WHAT THIS IS…  The main purpose of this site is to inform.  There are a lot of solo and small firm practitioners out there who can’t keep abreast of everything going on in the law, and this is mainly for them:  it’ll give you information on current opinions and legal trends that might be helpful in your practice.  I’ll give some analysis at times which I hope will prove stimulating.  I’ll also do my best to keep it interesting and entertaining. 

WHAT THIS ISN’T…  Caveat emptor applies here, bigtime. If you’re not a lawyer, nothing here is intended to be legal advice. If you have a question, consult an attorney in your jurisdiction. You can send me an email if you’d like, but doing so does not establish an attorney-client relationship, and will not be regarded as a confidential communication.  If you are a lawyer, then what you find here will hopefully be informative or thought-provoking, but there’s no guarantee that it’s right. I’m writing a blog, not a law review article. 

WHAT IT COVERS…  Mostly Ohio law, with slight emphasis on the decisions of the Cuyahoga County Court of Appeals, since that’s where I practice, and a fairly pronounced emphasis on criminal law, because that’s what I enjoy most.  I’ll also focus on cases involving questions of procedure, as well as tort and contract law.Unless they’re really interesting, I won’t get into highly specialized cases, and if you’re looking for cases on tax or corporate law, you’re going to be keenly disappointed.  My attitude on those subjects pretty much corresponds with John F. Kennedy’s sentiments toward farming, as indicated by what he told Orville Freeman, his incoming Secretary of Agriculture: “Orville, I don’t want to hear about agriculture from anyone except you, and I don’t want to hear about it from you.” 

WHAT’S ON THE SITE…  The cases mentioned here contain links to the actual source, in either PDF or Word format.  I’ll also have a link to any Ohio statute I cite.  Anything else, like rules or Federal statutes, you’ll need to look up on your own. 

HOW TO USE THE SITE…  You can read this every day.  It’ll take about three minutes, and it’s like staying in a Holiday Inn Express:  it’ll make you smarter, although I don’t offer a Continental breakfast.  Every Monday I do a Case Update:  quick summaries of US and Ohio Supreme Court cases from the previous week, plus a rundown of about a dozen key cases from the Ohio courts of appeals.  Every Tuesday I do a rundown of the preceding week’s cases from the 8th District Court of Appeals.  The other three days I’ll do a more in-depth analysis of a recent case, or whatever comes to mind.

You can also use this as a resource, if you’ve got a case and you know the law was discussed here, or just want to find out if it was.  If you just want to view posts on a particular subject, you can use the Categories.  Constitutional means anything of that nature, particularly cases involving search and seizure or other questions impacting rights of criminal defendants.   Criminal and Civil should be self-explanatory.  Potpourri and Rants are posts which cross over those categories — such as the Case Update — or don’t fall into any of them, with the snarkiness factor much higher in the latter category.

The best approach for finding cases on a particular subject is to use the Search button, which works just like Google, except it’s limited to this site.  If, for example, you put in anonymous tip, you’re going to get any posts where those two words appeared.  If you want to make sure you limit your result to those posts in which those words appear as a phrase, put them in quotes, e.g., “anonymous tip.”  Once you get the posts, you can quickly find the term or phrase by using Edit/Find on your browser’s menu bar; it will take you to that exact term or phrase, and you can find successive occurrences of the term by clicking on the Next button.

WHO I AM…  This is where I’ll stick in the “about the author” stuff, too, while trying to avoid the usual tendencies in that regard, which run the gamut from sounding like a personals ad gone horribly wrong to making the author seem like a cross between Thoreau and the Unabomber. (“The author lives with his wife, three dogs, and a llama in the mountains of Yakutsk.”) Suffice it to say that my name’s Russ Bensing, I’ve been practicing law for thirty-some years, and I take a great deal of pride in my writing and research abilities. In retrospect, if offered the choice, I’d rather have taken a great deal of pride in my ability to pick winning stocks, but them’s the breaks.