The right client can take bad news

Think about what it will be like to deliver bad news to a client before you take the case

Create realistic expectations from day one – that advice is crucial to the attorney- client relationship, and never more so than when the attorney has to deliver bad news. Pick the right clients, don’t deliver bad news by e mail and have a plan to present. Those are some of the options Randall Ryder presents on Lawyerist for How to Deliver Bad News. Likely you all can add your own such as don’t leave a voice mail and don’t let your client hear it from the other side if you can help it (this is a serious concern in dissolution cases).

Should juveniles be held to adult competency standards?

On the American Judges Association blog, Judge Kevin Burke presents an abstract from “Eliminating the Competency Presumption in Juvenile Delinquency Cases,” from the Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy. The arguments make sense, especially when one remembers, as author Professor David Katner points out, “The recent decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court recognize the developmental and organic brain differences between adults and juveniles.”

A bad decision for bankruptcy attorneys

Yesterday, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, 6-3, that the Bankruptcy Code does not allow a bankruptcy court to award attorney’s fees to law firms for work performed in defending a fee application in court. Schadenfreude alert: In this particular case, Baker Botts and its co-counsel won’t be getting a $5 million fee award they received for their work for troubled copper company ASARCO.