In United States v. David A. Taylor IRS Lays Down the Law The Wills, Trusts, and Estates Prof blog reports on a recent case demonstrating that if a fiduciary has a duty to pay a claim of the government before paying a debt—or they may be personally liable for the unpaid claims of the government!   Here are some of the case details: David J. Tyler and Paula I. Tyler were a married couple who held real proper ...

Weeding out Junk Science?  Or Scaring Off Competent Experts?  Are Daubert challenges really weeding out “junk science” and “pseudoscience” in the courtroom, or could it be that they are actually scaring off good, competent experts? Given the numbers alone, one can’t help but wonder.  Bullseye, a Legal Blog on Expert Topics, reports on a new study that examines the question. Since the U.S. Supreme Court’s 19 ...

How Divorce Can Affect Business Valuation Stanley Morganstern at the Ohio Family Law Observer reports that recent case in Ohio illustrates the difficulty of valuing business assets in a divorce. Courts should avoid "double dipping," or counting a business' income toward valuation and spousal support. Instead, judges are to separate current and future income from the business' material assets before making t ...

Small Firm Innovation Wins ABA Journal Most Popular Site in Legal Practice Management Category Small Firm Innovation, a blog dedicated to first person accounts of small firm success, won the ABA Journal’s Blawg100 competition for most popular blog in the Legal Practice Management (LPM) category.  The ABA announcement reports: In the wake of the financial crisis and a rapidly shifting legal landscape, Small ...

Apple's 'bogus' patents will 'strangle' Android: Google So reports Asher Moses this month in The Advertiser: Google's chief legal officer has launched a blistering attack on competitors, including Apple, for attempting to stifle innovation by using "bogus patents" to target Google's Android partners including Samsung. David Drummond, who is also Google's senior vice-president, wrote in an explosive blog pos ...

Dueling Documentaries You've maybe read about the pro-trial lawyer documentary out recently from HBO called "Hot Coffee" in The Atlantic.  (The title "Hot Coffee" refers to the famed McDonalds case of a few years back, when a woman was awarded some $3M+ by a jury for overly-hot coffee spilled on her by McDonalds.) Now there's "Injustice," which asks, "What do you have to do to earn a billion dollars in lawy ...

Have you had a chance to check out the Guard Series™ insurance policies?   Since claims against BV practices and properly credentialed professionals have historically been quite rare, these policies are deeply discounted.  NACVA and Primus Assurance Group (PAG) announced the policies' availability last fall, and since then PAG has built out its web site with lots of detail: Providing Professional Peace of M ...

The Wall Street Journal Law Blog says big regulatory changes are under way:   “Dodd-Frank is Sarbanes-Oxley on steroids. It’s an exponentially greater volume of regulation,” says Margaret Tahyar, a Davis Polk partner. The “sheer number of rules still in the pipeline makes it almost inevitable agencies will miss an increasing number of deadlines over the next year.” The Dodd-Frank law has 849 pages, compared ...