Legal Blog of Attorney Greg Curry

Recently, a federal judge in Illinois ordered Dish Network to pay $280 million in fines for robocalls and for calling people on the Do Not Call Registry. According to news accounts , one of Dish Network's defenses was that the companies doing the illegal calling were independent contractors, and, therefore, Dish Network can't be held liable for their actions. The judge rejected this argument. An independent contractor is different than a salaried or hourly employee, and they are treated differently under the law. Employers often hire independent contractors to do short or long-term projects. Or the independent contractors can even act like a full-time employee in everything but name. Often, employers can be held liable for wrongful acts committed by its employees , if those acts were committed during the course of the employee doing his or her job. But usually not for the wrongful acts of independent contractors, even if they caused harm while performing work for the ...

The evidence or fact-gathering phase of a lawsuit is called "discovery". Each party is entitled to demand various kinds of evidence from the other party or parties in preparation for a possible trial. Two common kinds of discovery demands are a "Demand for Discovery and Inspection" and "Interrogatories" (which are written questions, answered in writing, under oath). (Psst: Interrogatories are basically a waste of time, but that will be left for another day.) In a recent decision , a New York appeals court affirmed the ruling of a lower court, throwing out a case for plaintiff's failing to respond to defendants' discovery demands. In that case, an LLC sued an architecture firm for malpractice and breach of contract. During the discovery phase, defendants architects served plaintiff with a Demand for Discovery and Inspection and Interrogatories. You only have 20 days to respond or object to discovery demands, or you lose a lot of rights in how yo...

Maybe this is just a pet peeve of mine. And maybe it's a pet peeve because I'm a lawyer and am looking forward to a long, fruitful career as a lawyer. But otherwise very smart people studying and developing Artificial Intelligence keep saying lawyers are one of the most obvious professions to be replaced by robots. Yet they continue to demonstrate that they don't understand what lawyers actually do. This is from a May, 2015 article  that appeared on pbs.org: Attorneys: Though it’s unlikely we’ll see robots litigating in courtrooms any time soon, Ford says that some highly billable work normally reserved for seasoned attorneys is in the process of being automated.“We are already seeing an impact in fields like law, with entry level and paralegal jobs which involve document review. It used to be a manual process. They had to read through documents. Now that’s done algorithmically using artificial intelligence.” “There’s a new emerging technology called quantitative lega...