As we previously noted, Andy Mergendahl of Lawyerist has written an article of interest for all lawyers:  “Music on Vinyl is Better.”  This is an issue of concern to everyone, not just lawyers.  Essentially, Andy contends that the task of listening to music on vinyl is a difficult ritual requiring careful attention, thus, the experience is more enjoyable because of the effort expended.

Argues Andy:

There is an on-going debate about whether music played from a vinyl record sounds better than digital music, but my goal is not to settle that debate.  My point is that collecting and listening to music on vinyl is just a richer, more pleasurable experience.

. . .

First, you can’t take vinyl with you.  You have to be at the stereo.  You have to physically handle the record, and clean it.  You have to operate the machine, which has moving parts.  The sound of the record isn’t the same every time, because playing a record literally wears it out.  That makes you treat the vinyl and the music on it with care and respect.  Finally, you can’t jump from song to song with a click.  So you hear songs you would otherwise miss (or not purchase at all).  Plus a record’s sleeve can be 12 by 24 inches, allowing ample room for really cool or really awful art.

Combining all these elements makes it likely that you are really already passionate about what you are hearing or more likely to become passionate about it.

Andy makes an excellent point; the art of listening to vinyl is, really,  an affectation of the listener.  We enjoy the pleasure we derive from listening to music on vinyl because it is the fruit of a labor of love.  Andy notes in the piece that he is “old, so when [he] started buying music, the CD was just coming on to the scene.”  That makes him not to much older than me; and although I appreciate the care involved in the collection of vinyl records, I must step forward to defend the often maligned, never cool enough for school compact disc.

(It’s a product, after all, so we can talk about this issue on a products liability blog, right?)

The CD, by its very nature, is mobile.  It can be played in the car, thereby freeing the driver from the awful constraints of the popular radio.  With portable CD players, either the once ubiquitous Discman or the fabled boomboxes of yore, the listener’s music of choice can be easily brought from room to room, home to home, venue to venue, inside or outside.  Such technology allows us to take our own personal favorite albums, which may or may not be available on the radio or elsewhere, with us to play for our friends and such.

That’s far more difficult with vinyl, especially these days.

There’s also the quality issue.  CD’s do – and always have – sounded better. Remember when CD’s first arrived on to the scene in the mid to late 1980s? Listeners – not just snobby audiophiles, either – marveled at the depth of difference in audio quality between their old LP’s and the new CD’s. The more nostalgic fans – who insisted that the snaps, crackles, and pops of old vinyl were inextricably intertwined with the music listening experience – soured on CDs, finding new technology too clean and clinical in the absence of such accompanying noise.

But you can’t fault CD’s just because they eliminated some of the flaws of the system that you grew up enjoying, can you?

Plus, CD’s are simply more durable. Look at a 25 year old box of LPs and you will see faded, frayed, and damaged albums.  You will likely hear scratched and damaged content on the albums themselves unless the owner behaved like a museum curator.  With CD’s, the protective outer casing typically preserves the albeit album art (for the most part, at least). If the listener takes reasonable care, the music will sound just as good as it did on the day you initially bought it. Lord knows my 21 year old copy of Nevermind still sounds great.  Certainly, there are albums that one frequently enjoys that may require replacement on CD due to heavy listening.  I’ve had to  buy several of the Radiohead albums at least three times, and of course, I’ve bought The White Album at least four times (in various formats) over the last 25 years.  But I would have probably had to replace those albums more often had I been buying them on vinyl.

CD’s simply offer a richer listening experience absent a few, perhaps pleasurable, steps required of vinyl. There will always be people who will want to grind their own coffee and derive pleasure from the additional work required of that enterprise.  But there is nothing wrong with an easier more accessible way to enjoy music, particularly when the audio quality is superior.

Now don’t get me started on the issue of CD’s versus digitally downloaded music.  One can, of course, rip tracks from a CD onto one’s computer, but the default bit rate for imported tracks means that the audio quality is significantly less.

But that’s a debate for another day.

(An editorial aside: The best part of writing this article was learned that the boombox has its own Wikipedia entry.).

As we previously mentioned, we here at Abnormal Use are spending May 2012 focusing on comic book covers featuring police line-ups.  Above, you’ll see the cover of Dick Tracy #89, published way, way back in 1955. There’s nothing particularly jarring about the line-up itself (and much of that Warren Court jurisprudence was years in the future, anyway).  However, what strikes us about this cover is the amateur logo on the side of the police video camera. “Police T.V.”? In stencil? Wow, police, you couldn’t outsource that? Sigh.

Whoa! If you can believe it, this is our 650th post here at Abnormal Use! That’s a lot! Does this mean that we are in the same realm as Action Comics, which published its 650th issue back in the halcyon days of 1990, or even Detective Comics, which published its own 650th issue back in the fateful year of 1992? Superman published its 650th issue in 2006, as did Batman. We’re in good company.

Our own bloggers Stuart Mauney and Rob Green were recently published in the ABA Tort Trial and Insurance Practice Section’s Committee Spring 2012 Committee News newsletter. Their article is called “Emergency Response To Catastrophic Trucking Accidents.”  It can be found on page 3 of the PDF newsletter. Check it out. I mean, really, it’s got the word “catastrophic” right there in the title. You have to read it.

Once again, our pals at The Law and the Multiverse are offering some online CLEs. Not to be missed.

What? You’re not following us on Twitter? Quick, click here to remedy that!

There’s nothing quite like deposing an opponent’s retained testifying liability expert.  They are typically skilled and savvy deponents who know many of the tricks of the trade.  They make much of their living testifying in court. Past deposition transcripts, if they can be located, yield a wealth of information about the expert’s background, methodology, and, of course, their pet peeves. Plus, these experts usually know of the Daubert case and what must be done to avoid being excluded as an expert in a case.  Some experts even advertise on their websites that they have never been excluded by the Daubert case.

Why would they do that?

It seems a curious statement to make, particularly if the expert has been around long enough to have been challenged on multiple occasions in litigation across the country.  Diligent counsel will always locate and review an opponent’s expert’s website, if one exists.  If the expert maintains that he or she has never been excluded on such grounds, defense counsel would naturally ask if that fact were still true. If so, the required follow up question becomes:  “If you’ve not been excluded on Daubert grounds, on what grounds have you been excluded?”

Recently, we deposed an expert who made such a representation on his website.  However, after spending less than five minutes on Westlaw, we discovered that he had been excluded in not one but three reported decisions.  Note that these were decisions that were on Westlaw, and these findings may not have included unreported exclusions or those which occurred at the trial court level that were never appealed.  One such exclusion came from the very first case in which the expert had offered opinions.  At the deposition, we naturally confronted the expert with these three opinions and he claimed not to know of them.  How is that?

Sure, two of the opinions were more than a decade old, but the third was from 2011 (and in that case, the trial court had excluded the expert, later granted a motion for new trial based on the belief that the exclusion was improper, and ultimately earned a reversal from the Court of Appeals because the expert’s opinions had been proven to be false by some properly admitted trial testimony).

How could someone not know that?  Well, maybe the expert simply received a call from the lawyer who hired them noting that the case had settled or otherwise resolved, and that lawyer felt it unnecessary to reveal the full story. But how could an expert elect to make that representation on his or her website and then not track whether or not that was true?

We shouldn’t object too much, as it’s always fun to hand an expert a court opinion he or she has never seen before.

Other than for purely fun purposes, location based social media  seems to be the type of Internet fad that may not be of great assistance to the legal profession.  You are, of course, aware of this trend:  Foursquare, Facebook Places, the late Gowalla, and other applications permit a user to alert friends to his or her exact location at any given time.  Users “check in” to a venue, retail establishment, or elsewhere and can  leave comments and suggestions to later users who may find themselves at the same location at some point in the future.

Again, there does not seem to be must use for this technology in the legal field; real likes are not easy to get in this field.  First and foremost, confidentiality and privilege concerns may prevent an attorney from sharing his exact location at a given time with anyone other than his client.  Further, clients will receive no additional value by “checking in” to their attorney’s office, although we suppose some practitioners could, in fact, offer some type of incentive for future clients, although we don’t know how that might look or whether it would be ethical or not.

Despite such concerns, these days, most commercial establishments, including law firms, have their own entries on Foursquare.  Sometimes these are created by the firms themselves, and more likely than not, the entries are generated by whatever crawling software those services use to create specific entries for a given city or town. But it’s not just law offices on Foursquare.  Also included are entries for the types of places lawyers, such as this experienced workers compensation attorney in New Jersey, NJ frequent, such as courthouses, bar association headquarters, CLE sites, and other such haunts.

What inspired this post was a comment left by a Foursquare user a county courthouse somewhere in the Southeastern United States.  As a judicial center, it hosts various courts and offices where both civil and criminal trials are held.   Sure enough, the courthouse had its own entry on Foursquare, and the following comment was left by a visitor on December 21, 2011:

“If you kill in self-defense don’t destroy evidence and run away for 2 weeks, it looks bad to the jury.”

Wow.

Probably good advice, although we are trying to envision the exact circumstances by which this comment was offered.  Was this a juror commenting from the deliberation room?  Was this a courtroom observer commenting upon public proceedings?  An attorney offering pro bono legal advice? Was this a reporter?  Surely it was not the defendant attempting to learn from his or her mistakes?

Get this: that entry is not an anomaly.  Here’s a December 2010 comment we found to the Foursquare entry of a federal courthouse:

“Don’t break the law and you wont have to spend much time here.”

Again, probably good advice, though much more general than the first comment we discussed.

As you can see, there are some uncomfortable questions to be asked accompanying the usage of Foursquare in the judicial process.

As we mentioned last week, we here at Abnormal Use are spending May 2012 focusing on comic book covers featuring police line-ups. Last week, we featured Gotham Central #34, in which three costumed superheroes – who couldn’t look more different than each other – constituted the full line-up. Above, in Top 10 #4, published back in the halcyon days of 1999, we have the same problem. Written by the brilliant and mysterious Alan Moore, and illustrated by Gene Ha and Zander Cannon, this series is less familiar to us than others. But the constitutional issue remains!

Check out this tribute to friend of the blog Bill Childs, founder of the TortsProf blog, who is leaving academia for private practice. (Hat tip: Walter Olson).

We’ve read blogs for a long, long time. You know this. We’re huge blogging nerds. But in all of our years, we’ve never seen as cool a blog post title as one last week from the EvidenceProf Blog.  Behold: “Joss Whedon, The Avengers, Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Eli Stone, Reluctant Heroes & The Rule Against Hearsay.” Indeed.

Mike Birbiglia fears the legal implications of his “Saved Mail” folder. So should we all.

It’s a brand new month, and to celebrate, we’re going to spend our Fridays in May focusing on comic book depictions of police line-ups.  So, above, you’ll see depicted the cover of Gotham Central #34, published not so long ago in 2005. We’re not criminal lawyers here, but isn’t it a bit suggestive to have the participants to a line-up look so dissimilar as here?  By this point in the criminal procedure process, there’s a witness who has already described to the police the nature of the suspect, and the police have apprehended a suspect they believe to be the perpetrator. In this line-up, however, we’ve got Kid Flash, Cyborg, and Wonder Girl, who taken together, couldn’t look more different than each other.  If the suspect was a young red haired male wearing a yellow outfit emblazoned with a bolt of lightning, who do you think the witness is going to pick? There’s got to be a constitutional issue here, right?

How did we miss this? Friend of the blog Jay Hornack a/ka/ The Panic Street Lawyer writes up his recent tour of the Bruce Springsteen exhibit at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. As we noted and detailed in this piece, a handful of our attorneys recently caught Springsteen’s latest tour in nearby Greensboro, North Carolina. As always, a fun outing.

Here is an interesting 1966 letter, written by Harper Lee, responding to a school board’s assertion that her To Kill A Mockingbird was “immoral.”  Back in July of 2010, our own Mills Gallivan, senior partner at the firm and occasional guest author here, offered his thoughts on Lee’s famed novel and the movie based on it in a piece called “Bluejays and Mockingbirds.”  We encourage you to revisit it.

Ryan S. at The Signal Watch wonders what the current generation of children know about pop culture of generations past.  A good read, that. This is not the first time he’s written on youth culture, either. If you have friends or children starting college this fall, you might direct them to his rather amusing blog post, “The League’s Guide for Incoming Freshman.”

In the last few weeks, we here at Gallivan, White, & Boyd, P.A. have had a few new attorneys join our offices in Greenville, Columbia, and Charlotte. Check out the details here!

Whoa.  We just realized that this is our 120th installment of Friday Links.  How about that?

We here at Abnormal Use love “Seinfeld.” We have a bit of an obsession, in fact. You’ll recall that way back in 2010, we interviewed Phil Morris, the actor who played Jackie Chiles, the flamboyant Plaintiff’s attorney who represented Kramer on several occasions. Not too long ago, we interviewed veteran character actor James Rebhorn, who played the district attorney in the “Seinfeld” series finale who prosecuted Jerry, Elaine, Kramer, and George for violation of a Good Samaritan statute. (You’ll recall that Chiles defended the “Seinfeld” gang in that finale.). So, being the completists that we are, we sought ought actress Myra Turley, who played the jury foreperson in the series finale who read the verdict against our “Seinfeld” heroes. Not only did she appear on “Seinfeld,” she’s also been featured on some of our other favorite shows, including “Mad Men,” “Breaking Bad,” and even “The Misfits of Science.” You can see the “Seinfeld” verdict scene, and Turley’s role therein, here. She was kind enough to agree to an interview, which we present below.

JIM DEDMAN: You played the jury foreman who reached the verdict that Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer in the “Seinfeld” finale back in 1998, how did that come to be?

MYRA TURLEY: Well, Larry David, who is the creator of “Seinfeld.” I used to lease an apartment in New York City. I knew Larry, and before the big finale, I got a call from Larry, [he] said, “Myra, you want to be in the finale? I have a small but pivotal part!” So, it was a small, but pivotal, part.  I said, “Sure,” and that’s how that happened.

JD: Well, it certainly was pivotal. How does it feel to be the one who condemned the “Seinfeld” gang to jail?

MT: Well, they shot it both ways, because there was so much hype about the finale  . . . [P]eople [were] trying to find out what happened, [so] they shot it with both endings, them getting free, and them getting guilty . . . .

…

They didn’t shoot the [whole] scene twice . . .  [Just f]rom the point on where I announced guilty, and their reaction, and then the what happens afterwards, and [then] our not guilty, and their reaction, and then what happens afterwards.  So they shot from that part on twice.  Not anything up to that.

…

AU: One of the things we always ask is what efforts are made to realistically depict the courtroom process, and obviously, in a comedy like “Seinfeld,” that’s not the chief concern. But were there folks on the set that were explaining how the procedure works and that sought of thing?

MT: Yeah, they have legal advisers and military advisers or police advisers or hospital advisers usually on a set if they’re going to do something.  I do have one funny story, if I may tell it, about being the jury foreman .

AU: Certainly.

MT: I was called a couple of years after that to do jury duty in downtown L.A.; and it was a [criminal] case, and it was right before the . . . Christmas holidays, and it went on for a week, and it should never have gone on for a week. And we broke the day before Christmas Eve. Christmas Eve was on a Saturday. At 3:00 the judge said, “You have to go get a foreman and come in with a verdict on four counts. If you don’t do it, you will have to come back the day after Christmas . . . .”  . . . [S]omebody said, “[H]as anyone ever been a foreman before?”, and I said, “I was, on ‘Seinfeld'”, and they said, “You do it, then.”  We did it, and we came in with a verdict on the four counts, and we were out by 4:00, and we didn’t have to come back after Christmas.  It should have never gone to trial, and we gave the verdict, and the judge said, “I agree, and if any of you are willing to stay and talk to a very young district attorney about why you came to that verdict we would appreciate it.”  It was not guilty.

…

AU: You played Judge Carla DeCosta on “Family Law.”

MT: Yes.

AU:  How did you prepare to play the role of a judge?

MT: I talked to a friend who is a family lawyer to understand the difference between family court and civil and criminal; and basically, the difference I discovered, was there was no jury.

AU: Do you remember what type of direction you received as an actor playing a judge on that show?

MT: You don’t really receive direction.  . . . In television, they work so fast that you basically get blocking direction.  You come in with the audition, having done the work, and they like what you have done, and then they tweak it one way or another, but there is not a lot of direction, just like a tweak.

AU: You have appeared on a number of other legal dramas from “L.A. Law” and “Family Law” to “Judging Amy.”  What is it about the legal system do you think makes it such a popular subject matter for television shows?

MT: There are basically only five kinds of television shows.  You have your medical shows, your cop shows, your lawyer shows, your office shows, and your family shows, and maybe you can take a tweak on any one of them, but they all fall into those categories.  An office show might be your spaceship because it could have been “Star Trek,” but that’s your office, essentially, and then the style of the show could be science fiction, or it could be really nitty gritty like a procedural one like “CSI.” “Law & Order,” that’s a combination cop and lawyer.  So, that’s basically what television has been for the hour dramas.

AU: Do you think that actors and lawyers require a similar skill set on some level?

MT: If they are trial lawyers, yes.

AU: What types of skills do you think that actors and trial lawyers might share?

MT: Well, they have to play a strong intention or really clear intention of what they want, what they are going for.  . . . I would imagine for lawyers it is quite structured. You have to set this up, and then set this up, and then set this up, before you can make that deduction.  You have to lead the audience, the jury, into thinking this way, and an actor  . . . is a story teller, and the story is told and usually, on detective shows or law shows, we may not know exactly who the guilty person is in the beginning, and we may be led down this path, it’s a mystery, you don’t want to know in the beginning because then there is no suspense.  Also, with lawyers having the ability to speak and affect a jury’s emotions.

AU: I want to switch gears.  I mentioned in the beginning I wanted to ask you about some of your work in non-legal shows, and very recently you played Katherine Olson, the mother of Peggy Olson, on “Mad Men.”

MT: I’ve done that one for about five years.

AU: What is it like to be on the set of that show?

MT: It’s great.  I loved the show the first season, just loved it.  I love the idea of the question that he is asking, “How did we meet as society from Dwight Eisenhower to Woodstock in ten years?”, and I love, love the fact that the arc of the story is not completed in one hour which is really 44 minutes . . . that he arcs it over a whole season, over a whole five seasons, so I do like that.  I love the character that I play.

AU: From what I have read, they go to extreme efforts to make the props and the set design as accurate as possible. Is it like being back in that time period?

MT: Absolutely.  I remembered the first day I walked on the set in 2008, and I ran into Matt Weiner, who was the creator, walked me around the set and showed me that this is the kitchen, this is this, and this is this, and as he was walking by – that scene was set in 1962, he was walking by, and he noticed something, and he called his prop guy.  “That picture of John Kennedy wasn’t taken until 1963, it’s wrong.” He is so detailed oriented.  So detailed oriented, and you feel like you’re in a time warp when you go back there.  They wore under garments that are of that style, certainly not the one’s you would wear today.  The dresses are fit very differently.  Women’s body shapes were very different.  Hair, makeup.

AU: Well, that is not the only great AMC show that you have been on.  You were on the recent season finale of “Breaking Bad,” playing the nurse to Hector Salamanca, who was played by Mark Margolis.  What was it like working with him and with Vince Gilligan, who directed that episode?

MT: Vince Gilligan is a genius.  I loved “The X-Files,” and he creates such suspense, and he also goes into incredible detail, and the thing I had to do for most of this was work with Vince because Hector Salamanca doesn’t speak. He only has to communicate with a bell, and he works with kind of like a plexiglass see through, he can see, and I can see with letters, and pointing to letters that spell out what he is trying to communicate.  So most directors, creators, people, producers, would give you maybe one or two letters and then cut it to get the message, but Vince took every single one and discovered . . . and shot it a different way that it was such a way of building up the suspense knowing that something was going to happen.  . . . He is an incredible genius at building up dread, suspense, something keeping the audience on their tinker hooks.

AU: Well, that bell proves to be very important to one of the final scenes, as well in the undoing of the character played by Giancarlo Esposito.  What did you think of that final scene with Mark Margolis and him?

…

MT: Well I had sat next to Giancarlo in makeup, and then watching the prosthetics going on.  It was a prosthetics on half of his face, and he loved the fact that only half of his face received the blast.  So it was a combination . . . a lot of it was done with prosthetics, and then they did some in post production, they did some computer graphics post production, but very little.  That was quite a shot.  The first thing was you did all the work, and then the first scene was the explosion, and there was rubble all over the hallway and in the room, and having figured out how Giancarlo was going to fall, he wanted him to fall flat on his face, fall straight down, and come out see hm with a normal face, and then shoot it so you see the explosion of the face and then have him fall straight down and having him do that with all the rubble. It took a long time to shoot that, being he’s a perfectionist, he is a genius and a perfectionist, and I think it works brilliantly.

…

AU:  Any other fond memories you have from being a part of the “Seinfeld” finale, 14 years ago?

MT: Wow, wow.  How come I haven’t aged?  Next door to Stage One, Bill Maher was shooting his first show with . . . it wasn’t “Real Time with Bill Maher,” it wasn’t “Politically Incorrect,” it was kind of a pre-one, a pilot leading up to that, so he was always over on the set, and people would go over and check out his rehearsals and stuff like that, so that was a small world.  Huge crowds, huge, huge, huge, crowds.  It was almost like anyone who had ever been on the show was a guest star or was in the audience watching.  . . . [P]eople who had been friends with Larry or any of the cast, they were all there.  So it was a very festive party atmosphere, and yet it was so secretive.

AU: One more question for you. You mentioned that they shot it both ways, guilty and not guilty. You obviously were there on the set. Which one do you think was the right verdict for Jerry, Elaine, George, and Kramer?

MT:  Guilty.

We all remember Hank Ketcham’s “Dennis The Menace” comic strip.  It was so popular that the strips were collected and published in volumes, such as “Dennis The Menace Vs. Everybody,” depicted above and published way back in 1957.  We assume that with that title, Dennis has sued everybody, making him the Plaintiff.  Is he being cross examined on the book’s cover? We’d like to see that, although we’re a bit disappointed that Dennis has elected not to wear proper courtroom attire.  We wonder what Mr. Wilson would say about that. (Hat tip: Patrick Condon by way of Chuck Klosterman).

If you missed last night’s episode of NBC’s “Community,” you need to seek it out immediately, as it is a hilarious parody of NBC’s “Law & Order” franchise, complete with a send-up of all of that show’s legal cliches.  The best part: The characters stage a mock trial of sorts in which they make many frivolous objections (and then attempt to withdraw their own objectionable cross examination questions). Our favorite: When the character of Annie (played by Alison Brie) impressively begins to lay the foundation for a series of impeachment, her opponent exclaims: “Objection, she’s clearly ramping up to something!” The episode is entitled “Basic Lupine Urology,” a play on the name of “Law & Order” showrunner Dick Wolf.  For the time being, you can watch the episode on NBC’s official website here.

You may recall that in last week’s edition of “Friday Links,” we showed you the cover of Mr. District Attorney #63, published way back in 1958.  On it, the title character presents a suspect, “The Man in the Martian Suit,” to the police sergeant for fingerprinting.  Friend of the blog Kevin Underhill, who runs the seriously funny Lowering The Bar legal humor blog, couldn’t resist weighing on that comic book cover.  See his thoughts here.

Don’t forget! You can follow Abnormal Use on Twitter here and on Facebook here! Drop us a line!

We here at Abnormal Use and Gallivan, White, & Boyd, P.A. began this blogging thing in January 2010 as a law firm with one office in Upstate South Carolina.  Now, more than two years later, we have three offices in two states.  As you know, we recently celebrated the first anniversary of our Charlotte office. Our editor, Jim Dedman, just moved from our Greenville, South Carolina  home office to our Charlotte office.  And there is more news from Charlotte. After a number of months of occupying what was called the “temporary permanent space,” a smaller, nondescript series of offices in which we worked while waiting for our “permanent permanent space” to be renovated and completed, we have finally arrived in the permanent permanent space.

We are mighty pleased with our new digs.  We even have a private terrace:

How about that? So, update your address books and note the change in suite numbers in the left hand sidebar on our site.

And if you ever find yourself in the SouthPark area of Charlotte, North Carolina, let us know.

Above, behold the cover of Mr. District Attorney #63, published way, way back in 1958.  Note that the cover story is entitled “The Man in the Martian Suit,” which suggests something about the events depicted upon the cover.  Our hero, the district attorney, presents himself and the presumably costumed crook to the police fingerprint desk.  Says the DA: “Check those fingerprints, sergeant! We’ll find out who this masquerading criminal is!”  Replies the sergeant: “But, Mr. D.A. . . . These prints are like nothing on this Earth!” You would think that the district attorney, in apprehending the “man in the Martian suit,” would have removed the Martian suit from the suspect before presenting him to the police sergeant for print.  Or, if the suit was, in fact, not a suit, but the exterior of an extra-terrestrial, you’d think the D.A. would have figured it out before this point in the criminal process, too.  Sigh.

Friend of the blog Max Kennerly, of the Litigation & Trial law blog has an interesting post: “How To Excel At The Basics As A Young Litigator.” Complete with Robert Caro references! You can follow Max on Twitter here.

We are disappointed to report that friend of the bog Stephen J. McConnell has announced his retirement – temporary, hopefully – from the famed Drug and Device Law blog.  You can read his last post – published past Monday – here.  Through our blogs, we’ve become pals with Steve, and he very recently participated in our collection of “My Cousin Vinny” reviews. Although our two blogs have previously quibbled on musical issues, we once joined forces to compile a huge list of songs about lawyers, judges, and attorneys, which was an immense amount of fun. We even quoted Steve in a prior edition of Friday Links on the occasion of the death of Clarence Clemons. In the mean time, Jim Beck and company will continue to provide sharp commentary on the drug and device beat.  We’ll miss you, Steve.

Don’t forget! You can follow Abnormal Use on Twitter here and on Facebook here! Drop us a line!