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Vol. 73, No. 4, April 2000 |
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Book Reviews
This Month's Featured Selections
The Legal Assistant's Practical Guide
to Professional Responsibility
By Carole L. Mostow and Arthur Garwin
(Chicago, IL: ABA Center for Professional Responsibility, 1998.)
210 pgs. $34.95.
Reviewed by Natalia Walter
This handy manual on professional responsibility should be
required reading for every legal assistant and every attorney
who relies on legal support staff. In 11 succinct chapters, the
ABA Center for Professional Responsibility summarizes the field
of legal ethics for nonattorneys. Easy to read charts, citations
to state cases, and 80 pages of appendices supplement summaries
of the most common ethical issues encountered in law offices.
Attorneys will find it a useful tool to train support staff in
the ethics governing the legal profession.
While reminding attorneys of their responsibility
for the ethical conduct of all law office staff, the authors
also emphasize support staff's obligations in upholding
legal ethics. Noting that the legal assistant/paralegal profession
remains largely unregulated, the ABA urges the formulation of
codes of ethics for legal assistants and the establishment of
core competencies. The authors advise paralegals to monitor law
office conduct and seek advice in ethically dubious situations.
Particularly useful are the discussions of unauthorized practice
of law and confidentiality. What, for example, constitutes "legal
advice"? To what extent are paralegals bound by the rules
of confidentiality that govern attorneys? The boundaries between
legal support staff and the attorney are examined in each chapter.
As the cost of legal services increases, offices are relying
more heavily on support staff to provide a range of client services.
This book will greatly assist in helping an attorney to determine
efficient and ethical use of nonattorneys in her practice.
Natalia Walter, U.W. 1994, practices
immigration law in Texas.
The Boiler Room & Other Telephone Sales
Scams
By Robert J. Stevenson
(Champaign, IL: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1998.)
226 pgs. $22.46.
Reviewed by Gary Grass
Here is an uncommon work of independent scholarship. The
Boiler Room & Other Telephone Sales Scams has won academic
praise for its rare investigation of disreputable phone sales
shops. Erstwhile professor Robert Stevenson spent nine years
covertly observing the operations of more than 20 telephone rooms,
gathering perspectives from dozens of managers and house "pros"
and hundreds of lower-level informants. His intense research
has opened vistas into a fascinating netherworld of telephone
pitchmen.
Stevenson lets these professional talkers paint verbal pictures
for us in their rich-hued jargon. We hear their full pitches,
complete with inflections, their insights and metaphors, and
their contempt for the "mooches" who get their calls.
Stevenson adds his own expert eye for the ideology and economics
of the boiler room, classifies a menagerie of boiler room types,
and analyzes their pecking order. The inner workings detailed
include secrets unknown even to insiders, who are routinely victimized
by the boiler rooms' self-destructive rogue capitalism and
poisonous internal "chemistry."
Stevenson assesses social costs from
the hawking of worthless or substandard wares or nonexistent
services. How many accidents are caused by product houses'
defective auto parts, or rubbing alcohol (diluted in someone's
bathtub) sold to an airline purchasing department as de-icer?
Stevenson considers a variety of tactics boiler rooms use to
avid legal snares, but without venturing far into matters of
law.
For all its merits, a nonsociologist expecting a potboiler
may find the detail agonizingly thorough and certain analyses
perplexing. The Boiler Room has an index, notes, and references,
but could use a glossary. The trade vernacular ("cooling
out the mark") and sociological lingo ("interaction
membrane") are erratically explained. A few typos appear,
and the organization is not always transparent. Some conclusions
seem tendentious.
But when it's all boiled down, the unique and compelling
material highly recommend this book.
Gary Grass is a Milwaukee writer, teacher,
and paralegal. He currently works as a supervisor at a legitimate
telephone research company.
Animal Law & Dog Behavior
By David Favre & Peter L. Borchelt
(Tucson, AZ: Lawyers & Judges Publishing Co., 1999).
388 pgs. $89.50.
Reviewed by Patricia Sommer
Animal Law and Dog Behavior is exactly what one would
expect from its title. The first half of the book is an overview
of the body of law surrounding animals, from their ownership
and regulation to cruelty laws and veterinary malpractice. The
second half is a group of articles addressing canine aggression.
The book is mildly interesting, but poorly edited.
The book's first half is comprehensive and well-researched.
The historical discussions were interesting, even though some
of the issues presented were arcane. One problem with this section
is that is repetitive - the same cases are sometimes discussed
in multiple sections without distinct analysis justifying the
rehash.
The second section seems thrown together
in order to justify publishing the book. Several articles written
for other publications are included. These deal with dog behavior
and aggression. Perhaps one more sympathetic to the industry
of animal psychology might review this portion more favorably.
That being said, this section might prove useful to anyone whose
practice includes a lot of dog-bite cases: It contains checklists
of possible causes of action and other aspects of trying such
a case.
One section struck a chord in light of our supreme court's
1999 decision in State v. Bodoh.
Several states have laws imposing criminal liability on persons
whose dangerous dogs injure others, much like the law envisioned
by Judge Harry G. Snyder in his dissent when Bodoh was
before the court of appeals. (See State
v. Bodoh, 220 Wis. 2d 102, 116, 119-20, 582 N.W.2d 440,
446-48 (Ct. App. 1998).)
Overall, the book is no page-turner, and it is annoyingly
riddled with typographical errors and grammatical mistakes.
Patricia Sommer, U.W. 1998, is a law
clerk to the Hon. Richard S. Brown, Wisconsin Court of Appeals,
District II.
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