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In California, is there a legal issue with holding the property of someone who owes you money until they've paid that money? A client refusing to pay his last invoice wants me to pay to ship something back to him. I'm fairly certain I'm under no obligation to spend money to return it to him, but if he provides a way for me to return it that doesn't cost me money, can I still hold the item as collateral until he pays me the money he owes?
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Oct 3, 2011 23:52
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Powdered Toast Man posted:I recently quit from an employer I had been working at for about 3 years. At the time of my separation, I had a negative balance of PTO in their payroll system. This was, as it happens, right before the end of the year. Let's ignore the whole fact that their stupid system even allowed the negative balance anyway... (and the fact that the negative balance would have been cancelled out when the year rolled over and I got my PTO for 2012) I can't really say anything on the subject of your obligation to pay back PTO, but if the company does not send you a W2, you can use form 4852: http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f4852.pdf I'm not a lawyer, but it's my understanding that the company has a legal obligation to send W2s by January 31st, and that you can contact the IRS if you haven't received one by Febuary 14th using the phone number from that form. They'll contact the company to get a copy for you, or you can fill out that form using info from your last paystub if they can't get you a copy in time.
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Jan 21, 2012 00:16
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Robo Olga posted:I thought you had a lawyer, you should probably be asking him these things. She's not living there, though, and she and his father were going to get a divorce before he unexpectedly died. There's nothing wrong with him trying to get some of his dad's estate (which would have gone to him if his dad had lived long enough for the divorce to go through anyway).
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Feb 21, 2012 23:57
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Alterian posted:Didn't they take attendance in the class when you took the test? That was never a very common thing when I was in college, particularly for large classes.
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May 3, 2012 23:41
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BirdOfPlay posted:Also, I know there's a term for a cop preforming a legal search (and seizure) without a warrant, but I'm drawing a blank on it. You're probably thinking of probable cause.
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Jun 29, 2012 06:07
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woozle wuzzle posted:somehow fall into a conflict, etc. I know you're just posing a hypothetical, but it sounds really easy to fall into conflict- you could easily give advice to two parties suing each other.
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Jul 25, 2012 06:08
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woozle wuzzle posted:I'm speaking from the perspective of the law, not necessarily "what's correct parenting philosophy": you are incorrect. Unless it was in self-defense or defense of another, like the daughter started attacking some one and your sister subdued her by the wrist, then it was illegal. It sounds pretty clear a domestic battery occurred that could result in a charge. Just out of curiosity, would spanking a child likewise be domestic battery? What legal line is drawn between acceptable physical punishment and battery, if any?
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Aug 7, 2012 22:42
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areyoucontagious posted:
A friend of mine actually had an issue with this when he was in his late teens or early twenties. He'd been told to always inform an officer if you had a weapon when you were pulled over, so when he got pulled over for speeding he cheerfully told the officer, "Oh, by the way, Officer, I have a gun in the car." This was apparently not the best way to do it, since the officer's reaction was to take a step back, put his hand on his own gun, and say, "You sure you want to do this, son?" I've always wondered what was the appropriate, non-threatening way to inform someone you had a gun.
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Aug 16, 2012 19:47
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Little Miss RKO posted:I'm not a lawyer, but registering your work entitles you to a lot more than just proving that you made it but didn't register it. If the work is unregistered, you will not be entitled to damages, only (if I remember right) any profits they may have gained from the use of your work, or what you would have charged for licensing the work to them. Not a lawyer either, but I think that you have to prove actual damages if it's not registered, whereas you can get the statutory damages (something like $150k per work, if I remember correctly) if it is registered.
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Aug 29, 2012 23:09
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Busy Bee posted:My friends lawyer spent logged in over $7000 preparing for a trial (interviewing witnesses, writing trial brief etc) and on the week before trial when they were supposed to set the date, the prosecutor offers 25 hours of community service to have the case dismissed. My friend has two choices, take the 25 hours and do community service, or pay another $3000 towards his lawyer for the trial. Unless your friend makes more than $120 an hour, that sounds like a great deal
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Oct 26, 2012 23:58
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VyperRDH posted:I'll have to see if I still have my employee handbook, but considering they fired me a day before I went on vacation my guess is that they don't pay for unused vacation. You'll probably need to check your employee handbook for that too; I know I've worked for companies that don't give holiday pay if you're not working (or using PTO for) either the day before or the day after the holiday. If that's what their handbook says, and you were off the 31st as well, they wouldn't need to pay you for the 1st regardless.
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Jan 12, 2013 00:53
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Kalman posted:We really need to post David Simon's essay on this from Homicide in the OP. The one in this (hopefully functional) link. http://books.google.com/books?id=uw...utput=html_text. It's long, so I will summarize: if you are a suspect, it is literally never in your interest to speak with police without your lawyers presence and advice. I've always been a little curious as to how they determine whether you can have a PD. It's supposed to be if you can't afford an attorney yourself, right? Since different lawyers charge different ammounts and trials can go for varying amounts of time, how does the court determine whether you can afford an attorney?
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Mar 14, 2013 23:43
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Angry Hippo posted:Do you believe that was conveyed in his post? I am not a lawyer, and I understood exactly what he meant. Then again, I'm a non-lawyer that lurks this thread, so that gives me some advantage in understanding concepts that come up in the thread regularly.
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Jun 14, 2013 22:28
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My favorite part of that letter (you can read the whole thing at the bottom of the first page of the thread he linked) is this:quote:In addition, you have agreed to not distribute or share or otherwise disseminate "I'm going to sue you for copyright violations that I assume are going to happen in the future!"
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Jun 22, 2013 00:58
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euphronius posted:This is in California which might as well be Laos when compared to my native Pennsylvania, but I don't see how a lawyer could ethically represent both of you. Hopefully some other law goon will chime in. I'm in CA, and assuming the stuff I've been looking up regarding pre-nups applies to other methods of dividing up property, you can have one lawyer do everything for you here but it's unlikely to hold up if either party challenges it, which mostly defeats the purpose. If only one lawyer is involved it's assumed the other party wasn't adequately represented and the agreement can be challenged. Not at all a lawyer, this is just based on reading stuff written by CA lawyers a month or two back.
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Aug 14, 2013 02:19
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Michael Scott posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmTP4xUTqCM Not a lawyer, but I imagine the driver that failed to yield when making a left hand turn would be at fault.
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Sep 24, 2013 19:19
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I don't know if it's still popular enough to get results, but a friend of mine managed to get a laptop replaced quickly by contacting The Consumerist. Pretty soon after her story went up Dell got in touch with her to give her a new computer rather than try to repair her motherboard again.
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Oct 9, 2013 17:32
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It's just come to my attention that the state listed for my father's birth on my marriage licence is inaccurate- I thought he was born here in CA, but it was actually NV. I'm guessing that information is a formality and doesn't really affect anything, but just in case, is there any reason I should amend my licence to get an accurate birthplace for my father?
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Nov 5, 2013 01:16
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Arcturas posted:The PD vs. lawyer question is the only important one here. PD quality is very location-dependent. In my state, the major cities have great PD offices, and the PDs in the boonies don't have the resources they need. I don't know North Carolina's PDs. That said, hiring an attorney is going to be expensive. I'd always been under the impression that there wasn't a lot of choice in the matter- that they wouldn't give you a PD if you could afford to hire a lawyer, so you either didn't have money to pay a lawyer and got a PD or did and weren't allowed a PD. I take it there's some overlap, some people who could potentially afford a lawyer but still qualify for a PD? How is that determination made (in general or in your experience, the jurisdiction for this hypothetical doesn't really matter to me)?
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Mar 10, 2014 17:10
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patentmagus posted:A friend of mine wanted to get into landlording and so we pulled out the spreadsheets and gathered lots of data. It turned out that the most profit was in HUD housing. The state pays on time and the tenants are motivated to avoid being evicted from their subsidized home. The down side is that you have to be a pretty cold bastard because so many of your tenants will be serial gently caress-ups that you want off your property. My parents rented their old house out through HUD. When they got divorced, my mom, my sister, and I moved back to the old place. We gave them over 60 days notice and still nearly needed to evict them to get them out, and they had trashed the place when they finally did leave. Some of it was recent, but some things- like the mouse corpse ground into the carpet in one bedroom- had clearly been there for a long, long time. It was incredibly filthy. The moral of the story is never be a landlord.
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Mar 31, 2014 17:58
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BeastOfExmoor posted:I have a question regarding email retention policies as they apply to litigation. I haven't read through this enough to know if it's up anyone's alley, but I figured it was worth a shot. I'm not a lawyer, but my for-profit company has the same e-mail policy; I'm given to understand it's increasingly common these days. We're a records management company, and making sure our clients are correctly applying retention is a big deal to us, so I can only imagine that someone checked very thoroughly before we implemented the policy and that it's legally sound. In the event that you were sued and your e-mails were potentially evidence in the suit, you'd probably be required to make an archive at that point. Anything that was 90 days before the suit (and therefore destroyed before you were alerted that it was evidence) wouldn't be able to be used against you.
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Apr 3, 2014 03:47
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ShadowMoo posted:Has sovereign citizen ever produced anything other than comedy, pissed off judges, and prison terms? If you're asking whether it's ever been successful in court, I've never heard of such a thing happening.
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Apr 7, 2014 23:43
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This isn't a question, just a rant about a co-worker I thought people here might appreciate/be just as annoyed by as I am. He's getting a divorce, but he doesn't want to spend money on a lawyer, so he's just working with a paralegal to get the filings right. He refuses to understand that with a house and child support on the line, he really needs someone negotiating on his behalf, and that he stands to lose so much more than the cost of a lawyer. When he got his last paycheck, which included a large travel reimbursement so was much larger than normal, it auto deposited to their joint account and she drained the account. In her latest filing, she's asked for sole custody of the kids- he's already ceded the house to her and the kids because he wanted to disrupt the kids' lives as little as possible. Watching this happen is just painful. There's no way he doesn't come out better paying a lawyer for help, but he just sees it as an expense he can't afford.
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Apr 25, 2014 17:17
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beejay posted:Not a lawyer, but am I the only one that finds it hilarious when people post something that clearly obviously happened/is happening to them and then put "hypothetically" at the beginning? It seriously makes me laugh every time. Many of the lawyers in this thread feel more comfortable answering things phrased as a hypothetical, even if they are obviously not hypothetical.
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May 24, 2014 21:11
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tehloki posted:How do you propose a person would stop a dog from barking Well, there are collars you can buy that will spray a dog when it barks. I don't have one of those, but if I'm home when my dog is barking I stick my head out and tell him to shut up and come inside, that works too.
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May 28, 2014 23:47
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blarzgh posted:It would Is it really physical contact with another if you just leave something that used to be part of you somewhere that someone else will touch it? Is leaving a hair in someone else's toothbrush likewise assault?
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Jun 13, 2014 16:27
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woozle wuzzle posted:Nope. Can't legally sell his stuff, even with certified notice tattooed to his penis. You can't resort to self-help. I'm curious if they'd have to store his stuff at their expense indefinitely, or if there's some point that they can just put it on the street and wash their hands of it. Presumably if Goofus doesn't return before the lease ends and they move out they don't have to move it somewhere else.
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Jul 6, 2014 06:12
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chemosh6969 posted:I've seen them too but the nice place he describes isn't one I've really seen with alleys between them. Maybe my definition of nice and quiet family neighborhood is different but the ones that have homeless living in cars aren't all that great to begin with. I live in a nice neighborhood and there area alleys between houses; almost no one has driveways and they just access garages from the alley instead of from the front. The neighborhood is about a hundred years old, it probably wasn't designed the same way modern ones are but it's still nice and peaceful.
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Jul 11, 2014 20:05
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pandariot posted:Update of sorts: they emailed me that I am not entited to vacation pay according to the employee manual You're in California, you're entitled to vacation pay. California considers accrued vacation to be wages, the employer can't create a policy in the manual that would keep them from you. Now, if you got access to 10 vacation days before accruing the time off, it's possible he's right that he overpaid that. However, if it's a setup where you lose any saved vacation at the end of the year and get access to the next year's worth immediately at the beginning of the next year, that's also illegal in California; you can't take away saved vacation at the end of the year like that.
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Jul 26, 2014 00:53
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Queen Elizatits posted:Please settle an argument friends. Is there a law that controls how much percentage a Realtor makes of a sale? For the purposes of this argument it is San Antonio Texas but if anyone has heard of a similar law anywhere I would love to know about it. I know 6% is the usual amount but is it an actual law? I bought a house in California a few years ago, and it was by contract; the seller determined what percentage would go to each realtor involved. The seller's realtor, as far as I know, negotiates with the seller for their percentage, while the amount going to the buyer's realtor is part of the listing, discouraging the buyer's realtor from showing the buyer homes that they wouldn't get much from. My realtor explained the latter part, and phrased it as "can we stick to looking at houses that let me get paid for the services I'm providing you?" and we did. It's been a few years so I could be getting part of that wrong, but I'm fairly confident that this state, at least, doesn't require a particular percentage go to and realtors involved.
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Sep 22, 2014 05:34
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Bad Munki posted:like everything is an island if you think about it Oh man! That means we can't use the gold fringe on a flag to get out of lawsuits anymore!
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Sep 23, 2014 00:50
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Thanatosian posted:A question some lawyers in this thread can probably actually answer: I'm working on prepping some discovery documents in what is for me the largest case I've ever worked on (about 750,000 pages of discovery). Most (99%+) of what I've been working with has been provided to us in .pdf format. I have been bates-stamping the .pdfs, and providing the redacted versions to opposing counsel, broken down into logical sections: it's about 1000 insurance claims, so I've broken them down by claim, meaning most of the files are fairly large .pdfs (1000 pagesish, with a couple in the 2000ish range), but certainly not unmanageable. This is pretty much how I always do discovery docs. Am I committing some sort of discovery faux pas, here? Opposing counsel is pissed at us, because they wanted everything in single-page tifs (and after spending over a week getting this all sorted into .pdfs, they weren't interested in paying me to spend another week to do that). The idea that someone would prefer single-page tiffs over pdfs is incredibly strange to me. My company does records management, and while we convert things to tiff to display them within our software, it's really rare than anyone wants it exported in anything but pdf, and we have a lot of law firms that use our software. I'm pretty sure you're not being an rear end in a top hat by providing the files in pdf, absent a request for some other format.
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Jan 15, 2015 00:26
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NancyPants posted:I have to imagine it could create problems for the kid later on down the road when she has arrest warrants show up in records checks? Why not take the loving kid to court and make the idiot who requested the subpoena look like the illiterate moron he clearly is? A lot of people suggested that; she's just concerned because the baby was born premature and can't be vaccinated yet, so she doesn't want to bring it to a crowded place. I'm amazed that the people at the DA's office were adamant that the baby needed to testify.
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Jul 9, 2015 16:14
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While we're talking title insurance, there was something I was curious about. My sister bought property recently and a neighbor told her husband that some of the land he was mowing belonged to the neighbor, not my sister. They're in a dispute about it now, lawyers are involved. Based on my limited understanding of title insurance, I suggested that my sister contact her title insurance since this sounds like the kind of thing they're supposed to cover- the survey done as part of the purchase indicated she was buying that land, the neighbor claims he has a contradicting survey, and I thought title insurance would step in to help if someone else was claiming land that was part of that purchase. She got in touch and said it wasn't something they cover, which surprised me. What am I missing about title insurance that makes that something it wouldn't cover?
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Jul 24, 2015 23:51
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reformed bad troll posted:I live in the UK, a 1st world country and our taxes get deducted from wages before we see it hit our bank account. Only self employed people need to fill out tax forms. That happens for anyone who isn't self employed in America, too.
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Nov 19, 2015 19:32
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Random thought I had this morning: if you successfully sue someone, do you have to pay taxes on the amount you got in the suit? It's my understanding that lawsuits are generally to be made whole, undoing some previous monetary damage you suffered, so I wouldn't think it would be treated as income, but laws are weird.
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Dec 4, 2015 18:09
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Alchenar posted:So OP is being coy (which leads to a suspicion there's all sorts of fees and liabilities already attached that he's hoping to be able to escape), but I can certainly conceive of circumstances where a property will never be commercially viable because you have a condemned house on land in a dead city and it will cost more money to make it sellable than you will ever get for it. I can also see why a person who finds themselves with title to such a property would want to find a way to wash their hands of it. I feel something like this may have been discussed here before, but what happens if someone who owns such property dies? I assume that his heirs can refuse to take ownership, so what happens after going down the list and all potential heirs refuse the property? I assume that the same entity that would seize it for unpaid taxes will eventually take possession, but is there some other process than seizing it for unpaid taxes that the state can take possession of it? Can the rest of the estate be given to heirs in the meantime or would the estate slowly be drained by property taxes until it's gone and the property finally gets seized?
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Apr 25, 2016 18:44
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