Articles Posted in Maryland Legal News

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the median salary for a law clerk is $39,780 a year. I didn’t clerk because I had a job lined up and figured it would be best to get started. Is clerking a good idea? First, there is the obvious question: do you have a choice? If you don’t have a choice and clerking is your only option, you jump on that opportunity.

If you have choices, I think it really depends on the judge. Because the reports of the experience vary from “Awesome! Invaluable!” to “Torture!”

A 47-year-old Lutherville/Essex attorney/magician who – frighteningly – runs a children’s entertainment company in Baltimore County was arrested and charged with flying to Florida to have sex with a 14-year-old boy, It was a “Predators” type deal: the guy was really talking to undercover cops who posed as both the boy and – perhaps more creepily – the boy’s caregiver. So this guy was all pumped up that everyone was on board.

This magician/lawyer – a combination that was bound to end badly – claims to be a criminal lawyer yet he fell for the ole “bring a basketball and a movie so we can identify your pathetic self” play.

The story is in the Baltimore Sun and the Maryland Daily Record. I love the Daily Record’s title that the arrest could spur an Attorney Grievance Commission. Really? Ya think?

We get a lot of traffic on this blog for law students looking to read about their bar results. When the Maryland bar exam results were coming out on Friday, we just got tons of traffic. The traffic has died off naturally but continues strong. Who is it? Surely, it is not people looking to see if they themselves passed the exam. I suspect it is curious ex-boyfriends and ex-girlfriends.

Listen, your ex-girlfriend passed the exam. You should have never dumped her. She is going places. Now, I’m not saying she has a job or anything; it is a tough economy. Still. You made a mistake.

New Hampshire provides the latest in reminders that this is not a good idea.

The Washington Post has a good article from a lawyer at Joseph, Greenwald & Laake on the Limited Power of Attorney Act, a new Maryland law that creates new hoops before power of attorney can be transferred.

The South Carolina Supreme Court anonymously admonished a lawyer who had sex with the wife of his client with whom he had three open cases.

Our law firm’s general policy on these blogs is not to name names when lawyers screw up (or doctors or anyone else really for that matter). If you did something stupid, you did something stupid, but we don’t want to be the landing place to rub that in your face on Google. But, I can assure you, the Court of Appeals of Maryland does not share this view. So if a Maryland lawyer sleeps with a client’s spouse, you can expect the court to name names and to give a steeper punishment than a mere admonishment.

The Maryland Court of Appeals agrees with the CSA, reversing a Calvert Court trial court’s finding on no ambiguity in a waivers (yes, with an “s”) of subrogation clause in a form contract governing the construction of a restaurant.

You can find the opinion here.

The New York Times has an interesting piece about grade inflation. Apparently, some schools are going back and increasing the GPA of all of its students in an effort to make them more competitive.

As an anonymous commenter alludes to on Overlawyered, this is not an awful idea at top tier schools. But at law schools that are not in the top tier, students need to separate themselves by doing particularly well or potential employers have no reason to take a chance on students who cannot be distinguished by GPA.

Grade inflation in and of itself is of no consequence. These days, half of the graduating class of a high school has a GPA better than 4.0. The key is class rank. As long as lines are cut well enough to allow law firms to figure out who the top tier students are at average law schools, grade inflation is not really a big deal.

The U.S. News and World Report law school rankings may be flawed. Wait, we knew that already. But they may be more flawed than we thought.

In the much anticipated 2011 U.S. News & World Report law school rankings, 74 schools did not report their employment numbers at the time of graduation. You don’t have to be Oliver Stone to conclude that the vast majority of these law schools were covering up their employment numbers because, believe me, everyone gets the importance of the U.S. News & World Report rankings. But the schools who blew off reporting their employment numbers were just automatically assigned a number that is approximately 30% lower than the number of graduates employed nine months later.

So law schools that played by the rules got burned. Somewhere, some kid with a magazine is making a wrong decision on which law school to attend based on a ridiculous use of statistics. My only solace is that kid should not have been using a magazine to pick his school in the first place.

Incredible fact of the day: Of Elena Kagan gets confirmed, every Supreme Court Justice will have attended Harvard or Yale law schools.