Law Blog

Owning a piece of land without any means of accessing it is akin to owning a car without the keys.  While the absence of access to land, like the absence of keys to a car, does not have any impact on the fact of ownership, it obviously has a huge impact on the value of what is owned.  With that in mind, let’s consider the several ways that a landowner may have ...

Comfort is a killer of creativity and improvement. When you’re comfortable, there is a feeling you can coast, doing the same old, same old, and it causes many people to stagnate personally or professionally. That doesn’t mean they won’t be happy or maintain their position and role, but they will be stuck under a false glass ceiling they created. When you come...

Lisa M. Paine is a featured speaker at the Maricopa County Bar Association Seminar: EPPT Fundamentals II: Basic Estate Planning What: This on-line seminar will include an overview of estate planning including wills, trusts, living wills and powers of attorneys. It covers Arizona law, community property, trust funding and family considerations. Where: Live virt...

I have previously written about the impact of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic on force majeure provisions in a commercial contract. A force majeure clause may excuse a party from performing its contract because of an unforeseen disaster. Whether it does depends on what the clause says and the particular facts and circumstances of each case. See “Does Your Con...

It’s Friday. I like to post new blog posts in the middle of the week when readers are likely ready for a short break from the work in front of them. We all are too focused and busy on Mondays, and by Friday, we are trying to get things done before people shut down for the weekend. I missed that window this week. I could list the reasons this happened, but, if I�...

The Trademark Modernization Act of 2020 (the “TMA”) was buried in the enormous COVID relief and stimulus bill (i.e., the Consolidated Appropriations Act for 2021), signed into law on December 27, 2020. The TMA amends federal trademark law in several significant ways of which trademark owners should take note. Rebuttable Presumption of Irreparable Harm. One ...

An employee refuses to come in to work or calls in sick or doesn’t show up or call in at all because of the COVID-19 pandemic. There are plenty of excuses to do that, some real and some not so real. Many employees have been working from home these days, and they like it. Some may want to keep it that way by convincing the employer to embrace the economic virtues ...

Days before the January 20, 2021, presidential inauguration, the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL), under the outgoing administration, issued a flurry of new regulations, rules and opinion letters that could significantly impact the employment law landscape in the coming months or years. A gust of that wind stirs up new tipped employee regulations, set to take effec...

Unity in diversity is an old saying, which is true in many contexts. In the workplace, diversity makes for a better and stronger workforce. It means more than tolerance of differences. It is the recognition and understanding that differences provide ideas, create connections, and enrich the human connection. Diversity is broad and includes more differences than mos...

As 2020 closed, most people said “good riddance.” It was a year that few of us want to repeat. We had less control over many aspects of our lives, most of us faced paradigm shifts in how we worked, there were massive losses, and our social interactions were altered dramatically. It felt like we were riding in a bus without much control of where we were going an...