North Carolina Lawyers Weekly

As every political news junkie knows by now, North Carolina State Rep. Stephen LaRoque (R-Lenoir) resigned his position July 25 after being indicted by a federal grand jury. LaRoque faces four counts of theft from a program receiving federal funds and four counts of money laundering over his management of a non-profit group that administered loans to small businesses.

Tagged with: Theft

A word of warning to attorneys who create their own websites: Be sure to proofread carefully. Otherwise, you might wind up with some highly unfortunate typos. Christopher Connelly, a criminal defense attorney in Charlotte, maintains a website that includes a number of FAQ pages. One of these is a page for “Public Masturbation FAQ,” which raises an obvious question—just how frequently are people asking attorneys for guidance in this matter?

A North Carolina judge has bench-slapped two brothers who languish in jail because they refuse to walk away from land that has been in their family for more than a century. Carteret County Superior Court Judge Benjamin G. Alford hit Melvin Davis and Licurtis Reels with $11,000 in sanctions on June 12 for filing frivolous motions from behind bars. It’s just the latest in a series of setbacks for the stubborn pair.

A.P. Carlton, an attorney with Raleigh’s Allen Pinnix & Nichols, has filed a counterclaim against the North Carolina State Bar on behalf of his new client, Lienguard, an Illinois-based commercial lien filing service. In 2010, the bar’s authorized practice committee sent Lienguard a cease-and-desist letter saying that the company’s filing of claims of lien was “illegal and must end immediately.”

Tagged with: LegalZoom N.C. State Bar

Repercussions from the power outage at the bar exam continued to ripple through the law grad community last week as more than 1,200 test takers awaited word on how the N.C. Board of Law Examiners would respond to the incident. Would the board mandate a retake of the Tuesday afternoon section? Would graders consider the circumstances when evaluating the essays? And just how were hard-working law grads supposed to relax on their well-deserved post-bar Caribbean vacations with this issue unresolved, anyway?

Tagged with: Bar Exam N.C. Board of Law Examiners