June 1st, 2009

Sotomayor is Most Like Which Baseball Figure? (Yes! It’s a real question!)

Sure, I know what you’re thinking. That my question in the headline is silly, while everyone is probing every legal angle they can find on Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor. Every word she has uttered or written is being discussed and debated — while being cogitated, contemplated, ruminated and regurgitated in various hashings and re-hashings — all in the hopes of finding something controversial to be meaningfully exciting. And we haven’t even had hearings. But you should know that my question isn’t simply about whether this particular Yankee fan “saved baseball,” or not. No, this is a question that must get asked because it will be asked whether we like it or not.

It will get asked, you see, because Oyez.org, which runs a super-serious Supreme Court website, understands as I do that there is a passionate interest in baseball at the Supreme Court. If you don’t know about Oyez’s multi-media Supreme Court web site and its baseball quiz, here is an intro:

The Oyez Project began in the friendly confines of Wrigley Field in the late 1980s as the Chicago Cubs continued to break the hearts of its many diehard fans. It was during one such game that the idea of creating a multimedia-based Supreme Court experience took root. The first iteration was a series of complex HyperCard stacks built on a baseball-card metaphor. The “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the U.S. Supreme Court” demonstrated the power of multimedia integration with serious academic content. Many students worked on various versions before the development of a web-based application. The development of a web-based version of the project stems from the foresight of Richard Barone and Joe Germuska of Northwestern’s then nascent Learning Technologies Group…

Oyez has a biography of every Supreme Court justice, and at the end of each bio they have a quiz, asking the reader to choose which baseball figure a particular justice is most like. For example, John Jay, the first Chief Justice, is compared with Kenesaw Mountain Landis, the first commissioner of baseball. Philly fan, and former fantasy camp player Sam Alito’s bio is here and you can take your own peek to see how well you do with a modern day jurist.

Oyez gives this brief explanation of its quiz:

“The Law-Baseball Quiz” debuted in the New York Times on April 4, 1979. Created by law professor Robert M. Cover, it compared baseball players and Supreme Court Justices. Unlike Eddie Gaedel, the midget in baseball’s most publicized stunt, the Quiz has delighted and stumped enthusiasts on many occasions since it first appeared…

So, given that SCOTUSblog guru Tom Goldstein opined that Sotomayor is a shoo-in, and that the only glimmer of controversy is whether she ever made judgments based on race, and this turns out to be a non-issue when her record is examined, we must turn to the burning question of the day: Which baseball figure will Sotomayor be compared with from the world of baseball?

And if you thought you would just Google “First Hispanic Baseball Player” and be done with it (Esteban Bellan, 1871, Troy Haymakers) don’t be so quick on the trigger. For color barrier-breaker Thurgood Marshall was not compared with Jackie Robinson, but with Emmet Ashford, the first black umpire. Oyez makes you think. (Sandra Day O’Connor picked up the Robinson connection.) And there is also that background issue of whether Sotomayor even qualifies as the first Hispanic justice, given Benjamin Cardozo’s Portuguese roots.

Which brings us to the penultimate Sotomayor question — since the dead horse beating rule has not yet been invoked on all things Sotomayor nor has anyone successfully jumped the shark here — will she be compared with an Hispanic player? A Puerto Rican player? A woman umpire? Or someone that isn’t nearly so obvious? Let the guessing begin…

Sotomayor-Yankee photo find: Underneath Their Robes

 

May 29th, 2009

Linkworthy


Last year I wrote of how Esmin Green collapsed and died in the waiting room at Kings County Hospital, after waiting there for 24 hours. But the person that wrote she was “awake, up and about” apparently wasn’t aware that there was video, showing she had collapsed 1/2 hour before. Outrage followed. That case has now settled. See: Waiting Room Death Case Settles at TortDeform, Some justice for Esmin Green at last at Islandista, and City Settles For $2 Million In Death Of Neglected Patient at the Gothamist.

In the Bronx, one cop shot to death another. The Daily News has taken the racial angle on the shooting right away: Black cop killed by white officer: Horror in East Harlem as off-duty rookie is shot pursuing suspect;

Day on Torts has a piece on 39 ways for doctors to get sued for for not diagnosing breast cancer or not properly treating it when it has been diagnosed. The list comes from a medical malpractice insurer.

TortsProf with their 38th iteration of the Personal Injury Round-Up, continues to provide an outstanding weekly overview of all that was written about this field of law in the last week;

And there is no need to panic, Blawg Review #213 at Cyberlaw Central came right on time on Towel Day. So hitch on over for a round-up on the week in law and, perhaps, a few candid shots of law bloggers with their favorite towels. And yes, I am in there.

Links to this post:

breast cancer lawsuits
the doctors company provides a list by dr. richard e. anderson of 39 ways for doctors to get sued for for not properly diagnosing breast cancer or failure to properly treating breast cancer after it has been diagnosed (via day on torts, …
posted by @ June 02, 2009 5:37 PM

 

May 28th, 2009

Advice and Consent on SCOTUS Pick – First Time in Decades?

The comments were buried deep in an article in today’s New York Times on the process by which President Obama nominated Judge Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court. Obama, it seems, did the unheard of practice of calling every member of the Senate Judiciary Committee seeking their input.

While the Constitution requires (Article II, Section 2, paragraph 2) the advice and consent of the Senate for Supreme Court justices, stating that the President:

…shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court…

the reality is that Presidents, at least in recent memory, ignore the advice part and simply ask for consent. Presidents are funny that way.

According to Republican Senator Charles Grassley, however, in his 29 years on the Judiciary Committee Obama is the first President to call and actually seek that advice. From the article, with my emphasis:

As he narrowed his choices, aides said, Mr. Obama kept asking for more original writings by the candidates, and he called every member of the Judiciary Committee, something few if any presidents have done.

In his conversations with senators, Mr. Obama did not let on whom he was thinking about, but described what kind of nominee he was looking for and asked for names. “I don’t think he saw the process as him saying, ‘Which of these five people would you oppose or support,’ ” said Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, the Judiciary Committee chairman.

“He asked if I had any suggestions for nominees,” said Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, a member of the committee for 29 years. “This is the first time I’ve ever been called by a president on a Supreme Court nomination, be it a Republican or a Democrat.“

A President that actually cares about the Constitution. What a concept.

Links to this post:

blawg review #214
had enough of the credit-crunch? this is an edition of blawg review for those who say… “when the credit-crunch gets tough… the credit-crunched get crunched with smokedo… and blog.” it is not x rated, it is office safe; the geeklawyer …
posted by charonqc @ May 31, 2009 2:03 PM

 

May 26th, 2009

I Hate My Website

It isn’t the style or functionality of my website that I hate, it’s my writing. The site is my firm’s electronic brochure and it’s designed so that folks in need of a personal injury attorney can find it and consider retaining my firm. But creating such a website is a real problem because of three conflicting concepts:

  1. Biography: A need to show potential clients that you know what you are doing, which includes some past results;
  2. Search Engine Optimization: A way for those potential clients to actually find the site; and
  3. Fear of Juror Backlash: If jurors looks you up mid-trial, even though they shouldn’t, you have to make sure that they are not put-off by the content.

Biography is where we must start because the first thing any potential client will want to know is if the lawyer is the right one. The who, what, where and when of your professional life must be out there for the potential client to examine and, hopefully, be impressed.

And that’s the hard part, impressing the potential client. Because most of us were not brought up to brag. We’re taught as kids to be modest. Yet on the website we must do the opposite by showing past results and clucking about ourselves, and this does not come naturally. Except, perhaps, if you are Gloria Allred.

This wasn’t a problem in “the old days,” meaning before 1999 when I created my first site. I submitted verdicts and settlements to the New York Jury Verdict Reporter, which printed them up. Then I handed those printouts to clients so that they knew what kinds of cases I had successfully handled. In the digital age when information is demanded immediately, however, there is the need to put this stuff up on the web out of concern that the potential client will move on to another firm.

But even if lawyers know how to write their biographies well, and demonstrate that they know how to handle significant cases, and figure out how to do that with a fair degree of modesty, they will still run into the problem of …

Search Engine Optimization. What good is a website if no one finds it? Well, it’s only good if they already know your name. But if people are perusing a practice area without already having an attorney’s name, then you must do something to jump to the head of Google’s search results.

And part of optimizing the website for search engines is the requirement that certain keywords be repeated over and over until the copy makes you puke. This is, once again, unnatural. Seeing the same phrases gratuitously repeated destroys any decent writing that you may have done. This means that while you wrote the site for a client to find you, now that they have found you they will see that your writing leaves much to be desired.

But it gets worse. For not only must you brag about what you have done, and not only must you write poorly to get noticed by Google, but if you try cases for a living you also have to worry about…

Fear of Juror Backlash: Yes, we have to keep jurors in mind when creating a website because no matter how many times a judge tells jurors not to look you have to assume it will happen anyway. And here is the catch: What might look like a decent website in the eyes of the potential client (showing a track record of success) may look like obnoxious braggadocio to a juror.

Worse yet, it will look like poorly written obnoxious braggadocio due to the need for the search engine optimization. Thus, years of work getting to trial may now be impeded if a juror believes their verdict will be just some notch on a lawyer’s gun belt.

We live in an era where we occasionally see wretched lawyer ads — and now solicitation by website or blogs. While such lawyers are few and far between, their antics may get broadcast widely in the electronic age, and it sends a powerfully negative message to the public. Those horrid ads, as well as the occasional loopy lawsuit that finds its way to Overlawyered or the local papers where they are often justifiably skewered, helps to create and feed a deep cynicism when it comes to attorneys.

Of course, if a lawsuit makes the papers that means it was the exception and not the rule, since plain vanilla cases aren’t of interest to the media. But we must still deal with this anyway when picking jurors since those ads or crazy cases were the impression left on the jury pool. Only a fool would believe it doesn’t have an effect.

So the juxtaposition of these three elements — clients, search engine optimization and jurors — creates an unsolvable riddle for me. One possibility is to create a 2nd website, and have that swapped out with my real one when I am on trial so that jurors are not offended. But that doesn’t take care of the conflict between potential clients (where good writing is beneficial) and SEO (where poor writing is beneficial).

Nor is the problem solved by signing up with one of the many attorney search services that pollute the web so that they might feed you cases. For by outsourcing your marketing to these companies you may also be outsourcing your legal ethics. (See: New York’s Anti-Solicitation Rule Allows For Ethics Laundering and Must Be Modified and Is SueEasy the Worst Lawyer Idea Ever?)

I’d like to end by saying that I’ve have solved this riddle. But I haven’t. Nor have I seen any other personal injury website solve it, even those written by “professionals.” Many of us do the same thing when it comes to our content, repeating the keywords for Google, listing past results and hoping that we can find a happy middle ground. Many of the sites appear to be oblivious to the potential for juror backlash.

If anyone does know the magic bullet — and it seems to me that this is a job for a copy editor not a marketer — I’d love to hear about it in the comments or on your own site. It must exist in some form.

I’d also add that this is not a request for marketer solicitations, but a public discussion on how the competing issues can be reconciled so that those attorneys whose sites appeal to consumers (personal injury, criminal defense, divorce, residential real estate, etc.) can be informative, dignified and easy to find amongst the clutter of the web.

Links to this post:

blawg review #214
had enough of the credit-crunch? this is an edition of blawg review for those who say… “when the credit-crunch gets tough… the credit-crunched get crunched with smokedo… and blog.” it is not x rated, it is office safe; the geeklawyer …

posted by charonqc @ May 31, 2009 2:03 PM

my website is worse than your website
eric turkewitz at new york personal injury law posts that he hates his website. turk is one of the guys who gets it. if you’re a pi lawyer, or frankly a civil litigator of any stripe, turk would be the guy you want to emulate, …

posted by SHG @ May 27, 2009 5:39 AM

attorney hates his web site
this post is really about another (”i hate my website,” written by new york personal injury attorney eric turkewitz). but, first . . . ______. it’s the better part of a year ago, and i’m in a courtroom. (not to worry; i’m sitting in the …
posted by Thorne @ May 27, 2009 12:15 PM

 

May 23rd, 2009

Scott Greenfield Gets A Nastygram

A former cop named Jim Donahue stupidly decided he would send a take down demand to criminal defense lawyer Scott Greenfield of Simple Justice fame. If there is a contest out there for dumb mistakes, Donahue will take the gold. And Greenfield will take the platinum for his response.

It seems Donahue wasn’t too happy that other cops treated him as a mere civilian, instead of giving him preferential treatment. Those other cops should have known he was a cop, he whined at Officer.com, since:

I am wearing my only sweatshirt, which has a breast emblem from my previous department in Michigan. I just got my “high & tight” haircut tuned up yesterday. It would not be a great leap of faith to think that I may be a retired cop, a current cop, or minimally, related to law enforcement based upon my appearance and demeanor.

So Greenfield wrote the story up last December, using his picture that you also see here to show the unmistakable awesomeness of the “high and tight.” And Donahue then made the grave mistake of “insisting” that Greenfield surrender his First Amendment rights to him and take down the picture: Greenfield’s response? He deservedly chewed up Donahue and spit him out. You’ll have to go to his site and read Drop the Photo or I’ll Shoot for the rest, but here’s a taste:

You put your appearance in issue, and I used your photograph to make the point. Don’t like having it on a scummy criminal defense lawyer blawg like this? Bummer. Be a man and take it, you wussie with your “high and tight” hairdo. You were tough enough to call out other cops for not treating you with the respect due a fellow officer, but not tough enough to bear having your image shown to the public you pretend to serve and protect? Exactly.

No one will ever accuse Greenfield of equivocating in his response, telling said former cop to “bite me.” And that was the most polite part of his stomping of Donahue, who no doubt is used to people following his orders. Donahue also has probably never had anyone call him a “big-mouthed blowhard” that is also “an ignorant, hypocritical poster boy for people who are undeserving of a shield and gun.”

The post is an instant classic.

Winner: Greenfield by knockout in the first round.
Lesson: Don’t mess with Greenfield. Even if you do sport a “high and tight” hairdo.

Update: Donahue may not be a former cop after all.