Los Angeles Traffic Courts

We made some progress on our directory project, adding all the superior courts in Los Angeles County. Superior Court in California seems to handle just about everything, from simple traffic tickets up to murder cases and civil cases too.

A couple of the more "happening" traffic courts there include Beverly Hills Superior Court and Malibu Superior Court, which have had quite a few celebrity cases. Makes for fun research. You get your DUI cases involving Mischa Barton, the Hilton family, and Mel Gibson. Then you get the odd ones like the pregnant woman who killed a parking attendant and was sentenced to house arrest.

Lawyer websites and font size

I just visited a website for another law firm in the Albany area. The font size was extremely small. Below is an image showing it next to our website, and you can see that our fonts are significantly larger. If you go to the effort to create a website, you should go further and make sure it is user friendly and readable. It is an attractive website and the firm has a good reputation (I took the snapshot so the identifying info about the firm is not visible), but it could be better. If you click on the picture it will enlarge so you get a better view.

Albany Public Relations

My buddy Mark Grimm is also my fellow town board member. Mark really led the campaign and I think his skills in public relations really helped. He has a website for his business: Albany Public Relations. A couple years ago when we sued the Rensselaer DA, Mark set up our press conference and it went very well.

I've learned a lot from Mark, and from my own experiences with the media. One big thing is understanding that there's a lot of randomness. You can get everything set up for your big event, and then some huge news story can come up and the media doesn't come to your event. Imagine if you were doing your press conference on the day the Spitzer story hit.

Another big thing is to be sure you stay honest. It can be tempting to tell little white lies to the media. At least some journalists, and I think most, will start ignoring you if they think you're dishonest. Being honest won't get you in the paper every time you want to be, but being dishonest may ensure you won't get covered even if you have a good story.

There's a lot more to it, but the best way to really understand it is to work with a professional.

Schenectady DWI

We handle DWI in the Schenectady area. It seems like most of the cases we see occur in the towns, like Rotterdam, Duanesburg and Glenville. Of course there are some in the City of Schenectady as well. We certainly see more DWI and DWAI cases in Albany County. And we see more Saratoga DWI cases too. For Albany it seems obvious why -- bigger area, and maybe we have a closer connection to Albany. For Saratoga it's not as obvious. Saratoga does get more tourism than Schenectady (understatement of the week), and it's reasonable to think we get more "tourist" clients than locals. That's just a guess though.

Gmail April Fools Joke Got Me

So there I am peacefully using my Gmail when I notice a link at the top for a new feature -- Gmail custom time. Check out Google's Gmail April Fools Joke.

I actually fell for it for a couple minutes. Started composing a message to see how it worked, but the feature was missing. Went back to read the instructions again. Google got me!