Sara Sonet, Research Librarian at the United States Supreme Court Law Library, is this year’s Roy M. Mersky Spirit of Law Librarianship Award winner. From the AALL listserv announcements: The Committee (Barbara Bintliff, University of Texas School of Law; Dick…
Posts Tagged ‘year’
Perhaps This Year’s Most Controversial Commencement Speech: "Emory has failed you in some way." … "You might not be able to land that job [you want]."
03
Jun
So … “You might have to move to Nebraska. … You might have to join a small firm where they don’t make the big bucks,” she said. “You might also have to learn to be a giver, not a taker….
How Does the IRS Treat Registered Domestic Partners?
14
Apr
Before 2010, the IRS treated Registered Domestic Partners (RDPs) who reside in community property states like Washington as single people. For tax year 2010, the IRS has changed its policy and now treats RDPs more like married couples. Attorney Elaine G. DuCharme wrote an article for the April 2011 King County Bar Bulletin called, “New IRS Rules for Registered Domestic Partners,” which points out the changes in the tax code and what they mean for RDPs. This is an overview of that article for people who are in a Washington RDP or are considering registering.
The Old Rule.
Before 2010, people who were in a Registered Domestic Partnership would each file a separate federal tax return, report only their income, and only be entitled to claim their credits and deductions. Basically, the IRS treated RDPs like single people. This was despite Washington’s Registered Domestic Partnership Act which extended community property rights to RDP’s as of June 11, 2008.
The New Rule.
The IRS has changed their rules for RDPs in Washington effective with the 2010 tax returns. People who are in an RDP still file individually, but now each person reports half of the combined income of the RDP and takes half of the combined total credits for income tax withholding. “Income” includes both wages and income from community-property assets. These rule changes also allow taxpayers to amend tax returns filed in 2008 and 2009, though they do not require amendment. If one taxpayer amends, the other must do so as well.
What is or isn’t community property is still being sorted out and is likely to change as the IRS refines their new rules. According to Ms. DuCharme’s article, withdrawals from IRAs and Coverdell Education Savings Accounts are treated as separate income, but withdrawals from pensions (including military retirement, civil service retirement and FERS retirement plans) could be treated as community property. Income from a community business is community income, but the self-employment taxes are only imposed on the partner who is carrying on the business. If the property was acquired before the couple was registered or before June 11, 2008 (whichever was later) it will be considered separate property unless it was clearly converted to community property via a quit claim deed or agreement.
Effect of New Rules.
There is bound to be a good deal of confusion about how these new rules affect you and your partner. If you are registered, should you stay registered? If you aren’t registered, should you take that step? What does the IRS consider to be separate property and what is community property? Should you and your partner enter into an agreement stating that property is or isn’t community property? Is the new rule going to save you and your partner money or end up with you paying more taxes? Do you and your partner need to amend your tax returns? If so, how far back do you need to go? These are all very good questions and should be answered by a tax professional and attorney who are fluent in the new IRS rules as well as the RDP Act.
Ms. DuCharme’s article can be read here. If you have questions, feel free to call Pro Se University at 877.776.7310.
When you’re old enough, friends pop up in the oddest way
14
Mar
Celebrities are full of stories about their exploits, their famous friends, who they mix with, who they work with. It’s often to do with the size of their billing, or their latest agent’s gaffes. Then there are the less famous. People like me, with stories more down to earth, but, I think, more interesting, unless you’re a fan follower.
This is by way of saying that I went to a play the other evening, at the East-West Theatre downtown, a play called “Wrinkles”. Couldn’t believe what I saw, for there, playing the lead, was my old fellow worker at, of all places, First National City Bank, Park Avenue, N.Y. 5th floor. The year was 1963, the place the computer room, midnight to 8 am shift, Burroughs check sorting machine. His name – Sab Shimono. I remember him as a delicate, shy, self-effacing youngster, wrestling with the machine just as I was.
I met him after the curtain came down, and we swapped a few stories in the car-park. He has developed into a splendid actor, and reached an age of maturity reflected in his command of the stage.
I plan to see more of Sab.
LawPivot: Another Legal Advice Web Site
29
Jan
Another interesting start-up has emerged out of Silicon Valley to provide crowdsourced legal advice to other start-ups for free.
Vertical Q&A web sites seems to be the next new thing among venture capital investors. Even Facebook rolled out this year a crowd-sourced Q&A service.
LawPivot, a legal Q&A web site founded in 2009, hopes to fill a niche by providing legal advice to the founders of start-up and early stage high-tech companies based in California at a legal fee they can afford — FREE. Legal advice is provided by an experienced network of high-priced business law attorneys, recruited from the top 200 hundred or so law firms, who hope to pick up new clients by entering into discussions by providing free legal advice services to start-up companies.
Free legal advice or the “free consult” has been employed by lawyers for years, pre-Internet, as a tried and true marketing strategy for acquiring new clients. Now many lawyers are beginning to offer free legal advice online from their web sites directly. See for example, VirtualEsq.Com . By next year there will be hundreds of these free legal advice services offered directly by lawyers from their web sites as the virtual law firm movement begins to scale.
However, free legal advice from an individual law firm’s web site, is not the same thing as a vertical web site that aggregates answers from many lawyers, giving consumers a wider variety of responses to their particular situation.
Free legal advice online is not a completely new idea. FreeAdvice has been doing it for years, and consumers can get answers to their basic legal questions from sites such as AVVO, RocketLawyer, and JustAnswer. What is new, is that LawPivot provides through its network of lawyers “real” legal advice that applies to the client’s particular situation, as distinguished from merely legal information. And this advice is reputedly to be "high quality" given the stature of the lawyers recruited to the LawPivot network.
However, genuine legal advice, [as distinguished from “legal advice” that is characterized as “legal information” ], like any legal service, has to be delivered in an ethically compliant way requiring that the client’s information be kept confidential, that an attorney/client relationship be established, and that the attorney providing the legal advice be a member of the bar within the jurisdiction where the client is located. Presumably LawPivot is addressing these issues. The LawPivot service is presently limited to California, but the company, according to its representations, plans to expand nationwide.
Although the company recently raised $600,000 from Google Ventures, the venture capital arm of Google, after a $400,0000 round from from a group of angel investors, it will be interesting to see how or whether it survives. At this point, neither the clients are charged for legal advice, nor are the participating attorneys charged an advertising fee. So there is no revenue, and apparently no business model. However, I doubt that the investors thought they were making charitable contributions, so there must be a business model lurking in the background somewhere?
Unfortunately, the only business model that is ethically compliant in the US, is one where the participating lawyers pay an advertising fee to play (get listed) and get exposure. Splitting legal advice fees between a law firm and a non-law firm , is a big “No, No” and an ethical prohibition that exposes the participating attorneys to bar sanctions which could lead to disbarment. Perhaps because Google is now involved as a major backer of LawPivot , and the company is planning to move to the GooglePlex campus start-up incubator, "they can do no wrong.!"
Many other Western common law jurisdictions, like the United Kingdom, have abolished the division of fees, but the rules against splitting fees with non-lawyers remains sacrosanct in the US, on the theory that splitting fees would compromise the independent judgment of the attorney. However, in the UK, lawyers are permitted to work for a profit-making company and provide legal advice directly to consumers, and no one seems to be complaining about compromised judgment. [ See: FirstAssist in the UK for an example ].
Charging clients an administrative fee to “use” the web site, as an alternative revenue source, has been tried before in an earlier Internet era, and it failed then. [ e.g. AmeriCounsel ]. I doubt that this model will work today when consumers are expecting everything on the web to be for free.
I think it is a good sign that innovation is happening in the legal industry, and that private capital is finally looking for a way to get a return by investing in the delivery of legal services. [See: Total Attorneys Receives Multi-Million Dollar Investment ].
I would like to see companies like LawPivot thrive, but at this point I don’t see the juice. Are advertising revenues sufficient to make this venture sustainable, or has LawPivot figured out another legitimate source of revenue that doesn’t violate US ethical prohibitions? Only time will tell.
