I see another major law firm has been sued for legal malpractice by a hedge fund manager and a distressed investment firm who claim that their lawyers didn’t advise them about a particular term in a deal involving tens of millions of dollars, if not more.

Reprimanded teacher objects to disclosure of the reprimand. The appellate court’s opinion in Marken v. Santa Monica-Malibu Unif. Sch. Dist. (Jan. 24, 2012) No. B231787 is an excellent recap of the California Public Records Act with respect to disclosure of certain records of public employees.

California’s Mechanic’s Lien Law (Civil Code section 3082 et seq.) is littered with short deadlines, which are further complicated by the rules of bankruptcy.

The recent ruling in Baeza v. Superior Court upheld the alternative nonadversarial prelitigation contractual provision utilized by one homebuilder.

Foreclosing trustee represented that the delinquency amount was about $22,000. Actually, this was about one-tenth the true amount of about $220000. The Court of Appeal shifted the loss to the trustee, ruling that the buyer could obtain the huge windfall.

We lawyers may want to keep this case handy to drop into a meet-and-confer letter to send to opposing counsel/party who plays discovery games and to warn our own clients that such games can be costly.

Many lawyers have seen an increase in the number of clients who stop paying them for their services. And, the legal malpractice industry reports that there has been an upswing in the number of legal malpractice claims against lawyers in the same time frame.

The new California Rules of Court have eliminated the requirement that paper copies of non-California authorities be lodged with the court when cited in a brief or memorandum.

The unanimous opinion of the First District Court of Appeal held that the trial court erred when it refused to allow a UCLA Law School professor to view the demographic data of the State Bar.

Not all statements by a union and its members are protected, even in the context of a strike or other union action.

Public employee pay and benefits have been hot topics of late, exacerbated by the fiscal crisis in California at all levels of government. This topic reached the courts when one of the state’s leading newspapers sought the records of a public employee retirement system.

Even California’s bent towards environmental protection could not prevent a court from agreeing that even trees may qualify as an unlawful “spite fence” in California. A “Spite Fence,” which may be prohibited by court order under California law, is defined as “[a]ny . . . structure” over 10 feet that was “maliciously erected or maintained for the purpose of annoying [a neighbor].”