NEWS & INFO
Jury Trials in Georgia Suspended – Again
If your clients were looking forward to putting their legal issues behind them with post-New Year’s jury trials, you’ll need to break it to them that trials have been suspended - again. Chief Justice Harold Melton of the state’s Supreme Court credited the recent surge in Georgia’s COVID cases with the unexpected and indefinite pause, which is expected to last through at least February. He had warned attorneys in early December when trials were restarted after a [...]
Social Media: Linking In to New Opportunities
If you think social media is just for keeping up with family and friends, you are missing the boat -- the business boat. While Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram are the most social of the social channels, a great deal of business, including legal referrals, happens on LinkedIn. Would you be surprised to learn that LinkedIn has 690 million users? If you are like most attorneys, you doubt the online power and connectivity of LinkedIn. Just because [...]
Strange, Weird and Just Plain Crazy Crimes
Everyone agrees that 2020 has been a year like no other. As we wind down this pandemic-lockdown-socially distanced-masked year, crooks, it seems, have been just as confused as the rest of us. Consider these actual not-too-bright tales from around the world: Caught on video! Nabbed for underage drinking in Washington state, a 20-year-old, soon-to-be defendant just released from jail went looking for treasure – in the jail’s holiday-decorated reception area. The surveillance video showed that he left [...]
Beware of Alex Smith: Bail Bonds Scam Hits Home
Beware of “Alex Smith.” He will call you offering to bail one of your loved ones out of jail. He will sound official and even say he is with A 2nd Chance Bail Bonds, a legitimate, Atlanta-based bail bonds company. But he’s neither of those things. Alex Smith is a con artist who intends to scam you out of your hard-earned cash during the holidays in a pandemic. More than 40 residents of Metro Atlanta have made [...]
Pardon That Bird
A commemoration of what was believed to be the first shared meal between the English colonists, or Pilgrims, and the Wampanoag people in 1621, Thanksgiving used to mean turkey, stuffing (or dressing), potatoes, cranberries and pumpkin pie. In the South, we routinely add green beans with bacon, sweet potato dishes and pecan pies to round out the meal. There was no bail, no bond and no leniency for that first Thanksgiving turkey. Since then, however, many a [...]
Attorneys’ Cloud Technology Enables Long-Term Work From Home
This year’s multiple crises, including a global pandemic, an economic recession and shelter-in-place lockdowns, caused attorneys and law firms large and small to rethink how they conduct business. Long feared security vulnerabilities had kept most firms from embracing a remote staffing model but 2020 changed all that – overnight. The legal industry’s historic resistance to cloud-based technology solutions, a key enabler of work from home (WFH), quickly became futile. One of the unintended consequences of what was [...]