The VLW Blog

The official investiture of Fairfax Circuit Judge Charles J. Maxfield is set for this Friday, May 18. The ceremony will be held at 4:00 p.m. in Courtroom 5E of the courts building. The Fairfax Bar Association will hold a reception in Maxfield’s honor following the investiture. The judge actually went on the Fairfax circuit bench [...]

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The following selected stories appeared in the Virginia Lawyers Weekly Daily E-Mail Alert from May 7 to May 11. The originating source of a story is indicated after the item. Please note that not all links may remain active. If you are not presently receiving the Daily Alert, please click here to sign up. May [...]

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The Chicago divorce law firm’s billboard that advised viewers, “Life’s short. Get a divorce,” is no more (See item below). City workers yanked it down earlier this week. But not on account of taste and not on account of objections by other lawyers. The local alderman determined that Corri Fetman’s law firm didn’t have the [...]

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You read that headline right. In an effort to round up parents who fail to pay child support, Spotsylvania County will start putting their names on a flyer tacked onto a pizza delivery box, reports The Associated Press. When a newspaper publishes the names of men arrested for soliciting, they call it a “John list.” [...]

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The Supreme Court of Virginia apparently will decide whether foundations set up to support teaching hospitals have charitable immunity. The court had scheduled arguments before three-justice writ panels for May 18 in two cases from Charlottesville Circuit Court that had reached opposite conclusions on the issue. However, the court notified the lawyers this week that [...]

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It hasn’t been a good month so far for the image of lawyers. First there was the judge in DC who filed the $67 million lawsuit over a lost pair of pants. Amazingly, his claim is going forward, with a June trial date. The latest on that story: Supporters have rallied around the Korean couple [...]

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And the winner is … The Norfolk office of McGuireWoods, which won the Attorney General’s Cup by donating 42,824 pounds of food—1,338 pounds per person in the office—in the Legal Food Frenzy competition among Virginia law firms. The competition raised 679,000 pounds of food, well above the goal of 500,000, between April 2 and 13. [...]

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With so many mediators out there mediating, ethical issues are bound to arise. Over the past few years, mediator complaints and ethics issues have prompted governing bodies to consider revisions to the various guidelines, standards and procedures related to certification of mediators, mentors and training programs, according to the Virginia Supreme Court’s Office of the [...]

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Poor English skills did not keep two Hispanic union members from being bound by their union contract’s mandatory arbitration clause for complaints of discrimination, the 4th Circuit ruled yesterday in Aleman v. Chugach Support Services (VLW 007-2-070). The two Hispanic members of a D.C.-area carpenters’ union worked for Chugach Support Services, a construction company that [...]

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A Richmond federal judge didn’t follow a stair-step approach in sentencing a felon with a firearm, so the defendant gets a second shot at sentencing. Earlier this week, the 4th Circuit released an unpublished opinion in U.S. v. Tinsley, vacating the statutory maximum sentence of 10 years that Zachary Tinsley got for the .25 caliber [...]

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