple of months back, it gives you an idea as to how fast Twitter has taken off in the legal world.

So Twitter appears to be succeeding in the community development end. And that means it can be a valuable tool if you value finding articles and cases that may get swapped here and there, though they may be of limited use if (like me) you have a narrow geographic focus and practice area. I’ll get far more value out of a forum with 25 local personal injury attorneys than I will out of a forum of 2,500 attorneys in different fields spread out over the nation. But I’m not everyone and your mileage may vary.

So Twitter is succeeding, and can be a decent tool for some things. I will continue to noodle with it and use it to see how it goes. Not because the technology is good, but because that is where people are congregating. Yes, I know, that is simply a self-fulfilling prophecy.

But I don’t see it as a keeper. Twitter is not the future of the legal blogosphere. My next piece will be on what I think the future holds.

Links to this post:

twitter for law firm marketing
i ran across an interesting post from eric turkewitz, a new york personal injury attorney who offers up his wisdom on his blog – the new york personal injury law blog. his post, titled twitter: a review was a lucid overview of a social …

posted by admin @ February 10, 2009 5:04 PM

quickies and white lies
no, this post isn’t about guys who break-up with you just before valentine’s day. it contains a few follow-ups and forecasts about sex offender laws, schenectady’s felonious ex-police chief, the future of the legal blogiverse, …
posted by David Giacalone @ February 03, 2009 10:37 AM

 

January 30th, 2009

The People’s Court Wants Me

Ever wonder where shows like The People’s Court find their subjects? Well, the answer is here: They troll through small claims court looking for filings. (OK, you can learn that at Wikipedia, but stay with me on this one.)

I brought suit a few weeks ago in small claims court, only the 2nd time I’ve needed to do that in 20 years of solo practice. I paid an expert money for a review, and he never did the review. He didn’t say yes to my case, he didn’t say no, he simply put the retainer in his pocket, the records some where else, and then ignored me when I called to find out what was going on.

So I finally got his attention with a suit. (If I have to do this only once very 10 years, then I’ll count myself lucky.)

Enter, stage right in today’s mail, a letter from The People’s Court asking if the two sides would like to have Judge Marilyn Milian arbitrate our case. Lawyer v. Expert.

What do we get if we agree?

1. If I win then they guarantee payment, meaning I wouldn’t have to go through any collection proceedings to satisfy a judgment.

2. If I lose, they still pay me $250 for my time.

3. No waiting time in real court, as they set up a real date and time; and

4. Travel expenses.

What they don’t guarantee is that anyone appearing on such a show will be free of gratuitous humiliation that any judge wishes to dish out. Now I don’t know if that is the style of the show as I haven’t seen it, but if a show isn’t entertaining then the ratings go kaflooie and it drops off the air. And, frankly, I don’t feel like being anyone’s entertainment unless they are under the age of 10 and share my last name.

Why would any rationale person subject themselves to a TV court? It’s not something I can figure out.

Thanks, but I’ll pass. And besides, if it isn’t with Judge Wapner it doesn’t count.