Legal Services Blog on Tree.com

Seattle, WA: We learn that police in Seattle needed to set up a ticketing lot for a speed trap they had set up. Guess what kind of lot  they chose? If you guessed it would be the parking lot of a doughnut shop you were right. At least 50 city officers were joined by state troopers who spent the day operating out of  a Krispy Kreme shop parking lot. We learn further that the boys in blue handed out 120 tickets in one day.

On June 24, 2011, New York became the latest state to legalize same-sex marriage.  When clerks across the Big Apple and Hudson River valley begin issuing marriage licenses on July 24, New York will join Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont as states recognizing marriage as a civil liberty that must be granted equally to gay and straight couples alike. Same-sex couples can also find their wedded bliss in Washington, D.C. and on the sovereign land of the Coquille Indian Tribe in Oregon. 

According to "YellowPagesGoesGreen.org, "companies that print yellow pages had more than 19,000,000 trees destroyed" and "are wasting 7,200,000 barrels of fossil fuel."

But despite those concerns as well as falling ad revenues and growing consumer and government resistance, Yellow Pages directories surprisingly hang on like primordial insects with over a half million unsolicited books still being delivered each year in the U.S.

Apple has filed a patent that will prevent iPhone owners to use their cameras at concerts or sporting events. The patent, which Apple filed for 18 months ago, has recently been published publicly at the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). 

Last summer, I was lucky enough to land myself a judicial externship. In two months’ time, I spent 150 hours at court. I watched numerous trials and hearings, I observed many attorneys at their best (and a few at their worst), and, after the trials, I discussed my observations with the judge in his chambers, where I also heard his feedback.

In the past six months, more and more immigration reform bills have been passed in various states. The most infamous state law is arguably Arizona’s immigration reform bill and, ever since the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality in part of Arizona’s immigration bill, other states have followed suit. 

On June 20, 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on a decade’s long battle of litigation between female employees alleging discrimination based on sex and their employer, megacorporate super-chain Wal-Mart in Dukes v. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. The ruling is a huge blow to class-action litigators who hoped the case would broaden opportunities for class certification based on bias discrimination claims and to civil rights activists attempting to root out pay inequity based on sex discrimination.

Dubai: We learn that a woman in Dubai is suing her husband for $11 million. Why? In her court papers she contends that his erectile dysfunction kept them from consummating their marriage. She further maintains her husband would not sleep with her for the first four months of their marriage. 

You may have posted pictures on Facebook and Twitter and countless other social media platforms over the past few years. If you’re like most people, you probably never spent a single moment wondering about who owns those pictures. If you did, you most likely assumed that they were your pictures. You took the pics; you owns the pics. It’s as simple as that….Or maybe not.

A Chapter 13 bankruptcy can be a viable option if a debtor is overwhelmed by debt, yet has too high of an income to file a Chapter 7 application.  A Chapter 13 bankruptcy is commonly thought of as a debt reorganization, because the debtor is agreeing to repay some or all of their debt over a period of three to five years.