Behold! Above you’ll find an image of an old Dell comic book featuring Disney’s own Mickey Mouse! It appears that our hero has donned the garb of a private detective, and he’s even gone so far as to post an advertisement hawking his services as a “Private Eye for Hire.” Perhaps he is even assisting local law firms investigate their clients’ potential claims and defenses. Let’s hope, though, for the mouse’s sake, that he has complied with all state regulations and properly secured his state-issued investigator license.  We can certainly imagine a situation where Mickey Mouse is deposed and vigorously cross examined about his failure to comply with the state’s licensing scheme.  Poor Mickey.

In response to yesterday’s post observing the tenth anniversary of our editor Jim Dedman’s graduation from Baylor Law School, friend of the blog and Baylor lawyer Eric Nordstrom sends in this YouTube movie clip noting the significance of the passage of a decade.  It’s a clip from the 1997 flick Grosse Pointe Blank,  a film we couldn’t love more, so we direct you to itww. on this day.

Earlier this week, we ran not one, but two posts on the perils of social media and how your advocate opponents might use it against you in the future. As you may have seen, our editor Jim Dedman had a general piece on the issue, while guest author Stuart Mauney offered a real life example of his own Facebook posts being used against him at a mediation by an opposing attorney. These posts prompted some discussion in the legal blogosphere. We’re happy to report that Bruce Carton at Law.Com’s Legal Blog Watch picked up on the story. We encourage you to visit his post and peruse his readers’ comments.

Don’t forget: You can follow Abnormal Use on Twitter at @gwblawfirm and on Facebook here. (In fact, check out our GWB 2.0 website for all of our social media endeavors as a blog and law firm.).

As you know, we here at Abnormal Use often pause to reflect upon sentimental anniversaries.  We can’t help it.

Today, we offer this piece on the tenth anniversary of my graduation from Baylor Law School.

It was February 9, 2002, in Waco, Texas, when I graduated from law school, ten years ago today.

First things first, yes, I graduated from law school in February.  This is due to the fact that Baylor Law School, which runs on quarters rather than semesters, occasionally prompts an odd graduation date.  So, there I was, in February of 2002, preparing to graduate and take the February bar exam later that month.  That’s just the way we roll at Baylor University.

I had always enjoyed my time at Baylor Law.  A relatively small institution, it boasted a total of 450 enrolled students at the time of my graduation a decade ago.  When I started at Baylor Law in May of 1999 (another unusual start date, due to the quarter system), I had only 30 or so students in my starting quarter.  You always hear the stories of cutthroat classmates at larger schools; but this was not the case at Baylor, as the school was simply too small for anyone to get away with such antics.  Really, there was an unusual esprit de corps in the student body, brought about both by the size of the institution but also the shared looming dread of Baylor’s very difficult third year curriculum (a mandatory year long advocacy and civil procedure program known as Practice Court).

For the occasion of my graduation, my parents, my brother, and even some friends, trekked to Waco.  Few of them had previously visited my fair city. Most only knew the town because of its relatively recent notoriety from the Branch Davidian standoff just a decade before.  But we all met at the brand new Sheila and Walter Umphrey Law Center, which had just opened a few months before in the fall of 2001.  (In the late 1990s, Baylor Law alum Walter Umphrey, a famous Plaintiff’s attorney from Beaumont, Texas, gave a $10 million gift to Baylor to fund most of the new building. There is a dash of historical irony in the funding source, as Baylor has traditionally been defense oriented in its legal philosophy but its palatial new building was funded mostly by a trial lawyer’s mighty gift.). However, in 1999, I began my legal education in the old Morrison Hall.  At that time, the administrators of the law school knew that they would soon be building a brand new law center, and so, most funds were earmarked for that purpose and general upkeep of  old Morrison Hall was – shall we say – not the highest priority.  It wasn’t until August of 2001 that the new building would be completed and opened.

In the autumn of 2001, the new law center was immense, immaculate, and quite simply, amazing.  So new was the building, in fact, that there were no televisions in the public areas of the building on September 11, 2001.  Many students sat in the student lounge by the radio, of all things, listening to the news in the same way people must have on December 7, 1941.

So it was, in February 2002, that we congregated at nearby Miller Chapel on the main campus for the graduation ceremony. Twenty six of us graduated that day, and the commencement speaker was Professor Gerald Powell, who taught me both Evidence and Advanced Evidence.  Just a few months before, in November, at the new law center’s first graduation ceremony, Umphrey himself was the commencement speaker. But Powell was someone all the graduating students knew well, as he had taught them all.  I had been his research assistant and in 2001 wrote a paper for him on the admissibility of email and Internet evidence, new topics back then.

Powell’s speech was weighty and very well received. It was just a few months after 9/11, and that tragedy was on every0ne’s mind.

That day, he said:

You can no longer focus on just yourself, on your career, or even on just your own family.  More will be asked of you.  As Americans, and especially as lawyers, you will carry with you great responsibilities.  After September 11, each of you must be willing to stand guard over our liberty, to serve your country selflessly, and, if the need arises, be a hero.

…

Each of us must take our turn as sentinels.  And as lawyers we have our own post to man.  Our watch is over the Constitution.  Our perimeter is the outposts of liberty.  Our weapon is the law.  Our mission is to see that justice is done.

…

[W]e also hope that each of you will have inside of you that seed of heroism perhaps dormant until a moment of truth, when it will spring forth in the energizing light of adversity to give us the hero we need.  And until that time comes, or whether it ever comes, we hope and pray that you will act heroically in the conduct of your everyday lives, professional, public and personal.

The speech was later circulated by email to those in attendance, likely by Baylor Law’s unofficial historian, Eric Nordstrom, who would graduate later that year.

After a reception at the law school, but before that evening’s festivities, I had a bit of free time, so my younger brother, Bert, and my old pal, Alistair Isaac, and I decided to do the one thing that I had never done in Waco but had always wondered about doing: visiting the remains of the infamous Branch Davidian compound.  In the late 1990’s and early 2000’s, and probably today, one cannot attend school in Waco and not be asked constantly by friends from other cities if you have visited “the compound.”  Prior to my graduation, I never got around to doing so, but it seemed like an appropriate final quest on the day of my graduation, my last official day as a student in the city.  So, we found a set of directions on the Internet (which are still online today!) and ventured out to find the compound.  I drove my 2000 Honda Civic with Bert and Alistair as passengers, and we followed the directions, but somehow, along the way, we found ourselves lost.  This was rural Central Texas.  We were in an area of large fields, farms, and farm houses.  There were not many commercial establishments at which to stop and ask directions.  In fact, as we slowed the car to look for places to ask for assistance, we saw one house with a large sign on it which exclaimed simply “Don’t ask!”  We took that advice.  A few minutes later, we drove past a field in which a farmer was plowing or riding a horse or doing something along those lines.  My brother hopped out of the vehicle and walked toward the man.  Before my brother could utter a word, the man said simply, “You’ve already passed it.  Go back a mile or two and take the left that you missed.”

How about that?

Even in February of 2002, the compound was no longer the structure you might recognize from the 1993 media coverage. There was a tree orchard planted to commemorate those who had not survived the standoff.  There was some minor portion of the housing structure still in place, but not really enough to recognize it for what it was.  On some level, the visit was anticlimactic; after being asked about the compound for all the years that I lived in Waco, it was just a field of sorts with a handful of derelict structures.  We saw a burned out passenger bus at the scene, which we later learned was the result of vandalism years afterward and not the standoff itself. (Alistair and I thought the old bus had something very cinematic about it, but that’s a different story for a different day). And that was basically it for the compound.  We returned back to the city and readied ourselves for the evening to come.

Later that night, we congregated at George’s Restaurant, a local watering hole that has been memorialized in Texas country songs in part for its Big O’s, large, very large glasses of beer.  The whole graduating class was there, as were many other friends and students, and I suppose that was the last time we were all together in the same room before scattering off to different corners of the world.

And that was ten years ago today.  At that time, I was 26 years old, having just reached that age a month before in late 2001.  My concept of being a lawyer was not completely uninformed, as Baylor focuses on the practical components of legal education (a topic we’ve discussed here on occasion).  Although I am confident that on that day I never paused to reflect upon what my career would be like ten years later, I certainly would not have predicted that I would be 1,000 miles away from Texas in North Carolina. But here I am.

It’s funny where life takes you.

So, what does it all mean? Like all the others who graduated that day, I’ve been a law school graduate for a decade.  For those of us who began and developed our careers during that time period, almost everything has always been online – whether it be treatises, the laws and statutes themselves, cases and orders, law review articles or other such things.  And, of course, as time has progressed, they have only become more accessible, with the advent of laptops, wifi, and of course, iPad apps.  However, unless graduates have been particularly lucky, trials have not been in abundance.  The older lawyers talk about the days in the 1970s when you could get called to court on a moment’s notice to try a case unexpectedly.  But those pesky discovery rules we learned in law school arm clients and advocates with enough information to accurately gauge exposure, and thus, trials can be (and are regularly) avoided.  There are fewer surprises, and the days of trial  by ambush are long in the past.   It’s a different world than the one our professors and bosses knew when they graduated.

The legal blogosphere came along just about ten years ago and facilitated great discussion about the (major and incredibly minor) issues of the day – which is a great boon to the profession.  But, really, when I look back at the last ten years, I don’t face some existential dilemma as to what might have been had I not become a lawyer.  Rather, I am reminded of the fun moments that the career has afforded me.  There are silly moments, and there are meaningful ones.  Most enjoyable are those moments, at a deposition, hearing, or trial, when you realize that your preparation and hard work are about to pay off and that no one else in the room has realized it yet.  That feeling, that sense of accomplishment and victory, moments before you officially prevail – is what makes being a lawyer fun and interesting.

This is not to say that every day offer such moments.  There are those weeks that we spend in faraway places reviewing documents in old warehouses without air conditioning.  There are long drives and long waits in airports and courthouse hallways.

But in the end, we realize that one appeal of this profession is that it is different every day.  There are new challenges to face with every case and every hearing and deposition.  Although fewer and fewer cases go to trial these days, we must remain vigilant and prepare in case the one we are working on at present does go that route. And that’s something I learned way back in Practice Court at Baylor Law.

(Special thanks to Jerri Cunningham, the Baylor Law School registrar, for confirming some details for me and forwarding me a copy of Professor Powell’s speech).

As we’ve previously mentioned, our editor Jim Dedman is now contributing one monthly post to the North Carolina Law Blog.  Last week, his fourth submission was published at that site.  The topic: “Will My Advocate Opponent Impeach Me With My Own Legal Social Media?”  Do we bloggers and Twitter users face risks in engaging in Internet commentary?  Might some of our opinions or blog posts come back to haunt us?  Might an Internet savvy advocate quote our own posts against us in some future case?

Well, let’s not get too worried about that.  Here’s how his post begins:

At a recent conference at the North Carolina Bar Association headquarters in Cary, I heard a new and much more interesting critique of legal blogging.  A seasoned litigator panelist suggested that whenever she is to appear in court against another lawyer, she always investigates whether that opponent maintains a law blog.  If so, she will scour and scrutinize those posts to see if her opponent has ever taken a position opposite to the one advanced against her in the case at hand.  If she finds evidence of such, she can alert the tribunal that her opponent has taken a contradictory position on the relevant law in the past when writing, presumably objectively, on a legal blog. This is, for lack of a better term, impeachment in court by one’s own law blog.  Ouch.

But this does not seem to be a risk of legal blogging specifically but rather communicating one’s ideas and views generally.  For decades and decades and decades before the advent of legal blogs, lawyers delivered speeches, made presentations to trade and legal groups, and authored law review articles.  Sure, that may have been before everything was neatly placed online, easily searchable, and simple to locate in seconds, but there have always been ways in which one lawyer can find the writings of another if that lawyer knows where to look. Like most things, though, that task has been made far, far easier in the digital age, though it could be done before.

There’s more, so click here to read the rest.

In the end, Jim concludes there’s probably not an increased risk simply because one is blogging.  But, in all such things, beware nonetheless.

If you’re reading this site, you already know that we here at Abnormal Use are huge Internet nerds, and of course, that love of such things extends to Twitter. (An aside: Don’t forget, you can follow up on Twitter at @gwblawfirm). Well, our editor had his 15 minutes of Twitter fame this week when one of his tweets was read on national television on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos.” You see, at some point last week, the online team for “This Week” asked the show’s viewers to submit questions for the show to be read by Mr. Stephanopoulos (who was vacationing last week and replaced for the day by ABC’s Jake Tapper). Viewers were encouraged to ask questions relating to the issues of the day and use the hashtag #askgeorge. Well, our editor couldn’t resist, and the most important question he could muster was the one you see above: “Why isn’t George F. Will on Twitter?” And as you see above, this past Sunday, “This Week” broadcast that tweet on national television!  Not only did they do that, they took the question to George Will, whose reply is below:

Said he: “I don’t think in 140 characters, but in 751 word chunks.”

He’s, of course, referring to newspaper column link, but interestingly, as some observed, his reply was less than 140 characters.

You may not think this is as cool as we do, but if you do, you can watch the episode in question on the ABC News website. Click here for the online version of the 1/29 episode and fast forward to 46:45 in the video. You’ll then see the tweet itself and the discussion thereof.

And, alas, if you’re bored with today’s discussion of Twitter and political talk shows, don’t worry, we’ll return to legal themed comic book covers next week.

Well, it’s Groundhog Day, again. We here at Abnormal Use are immense fans of the Bill Murray film by that name (and in fact, our editor even saw it at the theatre as part of a pre-release sneak preview!).  One thing we litigators can enjoy is the fact that each day presents a new challenge.  On Tuesday, it’s the deposition of a Plaintiff in a products case. On Wednesday, it’s a hearing on this, that, or the other. On Thursday, it’s a mediation.  On Friday, it’s something entirely different, maybe trial.  So, unlike Phil Connors in Groundhog Day, we can usually avoid the quotidian monotony depicted in the film and be thankful that every day is, usually, quite different from the one before.

Happy Groundhog Day from Abnormal Use.

So, we thought we would escape from the world a bit this past weekend and revisit Superman Returns, the 2006 reboot of the Man of Steel film franchise directed by Bryan Singer and starring Brandon Routh as Supes.  Well, before we even reached the halfway point of the film, we bristled at a very basic legal mistake.  Villian Lex Luthor is a free man because Superman “missed a court date.”  Well, that’s an interesting procedurla twist.  Specifically, though, a character remarks that “the appellate court” called Superman as a witness, and Superman – whose extended absence from the Earth is a key plot point of the film – didn’t appear when summoned.  Thus, Luthor goes free.  But appellate courts don’t call witnesses!  (Note: We’re obviously not the first ones to point this out, but we are the most recent bloggers to be irked by it.).  By the way, that’s the cover of the DC Comics Superman Returns comic adaptation depicted above.

The wonderful, wonderful Etta James will be missed by us.  May she rest in peace.

Katherine Frye of the North Carolina Law Blog asks: “Should I Delete My Facebook Account?”  She’s not asking whether she, the lawyer, should delete her own Facebook account, but how she, as an advocate, should address her clients concerns about their own social media profiles.

If you follow Zoey Deschanel’s litigation choices, then you must see here.

Read this 1985 letter from Roger Enrico, the chief executive officer of PepsiCo, on the release of New Coke. (Hat Tip: Letters of Note).

One year ago today on January 25, 2011, we first published our Stella Liebeck McDonald’s Hot Coffee Case FAQ post.  We are still proud of that piece, which we intended to serve as an objective accounting of the case using only the primary sources, pleadings, motions, and other court documents, as well as some contemporary media coverage of the case from 1994.  It is by far one of our most popular posts, and we suspect that it led to later citations in The New York Times and NPR. We have written a lot about that case since then, and we hate to dwell, so we would just direct your attention back to the FAQ file once more today, its birthday.

Coincidentally, in 2011, the Liebeck case reemerged in the mainstream media as a talking point, primarily due to the release of Plaintiff’s attorney Susan Saladoff’s would-be documentary, “Hot Coffee.” Apparently ignoring our objective accounting of the case, some have continued to promote the myth that McDonald’s serves an unreasonably dangerous product. Just this week, The Pop Tort blog set out on a campaign to highjack a McDonald’s Twitter promotion. The blog has encouraged its readers to utilize the company’s #McDStories hashtag to spread the word that “seriously injuring customers and then viciously fighting them in court . . .” is wrong. Or, in the alternative, you can tweet about meeting your spouse over a honey mustard dipped McNugget.

Of course, we are all entitled to our opinions. We just hope our FAQ file has helped provide you with some basis for them – whatever they may be.

Depicted above is the cover of Batman Gotham Adventures #27, published not so long ago in 2000.  Here’s our question: If Batman has been, as the cover suggests,  “wrongfully accused” and jailed, why have his jailers permitted him to remain in costume? Surely it is a violation of the Gotham City Detention Center’s policies and procedures to permit a criminal defendant to remain in costume.  We suspect that Batman ultimately escapes this predicament, but we also surmise that if he had been revealed to be Bruce Wayne during his confinement his flight from justice would have been much, more difficult.  By the way, this is not the first time we’ve looked at a cover from this series.  See here for a similarly puzzling cover.

According to this tweet by our own Stuart Mauney, the South Carolina Bar House Delegates debated the rule against perpetuities yesterday.  There’s something we never thought we’d hear of again.  What next? The rule in Shelley’s case?

For years and years, we’ve loved The Onion.  This week, that satirical paper published a piece entitled, “Supreme Court Overturns ‘Right v. Wrong.’”  That’s big news.

Lawyerist asks its lawyer readers: “Is Facebook ruining your life?” We’ll get back to you on that one.

Jeremy Grabill of The Product Liability Monitor pauses to comment upon the release of Susan Saladoff’s “Hot Coffee” documentary on DVD.  Grabill notes: “[F]or every sympathetic plaintiff that Ms. Saladoff (the film’s producer/director) presents, there are no doubt an equal (if not greater) number of truly frivolous claims that could be chronicled, especially in the mass tort context.” As you know, you can follow our continuing coverage of that film and the fabled Stella Liebeck McDonald’s hot coffee case here.

If there is one thing we loathe, and we mean really despise, it’s the exasperating “Objection!” television lawyers make unaccompanied by any other statement clarifying the basis of the objection.  Television lawyers, according to this Tampa criminal justice lawyer, seem to believe that if they merely yell the word “Objection!” with some exaggerated sense of annoyance, disdain, or self-righteous outrage, then the television judge, impressed by the level of indignation apparent from the face and voice of the objecting attorney, must therefore rule on his or her behalf.  However, we all know that such objections are rubbish, as they do not preserve any error whatsoever on appeal.  But screenwriters don’t know that, and accordingly, the world is a terrible place indeed.

Sure, sure, we understand that television lawyers play by a different set of rules than do real litigators.  In that simplified world of television courtroom drama, trials are quick and easy, closing statements last only two minutes, and lawyers speechify beyond belief.  To get the hang of how lawyers behave in reality, you must learn more about Whitney S. Boan, P.A. We believe that these irksome television objections occur so often, so frequently, that they must be stopped, and we here at Abnormal Use have got to stop them.

Accordingly, we now call upon Hollywood screenwriters to write follow up justifications for all objecting television lawyers.  These follow up clarifications can be short and quick so as to not disrupt the narrative flow of the television program.  For example, a lawyer can “Objection, hearsay!” or “Objection, badgering the witness!” or even, for the sake of the old school practitioners, “Objection, res gestae!”  Sure, these objections may be just as deficient as the use of the single word, but at least it would be some type of improvement from one we typically see on such programs.  Let’s at least make these objecting television lawyers seem somewhat competent, eh?  Perhaps the most ambitious among those screenwriters will instruct their characters to offer even more substantive objections, citing rules, cases, or courtroom custom.  Then, perhaps, we at Abnormal Use could once again watch legal dramas withour frustration.

(As an aside, we must share a remark made by our evidence professor many years ago indicating that only television lawyers say “Objection, ask and answered” and that the proper objection for practicing litigators is “Objection, repetitious.”)

In fact, we’d also like to see television judges do a bit more than respond with single words, as well.  On many shows, you will only hear the judge say “Sustained!” or “Denied!” If you are lucky, maybe the judge will say something like “I’ll allow it” or “Move along, counselor,” but that’s it.  Come on, television judges! Apparently in the Hollywood legal television program Mad Libs employed by screenwriters, that’s about all they can permit a judge to say on screen.  We can do better!

We here at Abnormal Use and Gallivan, White, & Boyd, P.A. celebrate the legacy and leadership of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In honor of the occasion, we direct you to this website from ABC News, which offers a complete transcript of Dr. King’s famous “I Have A Dream” speech. As you know, we here at the firm now have offices in three cities in the Carolinas. Today, our offices are closed. For a listing of MLK Day events in Upstate South Carolina see here, for Columbia, SC, see here, and for Charlotte, North Carolina, see here. (By the way, the comic book cover depicted above is that of Golden Legacy #13, published in 1972. The Fitzgerald Publishing Company, which produced that comic book series dedicated to African American history, has posted the entire contents of this issue on its website here.).