South Carolina Lawyers Weekly

For law firms to be successful they must be more than a collection of single practitioners. Success in the law, like success at sports, is a team effort - if the team isn't firing on all cylinders, it gets away from what made it successful and people no longer play their true roles. No law firm can be profitable and growing without a range of skills and abilities. Not every player on a sports team is expected to be a star, and not every lawyer in a law firm should be expected to play similar roles in the life of the firm.

Tagged with: Business of Law Coach's Corner Practice Management

In re Halford. Where an attorney's trust account checks were returned against insufficient funds due to accounting errors resulting from a failure to account for fees charged by credit card vendors in . . .

Tagged with: Attorneys Trust Account

Strike "international contraband smuggler" off my list of alternative careers. I'd never get the first kilo over the border. I've known for a while that I have an innate distaste for authority, which I attribute to some residual ornery genes inherited from the West Virginia branch of my family tree. But I wasn't aware that I had such an irrational fear of authority until last month's episode at a Canadian border crossing.

Tagged with: Fourth Amendment

Lawyers nationwide increasingly face state and federal government actions to implement a whole new regulatory structure aimed at what is in fact a growing problem: companies that charge consumers an up-front fee to modify the terms of a mortgage or deed of trust they can no longer afford, then either fail to deliver results or actually abscond with the fee itself. In an early effort, New York banned upfront mortgage-modification fees but explicitly exempted retainers to lawyers. Later, reports that mortgage companies were using relationships with lawyers to get around the fee ban led to passage of another law, this time banning retainer and escrow collections by lawyers unless the fee is collected as part of ongoing, regular legal counsel.

Tagged with: Coach's Corner Ethics Foreclosure mortgage

I was bewildered by the sight of my 11-year-old nephew carefully clipping the gun-like plastic protrusions off of a brigade of 2-inch-tall Civil War soldiers. It didn’t seem likely that a pacifist streak had surfaced in the boy, particularly considering ...

It took less than six years for South Carolina’s second law school to go from interloper to institution. That’s a remarkable pace in a state known for a tight-knit legal community made up of lawyers with a mostly homogeneous educational ...

Although the recession may have stalled fundraising for a new law school building at the University of South Carolina, Dean Jack Pratt says he sees signs that cash might start flowing in soon. “In recent months, instead of responding ‘no,’ ...

The difference in the details is what makes international travel enlightening. It’s often the seemingly small things that tell you a lot about a foreign country and your own. I just got back from a visit to our neighbor to ...

I don’t intend for this to be another screed on legalese or how illogical and inconsistent the English language is. If you’re interested in the latter, Richard Lederer and Bill Bryson have penned some delightful books about our twisted mother ...

There’s something slightly countercultural about the notion of alternative careers in the law. It would appear that people who choose such a path could be part of a neo-hippie group working to subvert the buttoned-down, corporate model of the traditional ...