Take a deep breath and learn how to deal with a bad work situation: “Like having an employment attorney on call. . . . It’s exactly what employees need.” —Alison Green, author of Ask A Manager USA Best Book Award Winner Hate your job? Ready to quit? Facing a layoff before you even have a chance to quit? Is your boss is a flaming jerk? Think you might have a lawsuit? If any of these scenarios apply to you, you are facing a crucial career moment—and mistakes and misinformation will cost you dearly. In Stand Up for Yourself Without Getting Fired, celebrated attorney Donna Ballman provides winning answers to these and many more tough questions, such as: I think they’re getting ready to lay me off. What can I do? My boss is creating a hostile environment. Can I sue? What does it mean if I sign a paper saying I’m an independent contractor and not an employee? Am I exempt from overtime? Whether you’re a recent college grad or an almost-retiree, newly employed or laid off after twenty years; gay or straight; single or married with kids; janitor or CEO . . . Stand Up for Yourself Without Getting Fired will give you the specific and relevant advice you need to face any career-threatening situation . . . and come out ahead.

The Model Rules of Professional Conduct provides an up-to-date resource for information on legal ethics. Federal, state and local courts in all jurisdictions look to the Rules for guidance in solving lawyer malpractice cases, disciplinary actions, disqualification issues, sanctions questions and much more. In this volume, black-letter Rules of Professional Conduct are followed by numbered Comments that explain each Rule's purpose and provide suggestions for its practical application. The Rules will help you identify proper conduct in a variety of given situations, review those instances where discretionary action is possible, and define the nature of the relationship between you and your clients, colleagues and the courts.

This book re-examines fundamental assumptions about the American legal profession and the boundaries between "professional" lawyers, "lay" lawyers, and social workers. Putting legal history and women's history in dialogue, it details the history of the origins and development of free legal aid for the poor in the United States.

This book considers how access to justice is affected by restrictions to legal aid budgets and increasingly prescriptive service guidelines. As common law jurisdictions, England and Wales and Australia, share similar ideals, policies and practices, but they differ in aspects of their legal and political culture, in the nature of the communities they serve and in their approaches to providing access to justice. These jurisdictions thus provide us with different perspectives on what constitutes justice and how we might seek to overcome the burgeoning crisis in unmet legal need. The book fills an important gap in existing scholarship as the first to bring together new empirical and theoretical knowledge examining different responses to legal aid crises both in the domestic and comparative contexts, across criminal, civil and family law. It achieves this by examining the broader social, political, legal, health and welfare impacts of legal aid cuts and prescriptive service guidelines. Across both jurisdictions, this work suggests that it is the most vulnerable groups who lose out in the way the law now operates in the twenty-first century. This book is essential reading for academics, students, practitioners and policymakers interested in criminal and civil justice, access to justice, the provision of legal assistance and legal aid.

Compares the performance of lawyers and non-lawyers as advocates in various legal proceedings

This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This edited collection provides a comprehensive analysis of the differences and similarities between civil legal aid schemes in the Nordic countries whilst outlining recent legal aid transformations in their respective welfare states. Based on in-depth studies of Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, and Iceland, the authors compare these cases with legal aid in Europe and the US to examine whether a single, unique Nordic model exists. Contextualizing Nordic legal aid in relation to welfare ideology and human rights, Hammerslev and Halvorsen Rønning consider whether flaws in the welfare state exist, and how legal aid affects disadvantaged citizens. Concluding that the five countries all have very different legal aid schemes, the authors explore an important general trend: welfare states increasingly outsourcing legal aid to the market and the third sector through both membership organizations and smaller voluntary organizations. A methodical and compassionate text, this book will be of special interest to scholars and students of the criminal justice, the welfare state, and the legal aid system.