As law students around the country focus on upcoming exams, Tatiana Scott, 24, has some other concerns to deal with. Left to raise a younger brother and sister in 2006, after her mother disappeared early that year, Scott graduated from high school, went to college and is now in her second year of law school at the University of Tulsa, according to KOTV and the Tulsa World. She also works full-time. Sheila Scott went out for a quick trip to the store on Valentine's Day 2006 and told her daughter she would be right back, Fox 23 News reported last…

Fed-up with “sky-high” fees at outside firms, Jones Lang LaSalle general counsel Mark J. Ohringer says he now spends 75 percent of his budget on non-law firm resources. “I’m law firms’ biggest competitor,” Ohringer said during a program at the 2011 Futures Conference on Friday, “and I don’t think they see it that way.” Jones Lang, a global real estate and investment management firm, has boosted its in-house capabilities by 60 lawyers in the past few years, and Ohringer says he won’t hesitate to add more as the company’s needs increase. Speaking at the conference held at Chicago-Kent Law School…

A former staff attorney at Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan has sued the law firm for race discrimination and retaliation. Kisshia Simmons-Grant says in her federal district court suit that the law firm gave work to less qualified white staff attorneys while she went without assignments and hence was not paid, Reuters reports. She also contends the firm retaliated against her when she complained of discrimination, among other allegations. The suit was filed Friday in the Southern District of New York. Simmons-Grant worked in the law firm's New York office from 2006 to 2010. Robert Juman, a Quinn partner, called…

Justice Clarence Thomas sees a lost opportunity to “provide clarity to an establishment clause jurisprudence in shambles” in the U.S. Supreme Court’s refusal today to take up a case involving crosses beside a highway. Thomas dissented (PDF) from the cert denial. At issue is whether privately financed roadside crosses erected to honor fallen highway patrol officers in Utah violate the establishment clause. A nonprofit group raised private funds to finance 13 crosses, placed where officers had been killed, including alongside highways. The state had granted permission in a permit that said it neither approved nor disapproved of the memorial markers.…

Doubts about a grandmother’s guilt didn’t merit overturning a jury verdict based on prosecutors’ theory that an infant died from shaken baby syndrome, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled. The Supreme Court granted cert and reversed the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals today in a summary reversal. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissented in an opinion joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor and Stephen G. Breyer. “Justice is not served by the court’s exercise of discretion to take up this tragic, fact-bound case,” Ginsburg wrote. The Supreme Court opinion (PDF) said the 9th Circuit improperly substituted its judgment for…

Justice Cleo Elaine Powell was invested Oct. 21 as the 102nd justice and the first African-American woman to serve on the Supreme Court of Virginia. Powell, who first took the bench in the general district court of Chesterfield County and Colonial Heights 18 years ago, also joins the elite group of justices who have served at [...]

Halifax attorney David Franklin Guthrie died Oct. 14 at his home. He was 82. Despite blindness from an early age, “Buddy” Guthrie enrolled at Ferrum College, received an undergraduate degree from Lynchburg College and earned a law degree from Washington and Lee University in 1953. Mr. Guthrie practiced law in Halifax County for more than 50 [...]

On Oct. 12, 2011, a Virginia State Bar Third District Subcommittee issued a public reprimand with terms to Brian K. Stevens of Glen Allen after finding he had violated disciplinary rules that govern diligence and communication. According to the VSB, the discipline was an agreed disposition of misconduct charges against Stevens. * * * On Sept. 8, [...]

NEWPORT NEWS—A Newport News high school student has been charged with a felony after police say she allegedly used pepper spray on another student. Media outlets report the incident occurred last week in a hallway at Denbigh High School. Police said in a news release the two 15-year-old girls apparently were involved in an ongoing dispute. The ninth [...]

Implementing national healthcare reform will be the topic when lawyers, government officials and academics convene at the University of Richmond Law Review’s annual Allen Chair Symposium Nov. 11. This year’s event – “Everything But the Merits: Analyzing the Procedural Aspects of the Healthcare Litigation” – will bring together legal experts from across the country to [...]