Monday Mashup (Updated)

Pretty tough sports weekend with the Fins and Canes heartbreakers. At least the blog fantasy team whooped SFLawyers. Not a lot happening today.... So let's check out what's going on around the net:

Rumpole has been all over the state court email fiasco.

Perhaps the state judges should take their cue from Justice Thomas and hush. Yes, he was talking about oral arguments:

Thomas — who hasn't asked a lawyer a question during arguments in nearly four years — said he and the other eight justices virtually always know where they stand on a case by reading legal briefs before oral arguments.
"So why do you beat up on people if you already know? I don't know, because I don't beat up on 'em. I refuse to participate. I don't like it, so I don't do it," Thomas said during an appearance before law students at the University of Alabama.
Thomas didn't name names, but fellow conservative Justice Antonin Scalia is generally considered the court's most aggressive questioner during oral arguments. President Barack Obama's lone nominee so far, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, isn't afraid to ask questions either.
Thomas scoffed at the idea that the justices try to use questions to influence the opinions of fellow members of the court.
"All nine of us are in the same building," he said. "If we want to sway each other we know where we are. We don't need oral arguments to do that. It doesn't make any sense to me."

The Supremes will be hearing the juvenile sentencing cases from Florida in a couple weeks. The ABA covers it here:

As any parent knows,” children are different. So said U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy more than four years ago in Roper v. Simmons. There, a deeply divided court ruled 5-4 that executing those who committed murder as ju­veniles vio­lated the Eighth Amendment’s proscription against cruel and unusual punishment. Part of the reason, the court said, was that juveniles were less cul­pable, less mature and less responsible than adults.
“The reality that juveniles still struggle to define their identity means it is less supportable to conclude that even a heinous crime committed by a juvenile is evidence of irretrievably depraved character,” Kennedy wrote for the majority.
“From a moral standpoint,” he added, “it would be misguided to equate the failings of a minor with those of an adult, for a greater possibility exists that a minor’s character deficiencies will be reformed.”
This month the court returns to the subject of juvenile justice by examining what has been termed the penultimate punishment for juveniles, life without parole.
In a pair of cases from Florida, Graham v. Florida and Sullivan v. Florida, the court must determine whether Roper’s reasoning—that juvenile defendants are fundamentally different from adult defendants—extends from the death penalty to life without parole. Arguments are scheduled for Nov. 9.

UPDATE -- Another Vanessa Blum video report this morning!

Columbus Day edition

What a strange day -- courts are closed, but schools are open. It only took 10 minutes to get downtown on US1... Apparently, the DBR didn't take the day off. All kinds of fun stuff today, including Vanessa Blum's story on billing rates and her awesome video report:



There's also a story securities cases, which SFL likes because of the new Scott Dimond photo.

And John Pacenti dials in on UBS account holders seeking amnesty.

Jay Weaver at the Herald was busy this weekend on Alan Mendelsohn and Helio Castroneves.

Canes are #9... Dolphins will beat the Jets tonight. And the blog fantasy team racked up a win. And that's your Columbus day edition.

I'm back

Hey everyone. I'm back. A big shout out to Vanessa Blum for filling in last week while I was out tending to the new Markus bambina.

Speaking of Vanessa, you all should go over here to the South Florida Daily Blog and vote for her and Dore for their guest-blogging on the interviews of the district judge and U.S. Attorney applicants. (UPDATE -- I just checked and we're in second. Come on people... Go vote!)

Judge Graham is back from his summer vacation and picked up the prestigious William H. Hastie award at the National Bar Association Convention in San Diego presented by the Judicial Council.

Another NG for the FPD's office last week. This time Ayana H. and Sowmya B. pick up the win in an illegal reentry case.

Good guy Dan Rashbaum has left the U.S. Attorney's office and has joined Matt Menchel in the Miami office of Kobre Kim.

Nick Bogert is moving to Chicago after 30 years of reporting in South Florida. He's having a party on Saturday, August 22 from 7-10PM at Pacific Time Restaurant 35 NE 40th St., Miami. Go wish Nick well. (I remember one exchange I had with Nick a couple years back, after the Gilberto Rodriguez-Orejuella plea. There was a mass of cameras waiting for us outside of court, and I said that Gilberto was honorable for saving his family and not snitching; Nick yelled "Are you claiming that Gilberto Rodriguez is an honorable man after everything that he has done?" It was a fair question, and I stood by my answer.)

Monday round up

Hi all and welcome to Monday! Vanessa Blum here, holding down the fort for DOM, while he welcomes his third daughter into the world. Is that guy a slacker or what?

1. First, in the name of shameless self promotion: Definitely check out my cover story in the DBR—a scintillating profile of Miami lawyer Stephen Zack, the first Hispanic attorney elected to head the ABA. Also from the DBR (this one’s John Pacenti’s): should biometric data, such as retina scans, be used to ID illegal immigrants?

2. Second, this isn’t a federal court story, but I can’t resist linking to Paula McMahon’s Saturday article from the Sun Sentinel: Is a severed head found in Broward County enough to trigger local jurisdiction?

Broward prosecutors said that even though it's unclear where the 41-year-old was killed, the only part of her body that was recovered was found here and that under Florida law, that is sufficient to prosecute the two men charged here with her murder.

The defense argued that her body wasn't recovered and that it's more likely she was killed in New York. They hope Circuit Judge Michael Gates will rule that Broward prosecutors don't have legal jurisdiction to prosecute the case.

That’s all for now folks. I’ll be here all week, so e-mail news to vanessabblum@gmail.com.

Friday news and notes

1. UBS got pushed one more week, till August 10. Looks like it might settle. From the WSJ blog:

In a major break in a massive tax-evasion investigation, UBS AG and the governments of Switzerland and the U.S. have reached a settlement that could force UBS to turn over identities of thousands of account holders, a Justice Department attorney told a U.S. District Court judge Friday morning. ...
Stuart Gibson, a Justice Department tax division attorney, didn’t detail the settlement in a conference call with Judge Alan Gold that included lawyers for UBS and the Swiss government.
A hearing scheduled for Monday in Miami was postponed until Aug. 10, at which point more details are expected to be released. The judge scheduled another conference call with parties in the case for next Friday.
The Internal Revenue Service has demanded the identities of 52,000 U.S. account holders at UBS. UBS and the Swiss government have claimed that turning over those names would violate Swiss bank secrecy provisions.

2. Julie Kay special for the Herald on law firms cutting pay:

As law firms continue to lose money in a tough economy, their cost-cutting has moved from layoffs to a new strategy -- slashing lawyers' salaries.
Several firms in South Florida have instituted across-the-board salary cuts for lawyers in recent weeks -- the latest being Holland & Knight, one of South Florida's largest firms, which announced cuts of up to 10 percent Wednesday.
``Law firms have been forced to manage more carefully all of their expenses,'' Holland & Knight Managing Partner Steve Sonberg said in a statement. ``Like many other firms, Holland & Knight is reducing the base salaries of its associates, with limited exceptions.''
The reductions, Sonberg said, would range up to 10 percent. The firm is also chopping salaries of some non-lawyer ``senior counsel and other professionals,'' with an average overall reduction of 7 percent, he said.
Other firms to reduce lawyer salaries in recent weeks include Akerman Senterfitt, Squire Sanders and Ruden McClosky. Carl Schuster, managing partner at Ruden McClosky, said the across-the-board measure was in place until the end of the year when the firm hopes
to reinstate the original salaries.
He wouldn't disclose percentage cuts at the Fort Lauderdale firm.
Becker & Poliakoff cut lawyers' salaries 12 percent in 2008, but reinstated the original salaries three months later and repaid lawyers the difference, according to managing partner Alan Becker.

3. Next week I won't be able to blog, so we will be very very lucky to have the wonderful Vanessa Blum as our guest blogger. If anyone else wants to pitch in, let me know.

It's a special guest appearance by...

Vanessa Blum! In a "special to the Review," she covers the White & Case scandal:

Ten years ago, it would have been the stuff of law firm gossip. But in the age of e-mail, blogs and text messaging, the story of a messy affair between a Miami corporate attorney and a married mother of four has spiraled into a much bigger headache for the century-old law firm White & Case. First came mass e-mails from the woman’s husband detailing liaisons between his wife and an associate in the firm’s Miami office. Then the lurid e-mails landed on a popular legal blog where more than 100,000 people have viewed them. The associate’s name is not being published by the Daily Business Review. He did not respond to a phone message by deadline Monday or an e-mail sent Friday to his law firm address. A home phone number listed in the blog material for the associate is not accepting incoming calls, and a cell number reaches a recording saying it is not a working number.

We're happy to see Vanessa back and covering South Florida. She now is the second most famous guest star, after Heather Locklear from Melrose place.

The Sun-Sentinel *sucks*

I had a lot to post about tonight -- from Paris to dumb associates to heavy Cuban accents -- but instead I'm going to tell you how stupid the Sun-Sentinel is. That paper, which has always given the Herald a run for its money, had one of the young star reporters in South Florida: Vanessa Blum. And it fired her today.

Why?

Well, the Sun-Sentinel let Vanessa go today because it has partnered up with the Herald and decided that it could simply buy the Herald federal court coverage for its paper. The Herald will use some Sun-Sentinel coverage of local school board stuff for its paper. And on and on. Rumpole made the point about the dying newspaper business here when he was covering the Herald's firing of Susannah Nesmith:

Here's the point with the BBC stuff- if these trends keep up, local news will soon be gone. No one to report on County Commissioners doubling dipping into their expense accounts; no one to wander the hallways of the courthouse at 2PM and write about all the Judges missing; no one to write about the cops accused of misconduct and no one to write about the injustice of trying defendants over and over until the government gets a conviction.

We can function without Susannah Nesmith. We cannot function without the Susannah Nesmith's of the world. It's a scary thought that the free press is fading away not with an assault against the first amendment, but because the morons who made the business decisions for newspapers didn't see five years ago Craigslist was about to cripple their classified ad income.

President Obama recently referred to a quote from the nation's third president, Thomas Jefferson: "If he had the choice between government with newspapers or newspapers without government, he'd choose the latter." (Rumpole, I just cited to you, Obama, and Jefferson to make a point. What's wrong with that picture?)

Now, this is no knock on Jay Weaver and Curt Anderson, who are also friends of the blog, but they can't cover the entire District by themselves. And of course we have the DBR, which is committed to covering the federal courts. But while they are covering a big case in Miami, who will be tending the store in Lauderdale? What about Palm Beach and Ft. Pierce? And Vanessa broke her share of Miami stories as well -- the latest being the sealing issues in the Mutual Benefits case, which everyone is now looking in to.

I understand budgets and the crisis facing the newspaper industry. But what's the point of having a paper if you are giving up your local coverage? The whole reason people buy the Sun-Sentinel is because of reporters like Vanessa. Without that local coverage, why do we need a Ft. Lauderdale paper?

Vanessa will land on her feet -- she's smart, personable and a great reporter. I wonder where the Sun-Sentinel will land if it keeps this up.

UPDATE -- Bob Norman has a list of the others who have been laid off.