A woman who took a two-month leave of absence from the Brooklyn District Attorney's office to film episodes on The Apprentice with Donald Trump is quitting her $50,000-a-year day job. But Mahsa Saeidi-Azcuy says she is doing so because her new-found celebrity is making it difficult for her to prosecute cases as an assistant DA, not because she was fired, reports the New York Law Journal "I left my job because I couldn't really be in a courtroom any more," she tells the legal publication. While, for the first time in her life, she doesn't have a career plan for…

For over a year, an elderly Chicago woman says, she was harassed at her South Side home by two boys, now 12 and 13. When the retiree returned home from grocery shopping Tuesday, she found two broken windows, saw the pair running away and called police. Then, as she was putting her purchases away, they returned. Standing atop a shed in her yard, they threw bricks at her when she went out onto her porch and told them to leave and began swearing at her, recounts the Chicago Tribune. Margaret Matthews, 68, called the police again ... and got her…

A onetime associate who worked for personal injury lawyer George Fleming revealed in courtroom testimony Wednesday that his onetime boss was disappointed about “a lousy $41 million” in fees earned in a fen-phen case. Jim Doyle testified Wednesday about fees and expenses in a fen-phen settlement obtained on behalf of 8,100 plaintiffs represented by Fleming, the Houston Chronicle reports. Ten of the former plaintiffs have sued Fleming, claiming they didn’t learn until after the settlement that the plaintiffs were charged for echocardiograms performed on 35,000 people who were rejected as clients because they were healthy. Doyle said he left Fleming’s…

Two lawyers in the Ohio Department of Public Safety are jobless after the agency's director accused them of routinely intercepting possibly confidential employee e-mails. Former top public safety lawyer Joshua Engel is accused of intercepting e-mails sent to the state inspector general and to the Columbus Dispatch newspaper, the Columbus Dispatch reports. Another agency lawyer, Pam Bolton, is accused of helping him. Thomas Stickrath, the state's public-safety director, told the Dispatch that he fired Engel and Bolton submitted her resignation. Stickrath said some of the intercepted e-mails could have contained confidential information. "Obviously, when you're dealing with the inspector general,…

Hulk Hogan has settled a lawsuit claiming Post Foods misappropriated his likeness in an advertisement for Cocoa Pebbles featuring a character called “Hulk Boulder.” Under the settlement, the commercial featuring a fight between Hulk Boulder and a victorious Bam-Bam will no longer be aired, the St. Petersburg Times reports. Other terms of the settlement are confidential. Hogan, whose real name is Terry Bollea, said in the lawsuit filed in May that he used the name Hulk Boulder earlier in his career. The Hulk Boulder of the cereal commercial had blond hair and a Fu Manchu mustache, and bore a striking…

The pay is low and the hours are long, but the competition is stiff for jobs as adjunct law professors. Adjunct professors typically earn a “four-figure stipend” for each class they teach, compared to salaries for tenured college professors that can reach into the six figures, the Wall Street Journal reports. And some adjuncts give back in the form of school donations that eclipse their meager salaries. But that hasn’t discouraged adjunct job applicants at New York University School of Law. NYU has only a few adjunct law prof openings each year, but it fields hundreds of applications. “In a…

Updated: Two classmates are accused of secretly live-streaming a New Jersey college student’s gay sexual encounter days before he committed suicide by jumping off the George Washington Bridge into the Hudson River. Gay rights advocates are calling the death of Tyler Clementi a hate crime and an example of the effects of intolerance, report the New York Times, the New Jersey Star-Ledger and the Associated Press. Clementi’s roommate, 18-year-old Dharun Ravi, and another classmate, 18-year-old Molly Wei, are charged with invasion of privacy in the Internet broadcast. Middlesex County prosecutor Bruce Kaplan is weighing whether there's enough evidence to add…

Lawyers can’t use trickery to obtain evidence on Facebook and other social networking sites, according to a new ethics opinion. The opinion (PDF) by New York City Bar Association focused on this question: May a lawyer use deceptive behavior to friend a potential witnesses? The bar’s Committee on Professional Ethics concluded the answer is no, while allowing lawyers to play their cards close to the vest. “We conclude that an attorney or her agent may use her real name and profile to send a ‘friend request’ to obtain information from an unrepresented person's social networking website without also disclosing the…

Updated: After an article from Bloomberg over the weekend detailing document issues that could put thousands of mortgage foreclosure cases in doubt, JPMorgan Chase & Co. has slammed on the brakes. The lender announced today that it has asked courts not to issue final judgments in 56,000 cases while it reviews documents to make sure they are accurate, the Political Economy blog of the Washington Post reports. "Chase does not expect [to] find any factual problems and that customers have been harmed, but if we do find any cases we will take appropriate action," a bank spokesman said. The Associated…

Apparently blaming a local Minnesota prosecutor who happened to be his neighbor for his latest criminal conviction, John Stephen Woodward at first made legal ethics complaints against Dakota County Attorney James Backstrom, reports the Star Tribune. But when they didn't accomplish what he wanted, Woodward allegedly moved on to Plan B: He retained a fellow inmate to execute a murder-for-hire plot against Backstrom and Dakota County Judge Rex Stacey, who sentenced him in a felony drug case, authorities say. At one point, the 47-year-old inmate even gave an attorney $2,500, through his wife, as an initial payment for Thomas Jackson,…