Today’s New York Times has an excellent article on a topic that frequently crops up in Avvo Answers, when are children old enough to be left home by themselves? As the NYT article explains, most states do not specify an age but leave it to parents to decide. A notable exceptions is Maryland - where it is illegal to leave a child under 8 without a babysitter who is at least 13. Safe Kids USA, a DC-based nonprofit views the age of 12 as a milestone. According to Alan Korns, the Safe Kids USA Director of Public Policy / General Counsel, “Children under age 12 don’t have the cognitive ability to recognize risk and, just as important, don’t have the cognitive maturity to react to the risk or accident once it happens.” He added that additional concerns are raised when multiple children are left alone: ““That concern is heightened when there are other children in the home. So many injuries and deaths can be prevented by appropriate, active adult supervision.”

Jezebel has a scarily accurate, comic smackdown of what Judge Judy would likely say to Tricia Walsh-Smith, should the Youtube celebrity have to appear before Judge Judy.

The common themes in this roundup seem to be food & technology:

• Washington State’s Lemon Law turns 21
• Via Jack Bog’s Blog, Portland police officer eats sushi and parks illegally
• Effective 8/1/08, King County residents will share the same knowledge as New York County residents - namely that a slice of Starbucks fat-free banana chocolate chip cake packs 390 calories
• Spamming was lucrative for Robert Soloway, Seattle’s very own “Spam King”
• 1.7 M “Lucky Break” for Ken Ahroni - represented by Mark Walters of Washington State Patent Blog
• Digital Media Lawyer argues that Capitol Records “making available” lawsuit should be disappeared
• Blizzard griefs Glider software maker and creates controversial copyright infringement law

If you have a blog you would like to be included in this round up, let us know in the comments.

…trust me. I’ve been there and while there are many days where I find myself on the verge of dropping my computer off the side of the building because I can’t find that *one* file I need, my life (and work) without a computer is unimaginable. I have a feeling there are many lawyers out there who can relate. So we need to figure out a way to take control of our data and make it work for us in a way that allows us to focus on our real work.

David Leffler over at the APA GP/Solo blog reviews Bit Literacy - something we are familiar with here at Avvo. Bit Literacy is a book by Mark Hurst which teaches us how to manage the “bits” of information we come into contact with each day. Emails, digital photos, word documents; if its information on a computer, it’s most likely a bit.

“Solo attorneys do not have an IT department to help them manage all of their digital detritus. More often than not they do not have a secretary, either. So it is even more important that you get a handle on your digital bits before they overwhelm you—throwing your computer out the window is not an option.”

The idea here is to manage all our data in a way that makes it useful to us and helps us to be more productive. Managing data (especially email) correctly and efficienty is just as important for tech companies and lawyers as it is for anyone whose business depends on electronic communication in anyway. I know these concepts have helped me to manage a sometimes overflowing Customer Care inbox. Check out David’s post and see if it can help you too.

Some major stories in the blogosphere:

• Sonic Trial Blog scores an interview with the City of Seattle’s lawyer Paul Lawrence
• Slate’s Hot Document summarizes the Bill Murray/Jennifer Butler Murray prenuptial agreement and has it in its entirety
• WSJ Law Blog covers a new trend “dating terms of engagement”: this one is between Mark Zuckerberg and his girlfriend Priscilla Chan and it stipulates, “One date per week, a minimum of a hundred minutes of alone time, not in his apartment and definitely not at Facebook.”
• Lori Drew, the worst person on the internet plead not guilty in MySpace suicide case
• What’s the Matter With Kansas?  Lawyers, Guns and Money explains, sourcing the New York Times
• RIAA’s strategy may really boil down to “be sleazy, intimidate, then profit”
• Florida Bar recommends that Jack Thompson be disbarred for 10 years (Gamepolitics has the sanctions hearing transcript)

Oh and it’s sunny in Seattle

Taking a cue from Above the Law, we have lunch suggestions for lunching on an expense account - as well as for lunching on your own dime:

Expense Account Lunches

• Old: Metropolitan Grill or The Georgian
• New: Barolo or Steelhead Diner
• Something Blue: Earth & Ocean

Lunch on Your Own

• Old: Brooklyn or Le Pichet
• New: Matt’s in the Market (new space) or Taste (at the Seattle Art Museum)
• Something Blue (this one’s a bit of a stretch): Salumi

Stories floating around the blogosphere:

• Seattle Trademark Lawyer reports from the INTA Blogger meetup and manages to sneak in some legal advice to a Seattle Gary Busey look-alike
• “Jason Gambert” tries to trademark the term “SEO” and SEOmoz has a problem with that
• Insurance Coverage Law Blog discusses the excellent New Yorker article on John Grisham friend, Trent Lott in-law, and tobacco settlement billionaire(?) lawyer Dickie Scruggs
• K&L Gates argues that Bennett’s sincerity in trying to keep the Sonics in Seattle is no longer the issue (Enter, Center Stage Howard Schultz via Richard Yarmuth)
• Spam Notes begs to be harassed via Twitter

Around the blogosphere:

• ‘N Sync Svengali Lou Pearlman sentenced to 25 years for swindling $300M from investors and banks
• D.C. Circuit Court rules that U.S. currency discriminates against the blind, because it is all the same size
• Californians are confused about their state’s privacy laws
• Doctors learn to apologize to mitigate lawsuits
• Fourth Circuit rules that Virginia’s ban on late-term abortions is unconstitutional
• Via Jezebel, Farmworker Olivia Tamayo’s 1M sexual harassment award against Harris Farms upheld

1. A Civil Action by Jonathan Harr: I read this book straight through when it came out in 1995. It is a page-turner about a personal injury lawyer (and fellow Cornell grad) Jan Schlichtmann and his representation of eight leukemia victim families against W.R. Grace and Beatrice Foods. It is a David versus Goliath story, set in the modern day of complex litigation against large corporations.
2. To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee: I read this book as summer reading when I was in high school. The character of Atticus Finch was one of the reasons I aspired to be a lawyer: “Courage is not a man with a gun in his hand. It’s knowing you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do.”
3. Barbarians at the Gate by Bryan Burrough: This is the story of KKR’s leveraged buyout of RJR Nabisco. Though the chief characters are not attorneys (no one could compete for attention with Ross Johnson, the then CEO of RJR Nabisco), there are many transactional attorneys who feature prominently in the book.
4. U.S. v Microsoft by Joel Brinkley & Steve Lohr: Brinkley and Lohr were New York Times journalists who covered the trial from the beginning, and they write a compelling, highly readable book. Their reportage includes the incriminating emails, damning documents and verbatim transcripts that played such a key role in the trial.
5. Conspiracy of Fools by Kurt Eichenwald: This is an engaging, riveting read about the rise and fall of Enron. It features key players such as Stuart Zisman, corporate counsel in Enron’s wholesale division - who warned the company in an early memo about the creative accounting and the legal entities being created.

Are there any great books we have left out? Leave feedback in the comments.

Round up of Northwest Legal news for the week:

• Ballmer/Griffin group’s Machiavellian plan for the Sonics to remain secret
• Behold the Wild Sky Wilderness
• Summit Law and EEOC opine on Video Resumes (spoiler alert – they’re legal)
• Amazon cries foul (decries unconstitutionality) over New York tax law
• Word to A.M. Best: Holland & Knight no longer has a Seattle office
• $40M to Singh family is the largest civil jury award in Snohomish history