Evan Vitale Consulting: Lion killing dentist is 'consulting' Joe Friedberg

Tuesday, September 8, 2015

Lion killing dentist is 'consulting' Joe Friedberg – Minnesota Lawyer

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Friedberg is legal “consultant” for lion killing dentist

Minneapolis criminal defense ace Joe Friedberg is acting as an unpaid legal consultant – but not as a lawyer — for the Bloomington dentist/slayer-of-Cecil-the-lion, Walter Palmer.

With Friedberg at his side, Palmer this weekend broke his silence about the killing of the celebrated lion, speaking to reporters from the Star Tribune and Associated Press. Palmer didn’t reveal much about the incident that made him an international pariah but Friedberg chimed in with some interesting remarks.

“I’m not Walter’s lawyer in this situation because Walter doesn’t need a lawyer in this situation,” Friedberg said, according to the account from the AP’s Brian Baskt. “If some governmental agency or investigative unit would make a claim that he violated some law then we’d talk about it.”

Friedberg said Palmer agreed to take questions from U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service authorities on the condition the session be recorded but never heard back.

Who gets the ring? Who gets everything else?

At the Family-in-Law blog, Minneapolis divorce lawyer Mike Boulette delves into the question every family law attorney is asked by friends and acquaintances at some point: When a relationship goes south, who gets the ring?

“It depends on one thing: Did you actually get married? If you didn’t get married, then the partner who gave the ring gets it back, under the theory that the ring was a conditional gift and the condition was marriage,” writes Boulette.

But Boulette says people really ought to be asking another question: Who gets everything else?

That’s much harder to answer, particularly for unmarried couples with co-mingled finances. Boulette points to the recent decision from the Minnesota Court of Appeals in Anderson v. Lloyd, a broken engagement case in which one party (Anderson) sued over improvements made to the other party’s home.

From the post:

“The Trial Court decided for Lloyd, reasoning that Anderson’s lawsuit was essentially a lawsuit over a broken engagement, the sort of “heart-balm action,” no longer allowed in Minnesota. The Court of Appeals disagreed, and permitted Anderson to proceed with his claims for unjust enrichment and promissory estoppel, holding that they were not “predicated upon” a breach of promise to marry. In other words, Anderson presented evidence that his lawsuit was more than hurt feelings and a broken engagement. Because of it, he was allowed to bring his case to trial to try to recover for his contributions to his ex’s home.”

Thinking about setting up opposing counsel for DWI? Not a good idea.

The ABA Journal reports on a weird legal ethics case in which three attorneys are accused of deliberately setting up the DWI arrest of their opposing counsel in a big defamation case.

Of course, it comes out of Florida.

According to the story, the 2013 episode involved “a flirtatious paralegal,” a night of drinking at a Tampa steakhouse, and “a flurry of phone calls and texts between the lawyers and the paralegal” that culminated with the arrest of the targeted attorney as he drove away in the paralegal’s car.

“This malicious tampering with another person’s personal life and career was not only unprofessional, it was inexcusable,” Judge W. Douglas Baird, the court appointed referee, wrote in a reporting urging the Florida Supreme Court to permanently disbar the trio.

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