In a post on The Careerist called High-Powered Lawyers Wear Flip Flops, Vivia Chen provides a great article about the dress code at Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, where lawyers are encouraged to dress ultra-casually. According to the article, the firm's only requirement on the dress code is that employees wear some form of shoes, and that is only because their insurance company requires it. Beyond that, clothing such as shorts and flip flops is encouraged as the norm.

The firm's position is that litigation is a creative exercise, and therefore attorneys should dress casually to encourage their creative thinking. It also helps break down barriers, so that associates feel less intimidated by senior attorneys.

While some lawyers embrace the casual approach, others find it abhorrent. I know some attorneys who would probably sleep in a business suit if they weren't afraid of getting it wrinkled. However, this attitude among lawyers seems to be becoming less and less common, especially out in the smaller law firms where there is less formality or corporate structure to the business.

I still vividly recall an incident when I was a new lawyer starting out in my own law practice that first made me start thinking about casual attire in a law office. A prominent attorney at an established law firm asked me to come to a meeting at his office, where he wanted to refer a case to me to handle. I don't recall what the case involved, other than it being something trivial that a busy experienced attorney would not want to bother with but which would be perfect for a newbie lawyer like I was at the time. I arrived at their office dressed in a business suit, wanting to make a good impression on the attorney and on the new client. I was thus greatly surprised when he greeted me wearing a pair of shorts, sandals, and a shirt that looked like he had just gotten back from napping at a luau. Yet he was a top litigator with a booming law practice and more business than he could handle.

Over time, I came to understand the importance of NOT dressing up at the office. While some lawyers think dressing down makes a bad impression on clients, my experience has been that it actually makes many people more comfortable. We often forget that many people get nervous about going to see a lawyer, so anything that can be done to make them more comfortable seems worth the effort. And if you are more comfortable, and therefore better able to concentrate on your work, then that makes it all the better. You don't have to go all the way down to shorts and flip flops if that makes you uncomfortable, since the whole point of this way of thinking is to improve your comfort level. But I'll bet you'd be a lot more comfortable if you removed that pretty noose from around your neck that they call a tie, or got rid of the panty hose on those hot summer days. Is there really a reason you need to dress up unless you are going to be in court standing in front of a judge that day? While many lawyers would say you should always "dress like a lawyer," the trend seems to be to leave that approach in the past.

To learn more about the debate on this subject, read Chen's great article on this subject.

What are your thoughts on casual attire versus business attire in the office? Do you think it is crazy for lawyers to dress in clothing that would generally be considered unprofessional, or do you think it is a smart thing to do? Does your work setting affect how appropriate it would be to go with the casual clothes option? Do you think lawyers should dress in the office the same way they do in court, or should even the court system become more casual in its dress code? Share your thoughts on this subject in the Comments section below.

Dropbox is a great service for making your files and documents accessible from multiple computers, and it is an extremely popular app for the iPhone and iPad among lawyers. However, an authentication bug in their system recently made it possible for anyone to log into anyone else's account during a period of about four hours. Dropbox discovered the glitch and repaired it within five minutes, but during the preceding four hours all Dropbox accounts were vulnerable to being accessed by anyone who knew a user's login name. While it still required the person's user name to access the account, the system would accept anything as a password during this brief period.

To their credit, Dropbox not only discovered and repaired the bug swiftly, they even publicly disclosed what had happened on their blog. They also notified the accountholders who may have been affected. However, this incident has created a significant level of fear among many Dropbox users as to whether their client data is safe in Dropbox's hands. And if it could happen with Dropbox, logically it seems that any cloud storage system could inadvertently place client data at risk of exposure as well.

What are your thoughts on the Dropbox controversy? If you currently use Dropbox to access your law firm's client data, will you now change what items you make accessible through their system? Would you be afraid to sign up as a new user of Dropbox, or does the way they handled the situation give you greater confidence in them? Will you alter your other cloud computing practices as a result of this incident? Or is this an isolated event that is generating more of a reaction than it merits? Share your thoughts in the Comments section below.

Many attorneys have made complaints about Avvo, but overall I've found their site to be a good marketing tool for lawyers and I've personally gained several new clients using their system. I've written several articles about them for this site, including What is Avvo?, 5 Reasons Lawyers Love Avvo, and 5 Reasons Lawyers Hate Avvo. However, I've recently become annoyed with one trait of Avvo that I think the company should address, where it lets attorneys answer questions outside of the jurisdiction where they are licensed to practice law.

Under Avvo's system, attorneys can answer questions from any jurisdiction on any subject anywhere in the country. While this may be ok on a subject such as immigration law that is mostly governed by federal law, this is a big problem when attorneys provide legal advice in states where they are not licensed and don't necessarily know what they are talking about. Not only are they engaging in potentially unethical behavior, but many are giving out advice that is WRONG. This practice is apparently engaged in by lawyers seeking to grab extra Avvo points for answering questions in a rather pathetic attempt to make their profile show up more often, without paying for Avvo's paid advertising program that would accomplish the same thing in a more effective way.

Rather than focus on quality answers like most of the attorneys using Avvo, there are a few "bad eggs" who feel it necessary to answer every single question that they believe they can possibly justify posting a comment, even if it is to just tell the person they need to talk to a lawyer in the client's jurisdiction. While this practice makes those lawyers look rather foolish (at least to other attorneys), a meaningless comment at least does no harm. However, when those attorneys start giving out advice that is incorrect, then it becomes a problem. Not only could the person getting bad advice take actions that could result in that person being harmed, but the lawyer dumb enough to give out incorrect advice in another state opens himself or herself up to liability as well. And if Avvo knows this practice is going on, doesn't that create a liability risk for Avvo as well?

I don't log into the Avvo question and answer forum very often. But in the last two weeks alone I have seen several instances in which attorneys have given advice outside their jurisdiction where their answers were incorrect. Not just vague or meaningless the way most out-of-state advice is given by those inclined to do this, but flat out wrong advice giving the questioner incorrect answers that could create legal problems for the person if they relied on it. If I saw it that many times by logging in on an infrequent basis solely into the jurisdiction where I practice, it seems logical to assume that it is happening even more often than that across the country.

My hope is that at some point Avvo will address this problem, and restrict attorneys from posting comments outside of a jurisdiction where they are licensed to practice. For now, it seems that most questions are answered several times by out-of-state attorneys before any in-state attorneys even get a shot at it. This needs to be stopped. Since the attorneys engaged in this practice don't have enough sense to stop answering questions where they don't know what they are talking about, Avvo needs to step in and stop them before someone relies on bad legal advice from an attorney who shouldn't have been answering the question in the first place.

I'm one of the lawyers who likes Avvo, but this is one aspect of their system that needs to be changed.

What are your thoughts on Avvo? Do you think attorneys should be able to use Avvo's system to answer questions outside of the jurisdictions where they are licensed? Have you seen lawyers giving out bad legal advice on Avvo in states where they are not licensed to practice law? Share your thoughts in the comments section below, and take a look at some of our other articles on Avvo on this site..

A new report from the United States Courts indicates that the number of pro se federal lawsuits is increasing every year, and went up again for fiscal year 2010 (the 12-month period ending September 30, 2010). The report indicates the following numbers for pro se civil lawsuits filed in recent years:

• FY 2007 - 70,240 pro se civil lawsuits
• FY 2008 - 70,948 pro se civil lawsuits
• FY 2009 - 71, 543 pro se civil lawsuits
• FY 2010 - 72,900 pro se civil lawsuits

According to the report, most of the pro se civil filings are lawsuits filed by prison inmates challenging conditions of their incarceration. In FY 2010, 48,581 of the 72,900 pro se filings were prison petitions. Thus, the overall amount of pro se civil litigation is largely attributable to the never-ending expansion of criminal prosecutions. However, the number of non-prisoner pro se cases has gone up as well, and actually appears to be increasing at a faster rate than prisoner petitions. The data for recent years shows:

• FY 2007 - 20,545 non-prisoner pro se cases
• FY 2008 - 20,192 non-prisoner pro se cases
• FY 2009 - 22,821 non-prisoner pro se cases
• FY 2010 - 24,319 non-prisoner pro se cases

To learn more about the report, read Federal Caseload Trend: More Civil Cases Being Filed Without Lawyer's Help.

What are your thoughts on the growth of pro se litigation in the federal courts, both among prisoners and non-prisoners as well? How much less strain would there be on the resources of the federal court system if our country was not so obsessed with locking up so many people for such long periods of time? Is the rising rate of increase in non-prisoner pro se lawsuits attributable to people feeling that lawyers are no longer necessary, or is it a reflection of people simply being unable to afford the high costs of using an attorney for federal litigation? Share your thoughts in the Comments section below.