North Carolina Lawyers Weekly

Remember traveling? Getting dressed for work? Those were the days, but they weren’t without their risks, as Sidebar was reminded while reading a recent North Carolina Court of Appeals decision from the safety of his home office. Jerry McSwain filed ...

A recent law school graduate isn’t giving up on his lawsuit alleging the online site Above the Law defamed him in a 2018 story that referred to him as a “dumb kid” and “entitled ponce.” On Jan. 6, U.S. District ...

It’s hard to imagine how the Fyre Festival could have possibly been a bigger disaster. Promoters had hyped it as the experience of a lifetime, a luxurious music festival set on a dazzling Bahamian island, but in the end absolutely ...

Sidebar is always gently reminding his reporters to be thoughtful in choosing whether to use the active or passive voice in a story. There’s a time to write “a spy planted the bug in the office” (active), and a time ...

Tagged with: passive voice

The 33-foot Winnebago Vista was hard to miss when Sidebar rolled into the parking lot of a shopping center in northeast Raleigh—which, for the law firm that operates out of it, is sort of the point. The new firm, Osborn ...

The 2019 NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Tournament was tipping off just as Lawyers Weekly went to press, so Sidebar won’t embarrass itself by publishing its picks for the Final Four, but March is also the time of year for ...

Tagged with: moot court

“Radical transparency” is a hot new trend in tech and political circles, but a Guilford County District Court judge has—perhaps—provided some fairly radical transparency about why he’s just been suspended from the bench. Guilford County District Judge Mark Cummings was ...

Tagged with: allegations

Appellate judges are often called upon to review cases in which a person’s freedom, or livelihood, or constitutional rights may hang in the balance. And then there’s also this stuff: The North Carolina Court of Appeals recently handed down an ...

Sidebar hit the streets of downtown Raleigh on a gorgeous afternoon earlier this month to experience firsthand what might be the coolest contraption any law school in the county has in its toy chest—a giant orange bicycle, seating seven in ...

Tagged with: Campbell Law

Politics is the only job in the world where, if you get passed over for a job you wanted, it’s considered socially acceptable to log onto Twitter and blast the person who made the hiring decision. (That’s definitely not how ...

Tagged with: Gov. Roy Cooper