Tips for Summer Associates from law schools are commonplace.  Earlier, we referenced NYU’s memo.  Citing the New York Law Journal, the University of Connecticut reminds summers to be social, but not too social.  Last year, the University of Wisconsin-Madison noted that “legal research in a business setting may seem very different compared to your academic experience.” True enough.  So, we asked a few large law librarians for their input.  Here’s what they had to say:

Use the firm’s Library Take advantage of your firm librarians’ knowledge. Put the librarian on your ‘resource-to-check list.’ Visit your library often and learn how to use its resources . . . both ‘E’ and hard copy.  Work with the Librarians and Reference Attorneys to setup search parameters.

Bill Carefully Make sure you assign the correct client ID for any research you perform.  It cannot be changed. Also, your law firm password is not the same as your law school access. Any research you perform will be billed to a client.   Plan your research accordingly and, always bill your time.

Research Carefully  Attend training sessions offered by the firm.  Take WL/WLN e-learning classes to refresh and/or perfect your research skills. Ask questions when you receive a research assignment, so that you are as clear as possible as to what the attorney would like you to find. Deliver your work in a timely manner. It is your professional and ethical responsibility to learn the tools of you chosen profession.  Most of all, ask questions before starting a project!

Work Hard: Capitalize on all opportunities given to you during the summer. Ask questions. Demonstrate a willingness to learn. Work for as many attorneys as possible. Earn the respect of others by being respectful to those around you.

 Special thanks to Susan Harlow,  Peggy Martin, and Account Managers  for their contributions to this post.

These days, tips for summer associates come in many forms. This NYU Memo is a gem – hat tip Constitutional Daily. Throughout the summer, Westlaw Reference Attorneys will be serving summer associates in our own way — in any way we can. Be it over the phone (1-800-REF-ATTY), on this Blog, on Twitter (@WestlawRefAtty), or on Facebook. To start off, we collected nuggets of summer associate wisdom from former summer associates (now Westlaw Reference Attorneys).  Here are 5 tips from Westlaw Reference Attorneys who worked at Dorsey & Whitney; one in the summer of 2005, the other in 2007.

1. Learn the name of each attorney at the firm that is involved in the summer associate program.  Usually there is a committee at the firm.  Take advantage of every opportunity you have to meet and speak with them, as they often are the ones making the final hiring decisions.

2. Everyone is just as stressed as you are.

3. Being a summer associate is all about building relationships in your prospective firm.  Make it a priority to attend as many summer associate events as possible.  Not only will it signal to the recruiting attorneys that you are interested in and enthusiastic about the firm, but it also gives you a chance to meet many of the firm’s attorneys which could inform your decision as to which practice area of the firm to join.

4. Always have a positive, supportive attitude in interacting with fellow summer associates, even if you are competing with them for a limited number of job offers.  You will not make a positive impression on the firm if you are unsupportive or, worse, undermine your co-workers.

5. If you make a mistake, admit it honestly to the appropriate attorney.  No attorney is perfect, and it’s very likely that the consequences of having made a mistake will be much less serious than those of an attempt to hide a mistake.

Super Tuesday is upon us, and this seems as good a time as any to reflect on the intersection of Ohio, the presidency, and the courts.  While a broad number of topics fall under this umbrella, I want to focus on one, William Howard Taft, a leading Ohioan of his day and the only judge to have previously held the title of U.S. President.

Taft became Chief Justice of the United States in 1921, and went on to write 256 Cases while in that position (a simple search for ju(taft) in the SCT database shows this).  Likely his most famous opinion was in Olmstead v. U.S., 277 U.S. 438, which held that the 4th amendment’s prohibition on warrantless searches did not extend to wiretaps (a holding later reversed in Katz v. U.S., 389 U.S. 347).  But I was surprised to find that Olmstead is not Taft’s most cited case.  That distinction (found by using WestlawNext’s ‘Most Cited’ sort filter) goes to Carroll v. U.S., another search and seizure case.  Unsurprisingly, given that the cases are from the 1920s, both cases involved the illegal transportation of intoxicating liquors.

Before he was the only President to go on to be a Judge, Taft was the only Judge who went on to become a President (Truman technically held the title Judge, but his position was not judicial in nature).  He wrote 199 opinions while on the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals (available by doing the same ju(taft) search in cta6).

During his second tenure on the bench, Chief Justice Taft was integral in the passage of the Court Judge’s Bill of 1925, 68 Cong. Ch. 229, 43 Stat. 936.  This bill was notable for creating the Certiorari process for the Supreme Court, which before then took mandatory appeals from circuits and states.  A critical view of this bill and Chief Justice Taft’s involvement can be found at 100 Colum. L. Rev. 1643.  This may be his most influential act from his time on the bench (though if any Taft scholars out there disagree, please share your thoughts in the comments).  So, to any aspiring Presidents dealt a cruel fate by Ohio today or in years to come, remember: retirement is only the beginning.

Other Research References

FYI: The Office of the Federal Register has historical election results including Electoral Votes by State dating back to 1789. The cited source is the Senate Manual. Taft took Ohio’s 23 electoral votes in 1908. 

I finally got around to watching the movie Recount last weekend.  It wasn’t until after I finished watching that I realized I had chosen both the week of the just concluded primary in the state of Florida and the week of the 1 month anniversary of the very close vote in Iowa to watch.

The movie, for those who aren’t familiar, is a dramatization of the story of the Rresidential Election recount of 2000 in Florida, which began the day after the election and ended with the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Bush v. Gore, 531 U.S. 98.  The relevant details can be found in the opinion, and in the Florida Supreme Court opinion it overruled, Gore v. Harris, 772 So.2d 1243.

One of the film’s characters points to the oft-derided line in the decision*, which effectively rendered the entire decision non-precedential, and asked whether the court had ever written anything like it before.  I was able to find a few prior cases, and one subsequent case, though it appears the language is more likely to appear in concurrences or dissents.

Search:  consideration decision holding /15 limit! restrict! /15 present current “#before #us” /15 circumstance situation

Result: 24 Documents

Search: le(consideration decision holding /15 limit! restrict! /15 present current “#before #us” /15 circumstance situation)

Result: 9 Documents

The Florida Recount process forced every state to re-examine its election procedures, and a wave of reform legislation followed (for some discussion of this reform, see 73 FDMLR 1711).  Westlaw has a 50 State Survey of current ballot counting laws available at 0050 Surveys 8.   Also, the Reference Attorneys performed a WestCheck report on automatic recount statutes in November 2010. For your own (fairly) comprehensive list of statutes relating to recount procedures, try running pr(election) & sd(recount) in Statutes and Court Rules content. This finds 1832 relevant statutes, but a similar search in a state-specific database would yield a more manageable list.

If you want to learn more about the 2000 Presidential Recount, Westlaw still has the litigation materials in a special database: the database identifier is Preslit-Doc, and it includes numerous petitions and briefs filed by the parties, as well as court orders and oral argument transcripts.  I recommend a reading of the Suprme Court transcript, both for the quality of the arguments and for Joseph Klock’s mildly infamous inability to tell the justices apart.**

*“Our consideration is limited to the present circumstances, for the problem of equal protection in election processes generally presents many complexities.”  531 U.S. at 109.

**For more on this Mr Klock’s footnote in history, as well as a sense of how the litigation was viewed as it was going on, try the following search in allnews: joseph /3 klock /p justice /3 brennan souter.

Dennis Crouch recently noted that more U.S. utility patents were issued in 2011 than in any other year. We emulated his  research by using the following queries:

On Thomson Innovation: PY=([year]) NOT KI=(S?) NOT PN=(usre*);

On Westlaw: da([year]) and u.s. in US-UTIL

The Thomson Innovation search eliminates design patents by excluding Kind Codes, “S.”  It eliminates  Reissues by excluding publication numbers beginning with, “USRE.”   Westlaw has separate collections for Design and Utility patents (US-Design, US-Util).  Our results:

* We used Thomson Innovation’s US Class filter to acquire these results.

Thomson Innovation displays a maximum of 60K patents.  The Patent Office hasn’t issued fewer than 60K patents in a single year for quite some time. In 1950, there were 42,851 granted utility patents (Top US class was 346/033R or “Combined with external recording operating means”).  In 1900, there were 28,657 granted utility patents. (Top U.S. class was 431/110 or “Supported above upwardly facing fuel discharger”).  For this post, we did not do the work of breaking the  search into several parts in order to generate fewer than 60K results.  So, analysis for Top US class might vary with a more nuanced search.

“Small Claims Flash Mob.”  That’s what the LA Times is calling an enterprising Californian’s efforts to dissuade class members from settling their class claims with Honda.  A 2007 class action complaint alleges that Honda falsely advertised the fuel economy of Civic Hybrids (5:07-CV-00287). The class action settlement notice (pdf) offers rebates for as little as $100 towards the purchase of a new car.  Instead, Heather Peters is urging other Honda owners to take their individual claims to small claims courts, especially in California where the legislature recently raised the jurisdictional amount from $7,500 to $10,00.  See CA Civ Pro 116.221, amended by Senate bill 221.

The LA Times notes that,

If she’s successful in getting others to follow her example, Peters could inspire a whole new litigation strategy in the auto industry and other businesses. Working together but filing lawsuits independently, consumers could force companies to go mano a mano with individual plaintiffs in far-flung courtrooms nationwide.

Interestingly, there might be precedent for the flash mob strategy in California. Even if the cases were to be consolidated, the small claims court might maintain jurisdiction (thus, no attorneys allowed pursuant to CA Civ Pro 116.530.) California Jurisprudence notes that the small claims division was established to provide a forum to resolve  “minor” civil disputes.  The word “minor”

… refers to the financial value of the claim to the individual plaintiff. The jurisdictional amount limitations apply to each plaintiff’s individual claim, and the fact that on consolidation of the claims of several individual plaintiffs the aggregate amount is greater than the limit is immaterial. Thus, the small claims court had jurisdiction to hear 183 consolidated claims against a city alleging that city airport noise constituted a continuing nuisance causing damages to each claimant in the maximum jurisdictional amount for each claimant, even though the claims raised complex issues.

CAJUR COURTS § 227, discussing City and County of San Francisco v. Small Claims Court, 141 Cal. App. 3d 470, 190 Cal. Rptr. 340 (1st Dist. 1983).

RESEARCH REFERENCES

For related filings, try: (fuel /3 economy ) & TI(honda) in CA-FILING-ALL

Recommending a simple search for news and alerts.  Try, honda and fuel-economy and small-claims in ALLNEWS.

Note that the settlement notice cites 5 related cases:

Search results for ‘christmas’:

Patents:

U.S. Patent Applications, Granted Patents, and Patent Assignments Combined (US-PAT-COMB and US-PATPRE76): 20,943.

I used Thomson Innovation to Cluster roughly 1800 US granted patents and patent  applications where ‘christmas’ appeared in the title. Christmas tree stands and ‘holders’ dominate the category.  Light bulbs, lamps,  sockets and strings also make a strong showing.

Top US Classes: I also used Thomson Innovation to chart the Top 5 US Classes:

Grey Blue: 0470405 – Tree Trunk Supporting Base With Liquid Reservoir

Yellow: D111301 – Christmas Tree Stand

Red: 248524 – Plural means, vertically spaced

Lt Blue-Green: D11118

Purple: 362123

Other:

All State and Federal Cases (ALLCASES): 46,255

State and Federal Court Dockets (DOCK-ALL): 20,519

All State and Federal Court Filings and Briefs (BRIEF-ALL, FILING-ALL): 57,000

An impressive collection of  America Invents Act resources (free and paid-for) is being collected at a LinkedIn Group sponsored by Thomson Reuters.  They include BitLaw’s red-lined version of Title 35, a Husch Blackwell slide presentation, LegalEdCenter CLEs, and many others.  Several of these resources – and access to the LinkedIn group – can also be found at Thomson Reuter’s new America Invents site.

Westlaw Reference Attorneys are outlining strategies for some of our customer’s most common and challenging research tasks. Bill Josten just completed, Statutes of Limitation Research Strategies (pdf):

The first point that can cause hours of frustration is that, while there may be some exceptions, codified statutes will rarely refer to a Statute of Limitations in a chapter heading, a title, or a statute caption. More commonly, the relevant statutes will be grouped under headings like Limitation of Action, Time for Filing of Action, or even Proscription of Action. In New York, the relevant statutes are in the Civil Practice Law and Rules in an article entitled Limitations of Time. In California, they come under the Code of Civil Procedure in a title called Of the Time of Commencing Civil Actions. In these circumstances, browsing the Table of Contents may prove to be more of a hindrance than a help.

Upcoming documents will cover pre-trial discovery disputes, prior art challenges, and elements of uncommon actions.  Of course, we welcome your input.  If there’s a topic you’d like covered, let us know.

As you are no doubt aware, the National Transporation Safety Board announced recently that it is recommending a nation-wide ban on the non-emergency use of Personal Electronic Devices (PEDs) while operating a motor vehicle.

• The annoucement can be found on Westlaw at 2011 WL 6165016. 
•  The announcement notes that he NTSB’s full report will be available on the website in several weeks. You can also access accident investigation reports here  though the Gray Summit accident referenced in the announcement does not appear to be hyperlinked.
• The Virginia Tech report cited in the document appears here.
• Other Westlaw content includes National Transportation Safety Board Documents (NTSBDOCS).  The NTSB decisions database (FTRAN-NTSB) inlcudes aviation and marine cases only.