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    Wisconsin Lawyer
    April 01, 2000

    Wisconsin Lawyer April 2000: Book Reviews 2

     

    Wisconsin Lawyer: April 2000

    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.

    Boiler Room

    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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