Sneak peek: Health-care reform, judicial selection, and animal welfare
law featured in December Wisconsin Lawyer
Dec. 9, 2011 – In the December Wisconsin Lawyer, now
available online
and in mailboxes soon, Madison attorneys Michael Skindrud and Todd Cleary outline what attorneys
should know about health care reform for themselves, their employees,
and their business clients.
In addition, Madison attorney Joseph Raney provides
historical perspectives on the election versus merit-based debate in
choosing Wisconsin Supreme Court justices, Milwaukee attorneys Joseph
Goode and Aaron Aizenberg discuss changes to animal welfare
laws, and writer Diane Molvig reports the
results of a groundbreaking State Bar study on “compassion fatigue.”
Health-care reform
Skindrud and Cleary, who practice health-care
and employee benefits law at Godfrey & Kahn, discuss the Patient
Protection and Affordable Care Act’s impacts on individuals, the
health insurance market, employers, group health plans, hospitals, and
physicians in “Health-care
Reform: What You Should Know.”
They also discuss new payment mechanisms under Medicare and Medicaid,
and outline the constitutional issues that will be presented to the
U.S. Supreme Court soon. “Although in
early 2012 the U.S. Supreme Court will review several
challenges to the law’s constitutionality, which mostly focus on
the individual mandate, many of the provisions of the Reform Law are
likely to continue in effect after resolution of the constitutional
issues,” the authors write.
Judicial selection
In his article, Choosing
Our Judges: Wisconsin’s Longstanding Debate, Raney gives
historical background on Wisconsin’s “long-dormant
debate” on the judicial selection issue, which has been
“revived” by “recent storms” involving the
state’s supreme court justices, Raney explains.
But “[a]s state voters ponder whether to adopt merit selection,
it is vital to consider why Wisconsin chose an elective judicial system
in the first place and to ask whether conditions have changed to the
point such that a new system is necessary,” Raney writes.
Animal welfare law
Two years after 2009 Wisconsin Act 90 bolstered the state’s
animal abuse and neglect laws, Goode and Aizenberg, of Kravit, Hovel
& Krawczyk, discuss how the relatively new law is impacting dog
breeders, animal shelters, rescues, and others involved in the care and
custody of 25 or more animals in “Enhancing
Animal Welfare Laws.”
The article is gives “attorneys a greater appreciation of the
rules affecting their clients now that Act 90 is in effect and help them
understand the rights and obligations of the affected
constituencies,” the authors write.
Cover story
In the magazine’s cover story, “The
Toll of Trauma,” Molvig talks with prosecutors and public
defenders to unearth the cost of “compassion fatigue”
– the cumulative physical, emotional, and psychological effects
resulting from continual exposure to others’ traumatic experiences
– in light of a groundbreaking study on the issue.
“There’s research on the impact of secondary trauma on
human beings, but it’s never been looked at extensively with
lawyers,” says State Bar WisLap Coordinator Linda Albert,
cofacilitator of the compassion fatigue study. “We’re on the
forefront of this.”
Albert sat down with Deb Smith, State Public Defender director of
assigned counsel, to discuss compassion fatigue and the study in a
Wisconsin Lawyer WebXtra video.
Other topics
Also, don’t miss this month’s ethics
column by attorney Dean Dietrich, past chair of the State
Bar’s Professional Ethics Committee, who advises attorneys on
“ensuring confidential client communications” in the context
of email communications with clients.
Finally, in his monthly “Managing
Risk” column, attorney Thomas Watson of Wisconsin Mutual
Lawyers Insurance Company explains how litigation is becoming more
frequent in the estate planning area. Watson tells estate planning
lawyers what they should know to avoid potential pitfalls and
malpractice claims.
