Originally published by Brenda Sapino Jeffreys.
Firms of all sizes, not just big-name firms such as White & Case and Shearman & Sterling, are expanding in Texas.
Curated by Texas Bar Today. Follow us on Twitter @texasbartoday.
Originally published by [email protected].
A statute of limitations sets a limit for prosecuting certain crimes. Criminal charges must be filed within the specified time period or they cannot be filed at all. Not all crimes in Texas are subject to a statute of limitations.
There is a good reason why these laws are in place. Evidence deteriorates with time, witnesses die and memories become clouded.
In criminal law, the statute of limitations establishes how soon after an incident a prosecutor must file formal charges. The incident in question may be an arrest.
In Texas as in other states, there is no statute of limitations for serious crimes like murders and certain sexual assaults. In the Lone Star State, a defendant may be charged with a cold case murder decades after it was committed.
Crimes When No Statute of Limitations is in Place in Texas
The statute of limitations is not in place when the following crimes are committed:
Prosecutors can charge suspects with these crimes no matter how much time has passed since the alleged offense. There is no time limit related to prosecutions for sexual assault if biological matter is collected during the investigation and subjected to forensic DNA testing and the tests show the matter does not match the victim or any other person whose identity can be readily ascertained. A defendant may be charged after a positive DNA match many years after a sexual assault took place.
There is no statute of limitations for sexual assault when probable cause exists to believe the defendant committed the same or a similar sexual offense against five or more victims.
The application of the statute of limitations for various crimes is set out in the Texas Code of Criminal Procedure.
The cut off times for the filing of criminal charges include:
The statute of limitations is usually extended if the victim is under the age of 17 when the crime is committed.
The statute of limitations runs two years from the date when the crime was committed in the case of misdemeanor offenses in Texas.
The statute of limitations is not applicable when the accused is out of the state of Texas.
The statute of limitations and how it relates to crimes is a complex issue. An experienced Dallas criminal defense lawyer can advise you on this area of the law.
The post Are All Crimes in Texas Subject to a Statute of Limitations? appeared first on Dallas Criminal Defense Attorneys |State & Federal Lawyers.
Curated by Texas Bar Today. Follow us on Twitter @texasbartoday.
Originally published by Eric Quitugua.
When it comes to actors, musicians, and other notable people, much information—from major events in their lives and careers to the personal fodder for tabloids—is made public and can generally be used for fiction films and documentaries.
But the intimate, sometimes sordid details of the subject may not always be readily available on your average gossip rag. That’s when filmmakers, who want to get closer to the subject, pursue life rights to a story.
“The best kinds of documentaries tell a human story from a person’s perspective—so much of that is having that access,” said Megan Gilbride, an Emmy-winning and Producers Guild of America Award-nominated documentary producer and panelist on SXSW’s “To Get or Not to Get: Life Rights & Non-fiction Films.”
Life rights are legal agreements with a subject or estate that give full access to a subject—including artwork, journals, recordings, and anything else that can give extensive insight into the person.
Panelists Lisa Callif and Dean Cheley, both partners in entertainment law firm Donaldson + Callif, Fox Rothschild partner Lincoln Bandlow; and Gilbride explained the nuances of such agreements.
Life rights can protect filmmakers from litigation. Typically, agreements include a waiver of claim that ensures a subject won’t sue the filmmaker if he or she doesn’t like the depiction. These waivers can also grant the filmmaker exclusive access to the subject.
According to the panelists, the disadvantages of not having the life rights:
That’s not to say life rights agreements aren’t without their downsides—and that every panelist agrees filmmakers should seek such contracts when producing documentaries.
The idea of a life agreement that hands over the keys to an entire life story can be off-putting to a subject and scare them away from participating in production. These contracts can be especially troubling when filmmakers are building trusting relationships with the subject or estate, Cheley said.
“Should we seek life rights for documentaries? My answer is generally no,” he said.
Another focus of the panel was the right of publicity. This is an individual’s right to control commercial use of his or her name, image, and likeness. Whereas life rights agreements deal with accuracies in portrayals in film, cases involving alleged violations of the right of publicity deal with advertisements and alleged exploitation of a person’s image.
However, Bandlow said questions linger on the success of such cases when they deal with advertisements, and that they typically get overturned. This was the case with actor Dustin Hoffman after he claimed in 1999 that Los Angeles Magazine violated his right of publicity in a digitally altered photo spread featuring his image.
He was initially rewarded about $3 million by a federal judge in Los Angeles but the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in California reversed the decision, concluding the photo spread was speech protected by the First Amendment and not commercial speech.
Bandlow called litigation difficult in the case of violation claims in movies. “A movie isn’t commercial so it’s protected speech,” he said. “It’s transformative so it’s protected.”
Something the attorneys are paying attention to is a California appellate court’s upcoming decision in “Gone With the Wind” actress Olivia de Havilland’s June 2017 lawsuit against FX over her portrayal in “Feud: Bette and Joan.”
The veteran actress of Hollywood’s Golden Age said the docudrama recounted stories that never happened or that she never gave permission to use, and portrayed her as a gossip. De Havilland made claims of false light, defamation, and violation of her right of publicity.
Bandlow said the case could set a standard for how right of publicity cases are handled in California.
Curated by Texas Bar Today. Follow us on Twitter @texasbartoday.
Originally published by Lowell Brown.
Join us for Law Night at the Ballpark as members of the legal community bring out their friends and family from around the state to beautiful Globe Life Park in Arlington to raise funds for veterans’ legal services.
The Texas Rangers take on the Houston Astros at 7:05 p.m. Tuesday, July 3. For every advanced ticket purchased, a $5 donation will be made to the Texas Access to Justice Foundation’s Joe Jamail Endowment for Veteran Legal Services.
Get your tickets here.
Curated by Texas Bar Today. Follow us on Twitter @texasbartoday.
Originally published by Stacey E Burke Blog.
Between blog posts, content marketing, social media platforms, online advertising, email, and text messages, there are more ways to communicate digitally than ever before. Constantly communicating with your clients or referral base is incredibly easy in today’s digital age, but it’s also easy to overdo it. While keeping website content and postings fresh is important, make sure you don’t alienate your followers with information overload. Below are recommendations for how often your firm should post or share content on a variety of platforms, including a few tips and tricks for each.
Keeping your website fresh with new content is important. A blog is a great platform for establishing the firm’s authority on legal topics related to your practice areas, and Google prefers websites with regular updates. Blog posts are your digital workhorses, too. Once written and posted, they can be repurposed across a variety of mediums, including sharing them on social media channels and featuring them in your e-newsletters.
Blog posts need to be written with a minimum of 350 to 400 words to have any value for SEO purposes. And your posts should always, always, always be original content. Google absolutely despises duplicative content, and your website will suffer its wrath if you reuse content found elsewhere online.
If your firm’s website doesn’t have built-in blogging functionality, you can add content pages instead. These additional content pages are not always navigable via the main menu bar; instead, they are most often accessible when a user clicks on a link embedded on another page. For instance, below is a main practice area content page about drunk driving. An additional interior content page about wrong way accidents was written and is only accessible via the link embedded in the content of this page (the red text) – NOT via the main navigation.
Posting Frequency Recommendation:
One blog post or interior content page per week
As Digital Marketing expert Neil Patel says, “If you post too infrequently, your audience will forget that you exist and you will quickly fade into the deep dark recesses of their minds. However, if you are posting too often, you will become a complete nuisance and they will dread seeing your posts overcrowding their feed.”
Research shows consumers don’t want to see businesses and companies taking over their newsfeeds, and will start to penalize Pages for over-posting by no longer engaging with the content. Hubspot found companies with fewer than 10,000 followers that post on Facebook more than twice a day received 60% fewer clicks per post than those who post five or fewer times per month.
Posting Frequency Recommendation:
At least once per week and no more than three times per week
Tweets have a much shorter lifespan than any other form of digital content. With most tweets lasting around just 15 minutes, Twitter is the one place where more can actually be better. But because of the abbreviated life cycle of a tweet, it’s easy to repurpose material, reposting it at different times to reach a wider audience.
Posting Frequency Recommendation:
At least twice per day and no more than 10 times per day
As the professional networking social channel, posts to LinkedIn should contain only legal industry information. While Facebook is a great platform to humanize your firm with human-interest posts, LinkedIn is NOT the place to share that type of content. Keep it strictly professional here.
Posting Frequency Recommendation:
Once per week and no more than two times per week
Email is the cornerstone of office communication in this day and age, with 86% of professionals naming email as their preferred means of communication. Estimates suggest the average office worker receives 121 emails per day. With all of those emails hitting your inbox everyday, your instinct might be to send more e-newsletters in the hopes of making your content seen.
Unfortunately, sending too many emails will have the exact opposite effect. In fact, 69% of recipients unsubscribe due to “too many emails.” Instead of bombarding your subscribers every two weeks in the hopes of capturing their attention, instead focus on the quality of the content, the design of the newsletter, and whether or not you are providing answers or information relevant to the recipients.
Sending Frequency Recommendation:
No more than once per month, and we prefer once per quarter for law firms
Most digital media consumers are savvy enough to navigate the online waters, and with so many voices competing for attention, they are searching for better quality material rather than mass quantities of sub-par material. Inundating consumers is not the way to get their attention… and will only succeed at alienating the very people you are trying to attract. Following two simple rules will ensure your followers stay engaged: make sure the content your law firm shares is high quality, and avoid the urge to “over share.”
Curated by Texas Bar Today. Follow us on Twitter @texasbartoday.
Originally published by Drew York.
N. O. Smelz, owner of Smelz Rug and Carpet Cleaning, learns that Brite Bank has submitted a request for proposal to clean the carpets at their 15 branches in the DFW area. When Smelz reads the request he notices it includes a diversity provision that requires at least 10% of the total amount paid by Brite to go to a vendor, or a subcontractor, that is a minority-owned, woman-owned, veteran-owned, LGBT-owned, or disabled-owned business. Smelz is concerned because he doesn’t fall into any of those categories, and he doesn’t believe any of his long-time suppliers do either. But because his cleaning company has the best reputation around, Smelz submits his proposal anyway. Will Smelz get the contract?
Privately-owned businesses may legally adopt diversity supplier programs. These programs are becoming a more integral part of companies’ procurement efforts. Almost every large, publicly-traded company, such as AT&T, Capital One, and Walmart, require supplier diversity.
The programs vary depending on the corporate customer. Generally speaking, diversity supplier programs can be characterized as single-tier or two-tier. Single-tier programs mean that the company is looking to contract directly with diversity-owned suppliers. Two-tier programs mean that the direct vendor may not be diversity-owned, but it can still qualify as long as it subcontracts with a diversity-owned business.
Some companies have diversity policies that require a certain percentage of the dollars they spend on their suppliers to go to diversity-owned suppliers, but the company does not have to have a direct contractual relationship with the diverse supplier. Other companies may have a goal to spend a certain amount of dollars with diversity-owned suppliers in a particular year.
Brite Bank will not necessarily disqualify Smelz simply because it is not diversity-owned or because it lacks a supply chain that includes diversity-owned vendors. But because so many companies have adopted, or are adopting, supplier diversity policies, small business contractors such as Smelz can increase the chances of their bid being accepted if they establish a network of their own diversity-owned suppliers that they will utilize if their proposal is accepted. And, that network may lead to other projects through the diversity-owned suppliers that Smelz never knew existed, or never anticipated landing.
Curated by Texas Bar Today. Follow us on Twitter @texasbartoday.
Originally published by Cleve Clinton.
Having won her primary, Starr Struuck is ready to update her campaign website and Instagram feed to jazz up her image and promote the reasons why she should win the general election. Having been chastised by Captain Kurff of Star Warp’d who tweeted Struuck to take her personalized and autographed photograph of the two of them at the Comic-Con convention off her newsletter and website, she remains determined to stick with her Star Warp’d theme. A Getty image photograph of the Starship Enterprise circling an unknown planet is now pasted across her social media. This time Getty images complains. Again, Struuck insists that she was merely publicly confessing her affection for geeky space adventure shows. Is Getty in the right to complain and demand to be paid?
Almost certainly so.
As my colleague Travis Crabtree blogged last year, the copyright laws protect original works of authorship including artistic, literary, dramatic and musical works, such as photographs, graphics, poetry, novels, movies, songs, computer software, and architecture. The creator of a work has a copyright regardless of whether it is filed with the U.S. Copyright Office. Meaning, if you take the picture, then generally you own the copyright. While there must be a registration to file a copyright lawsuit, not registering does not lessen the right to claim ownership of something that you created.
Assume Google images are protected by copyright. Adding a few new words to someone else’s picture is not likely to transform ownership to you. And, there are many more such myths when it comes to efforts to avoid copyright claims – myths that abound on the internet. None of these will relieve you from liability:
Tips and best practices for copyright and using Google images:
And then there’s the “fair use” argument. Often overused, however, it’s worth considering. If the image is used for an educational, nonprofit, scholarly, reporting, reviewing, or research purpose, then it’s worth seeing if the other three factors for “fair use” can be satisfied.
Curated by Texas Bar Today. Follow us on Twitter @texasbartoday.
