World Justice

More states are allowing non-lawyers to represent people in civil court matters as the gap in access to legal counsel grows wider between those who can afford attorneys and those who can’t.

Although it’s in its early stages, such advocacy is desperately needed as states struggle to ensure residents with common legal problems aren’t left behind, lawyers said.

The cost of hiring lawyers “has increased since the 1970s, and many individual litigants have been forced to forego using professional legal services and either represent themselves or ignore their legal problems,” a task force of the state Supreme Court wrote in a report on legal services in Arizona in 2019.

Utah and Arizona launched programs in recent years that allow people who have earned legal technician’s licenses to dispense advice in family law cases, while Minnesota is in a trial run. Oregon plans to start an initiative next summer, and Colorado

Newport’s Magisterial District Court 41-3-04 has a new judge. Sworn in on July 18, with his grandchildren holding the Bible for his oath, Juniata Twp resident Jeffrey John Wood, 69, is ready to serve his community.

Having had nearly 40 years of legal experience, Wood brings a lot to the table. After earning a bachelor of arts in religion and political science from Juniata College and a master in education from Slippery Rock University, he earned his Juris Doctorate in 1983 from the Thomas M. Cooley Law School in Lansing, Mich., and began his career as a law clerk in the Lawrence County Court of Common Pleas.

Wood has had his own legal practice since 1984, serving private clients in Perry, Mercer and Snyder counties. He has also served as chief and senior counsel for the Department of Aging in the Governor’s Office of General Counsel.

Originally from Grove City,

MEMPHIS, Tenn. – One of the more compelling elements from Tuesday’s hearing in the US District Court Northern District of California was how attorneys for both the PGA Tour and the three players who have been suspended for playing the LIV Golf events were forced to vaguely talk about the contracts players signed with the start-up league.

The contracts were provided to the PGA Tour’s attorneys but were sealed for confidentiality reasons which meant any reference to them during Tuesday’s hearing for a temporary restraining order had to avoid specific details, like the amount of each contract and any stipulations included in the deals.

One exchange between Judge Beth Labson Freeman and Robert Waters, the lead attorney for the three players, appeared to suggest that earnings from LIV Golf events were counted against a player’s contract guarantees.

“The guaranteed number [a LIV player can earn in an event] is $160,000,

Since US law firm Kirkland & Ellis announced it was setting up shop in Miami, private equity partner Jeremy Liss has found himself very popular with his colleagues.

The 49-year old is trading the windy city of Chicago for South Florida heat to run Kirkland’s new outpost and has been fielding calls from lawyers keen to join him ever since.

“The initial demand has been extremely strong. It’s probably even stronger demand than we had anticipated,” he said. “[Miami] is the hot place in the US . . . It’s becoming Wall Street south.”

Kirkland is one of a number of firms expanding to Miami to capitalize on a mass migration accelerated by the coronavirus pandemic. In the year to July 2021, more Americans moved to Florida than any other state — 220,890 of them, according to census data. The influx included billionaires and hedge funds unmoored from their Wall

The US citizen and civil rights attorney Asim Ghafoor, who had represented Jamal Khashoggi before the Saudi journalist was murdered, has been freed from custody in the UAE where he was convicted on money laundering charges.

Ghafoor was headed home to the US, said his lawyer, Faisal Gill, having been freed after paying a fine and with help from the US embassy in the UAE.

A court on Wednesday upheld Ghafoor’s earlier in-absentia conviction, ordering him to pay a fine but revoking a three-year jail term handed down in May. UAE officials had no immediate comment.

Ghafoor – former lawyer of Khashoggi, the dissident Saudi journalist who was murdered at Saudi Arabia’s consulate in Istanbul in 2018 – had been transiting through Dubai airport on 14 July when he was detained for the in-absentia conviction, handed down in May, for money laundering and tax evasion that followed a 2020 request

On the morning after she became a multi-millionaire, a South Carolina woman drove by the KC Mart No. 47 in Simpsonville where she bought her lottery ticket, to see if anyone was there, just in case she had made a mistake and didn’t really win.

It was the largest Mega Millions jackpot to be won by a single ticket — more than $1.5 billion — and she had seen the numbers reported on television.

“If no one was there, I would say, ‘okay, well this was a disaster, we made a mistake,’ and I’d drive home and all would be good. But as we went by the convenience store, there was every media — there was helicopters, there was every piece of media, there was locals, you know, national. I so badly wanted to get out of there, I wanted to go under the seat, I became anxious.”

That was

Asim Ghafoor, a prominent civil rights lawyer, was arrested while he was in transit through Dubai airport last month.

US citizen and civil rights lawyer Asim Ghafoor, who was convicted in the United Arab Emirates this week on money laundering charges, has been released and is on his way home.

Ghafoor, who once represented murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi, was freed after paying a fine, his lawyer Faisal Gill said on Friday, adding that the US embassy in the UAE helped facilitate his release.

A court on Wednesday upheld an earlier in-absentia conviction against Ghafoor, ordering him to pay a fine of 5 million dirhams ($1.4m) but overturning a three-year jail term handed down in May.

UAE officials had no immediate comment.

Ghafoor, who lives in Virginia, was in transit through Dubai airport on July 14 when he was arrested for the in-absentia conviction.

UAE’s state news agency WAM said he

A Prior Lake man facing murder charges but claiming self-defense in a knife attack at a western Wisconsin river that killed a Stillwater teenager and wounded four others has retained a lawyer who defended Kyle Rittenhouse, acquitted of fatally shooting two people in the summer of 2020 during civil unrest in Kenosha, Wis.

Nicolae Miu, 52, who appeared by video for a brief hearing Friday, told the court he has secured attorney Corey Chirafisi of Madison, Wis.

Chirafisi won not guilty verdicts for Rittenhouse on all charges in November, after the teenager testified he acted in self-defense in a case that fueled a national debate over guns, vigilantism and racial injustice.

Miu told authorities that he acted in self-defense when several people confronted him as he searched for a friend’s lost cellphone Saturday in the Apple River. He said some of the people “produced two weapons,” hit him and

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About the author: Clifford Winston is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

A new specialization is emerging in the legal profession: autonomous-vehicle law. This innocent-sounding news is my personal nightmare, and it could soon become the nation’s. Autonomous vehicles are a game-changing technology that can solve problems the government has been unable to solve, but their adoption will be disrupted by a disinterested federal government dominated by public- and private-sector lawyers.