Monthly Archives: April 2022

Thanks to the ubiquitous portrayal of defense lawyers in the media, everyone has a rough idea of who they are. And you may not be too far off either. A criminal defense lawyer is a lawyer that represents a defendant’s legal interests during the course of a criminal case. But the details of the critical functions they perform may not be as widely known.

In this article, we will cover what roles a criminal defense lawyer plays during a typical case along with some tips regarding what you should look for when searching for one. The things we are going to discuss apply to both public defenders—who are assigned by the court—and private defense lawyers.

Investigation into the Charges Against the Defendant

Typically, a criminal case begins with a complaint from a plaintiff which is used by a prosecutor to formally charge the defendant in court. The very first thing a criminal defense lawyer does is look at the complaint and the different ways in which the defendant is being charged.

The lawyer usually starts the process through consultation with the criminal defendant to obtain extensive information about the details of the case. The lawyer then makes a discovery request and proceeds to thoroughly examine the existing information present in the charging documents and prosecution case as well as collect new information by interviewing new potential witnesses or other individuals involved in the case.

The goal is to find any loophole or flaw in how the prosecution is proceeding so as to prepare a strong defense or even find evidence that can be used to refute or dismiss the case. The lawyer may also review the laws pertaining to the case to help them build a stronger case against the charges.

Analyzing the Evidence

When a defendant is charged with a crime, the prosecutor is obligated to provide him or her with a copy of all the evidence gathered so that the defendant can have a chance to properly defend him or herself. The evidence includes police reports, witness statements, surveillance, etc.

A criminal defense attorney will help the accused by reviewing the evidence alongside the charges to see if the adversary can prove the case. This stage heavily involves the criminal defendant as well since in most cases they have been present at the scene when the crime took place.

Checking to See if Rights Have Been Violated

Sometimes evidence can be suppressed or excluded from a trial if it is gathered in violation of the defendant’s constitutional rights. For example, if the police have conducted a warrantless and nonconsensual search of the defendant’s home and have found and seized illicit drugs, the evidence has been collected in violation of the defendant’s 4th amendment right to privacy. As a result, it can be suppressed and cannot be used against the defendant in court. To learn more, continue reading here.

So, one of the things that a criminal defense attorney has on his or her checklist is investigating the evidence to see if there has been a violation. And if any is found, the attorney then proceeds to file a motion to suppress the evidence which based on the circumstances can lead to case dismissal.

Handling Criminal Plea Negotiations

Depending on the strengths and weaknesses of the case, sometimes prosecutors may offer deals regarding prosecution. It is part of a defense lawyer’s job to negotiate favorable deals before the trial and inform the accused of each option’s pros and cons.

Although the defendant is under no obligation to agree to a plea bargain instead of taking the case to trial, doing so often works out to a lighter sentence for the defendant. For example, the prosecutor may offer second-chance probation or a deferred prosecution that allows the charges to be dropped under certain conditions.

Participating in Trial

If attempts at case dismissal or plea bargains fail due to any reason, or the defendant refuses to accept any deal, the defense attorney will fight for the defendant in the trial. To prepare for the trial, the attorney will review the facts of the case, prepares all witnesses, and goes over the evidence. During the trial, the defense attorney selects jurors to listen to the facts of the case and presents to the jury the defendant’s side of the story using witnesses and evidence.

But the most important thing the criminal defense attorney does in the trial is cross-examination of the prosecutor’s witnesses. For an effective cross-examination, the defense attorney needs to know what the testimonies would be and what the weaknesses of those testimonies are.

Another role that a criminal defense attorney can play is during the sentencing phase where he or she may represent the defendant if the criminal defendant is sentenced for the crime, whether as a result of accepting a plea deal or being convicted by a judge or jury. It is possible that he or she can persuade the court to lessen the sentence.

If you’re set on having a future in a particular career, you’ll need to find a college that gives you exactly the right qualifications and educational basis. Here’s how to find a college that will help you get exactly the career you want.

Some students have no idea what future career they want when they are at the stage of applying to college. In this situation, students will tend towards applying for a course in a broader set of subjects that will give them plenty of options while they are making a decision about a future career. The choice of college in this instance will be more focused on what makes sense in terms of location and where a broad diversity of possible careers can be pursued.

But if you already have a good idea of what career you want, the way you search for a college will be altogether different. Here’s what you need to focus on to find a college that perfectly suits your choice of career.

What Do You Need To Study?

The most obvious place to start is to find out what subject or subjects you need to study to be able to do the career of your choice. Every career is different, so look in detail at your chosen career, and make contact with some authoritative sources in the field, such as accredited membership organizations. Think a little bit about your career trajectory too. For example, you might wish to be a journalist focusing on environmental themes. Although you could do a college course in journalism, you might be better placed gaining a degree in an environmental subject first, which could help to make you a subject expert in the field before specializing in journalism.

Look At Courses

Once you have identified exactly which course or courses you need to study to reach your desired career, do some research on all the colleges that offer this. Using a trusted website such as Authority.org can be an efficient way of finding all the colleges that are relevant to you. Coming up with a long list of colleges that offer the course or courses you need is an important early step towards identifying the right college for you.

Consider Reputation

Once you have a long list of colleges, you will want to narrow it down a bit to get closer to finding your top choices. One key consideration you will want to make is what is the very best college you could attend for the grades you have, or are expecting to get? The reputation of the college you choose will help you later on, as it will look good to future employers if you studied somewhere renowned or prominent. Consider the reputation of a college as a whole, as well as the reputation of the department or course you want to study. Sometimes the two things are not the same – for example, a specific course might be very highly regarded in a specific industry, even if the college itself isn’t high up in the league tables. The opposite can also be true.

Do You Need Accreditation?

In order to work in certain careers, you need to have studied an accredited course in order to qualify. Accreditation is when an official body gives its stamp of approval for a course being up to the required standards in order to work in certain professions. Find out if this is a factor in your chosen career, and look carefully at whether the course and college you are interested in provides this accreditation. Sometimes it is not always obvious, or sometimes the accreditation of a course is coming up for review, in which case you want to be sure that a particular course will retain its accreditation.

Other Factors That Make A Difference

Once you have pinpointed a few courses and colleges that offer the course or courses you need, it’s time to think of some wider considerations to help you decide. One of these considerations is if you can study everything you need to study at your shortlisted college. Using the environmental journalism example, could you study an environmental subject, and then go on to study journalism, all at the same college? This may or may not be important to you – but if you want to go to college and settle there for a few years, you might want to factor this into your decision making. Also think about the geographical locations of your shortlisted colleges. If you don’t want to travel too far from your home town, or if you need to be close to family, this will help you further pinpoint the best college for you.

Extra Support

Embarking on the right college course for your career is not the only thing you need to consider when choosing a college. Take a look into what extra support you might get at the college of your choice. A strong careers advisory service, mentors who know about your chosen industry, and links with businesses for work experience opportunities – are all things that could make a big difference to your future career success. Being able to gain some real life experience and insights into your future career can give you a strong edge over other students when you get to the point of applying for jobs.

As a cohort, Gen Z have championed a move towards breaking out of boxes and ripping off labels; at least that’s what we claim. But from my experience, it seems to me that we’re not simply unboxing, but creating more boxes within, and without, the space left behind. 

Maybe it’s in our nature to want to categorize everything to make sense of the world. If it’s not within, then it’s without. But it’s not enough to not be something, we must be something as well. So we stick on a label where there previously was no need for one, or rely far too heavily on pre-made labels to the point of making it our entire identity. Nowhere is this more apparent than on TikTok where most of our generation spends our time.

Think about the many different “aesthetics” that have emerged online, and which burst onto mainstream consciousness during the pandemic. These may have become popular with our generation due to our struggle to find an identity at that point in our lives where it is expected we feel lost or out-of-sorts with ourselves. Add on the pressures of an isolating and world-upending pandemic, and our desire to find someplace we ‘belong’ solidifies into membership and a stalwart belief in such ideas.

All Aboard MBTI

One of the most prominent of these memberships, and probably the most damaging, is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicators, popularly abbreviated to MBTI. The MBTI has been around for a few years already, but its relevance doesn’t seem to have died down; even though research since has disavowed it of the nearly prophetic powers the company that markets it claims it has. The MBTI, for the uninitiated, is a personality framework developed by Carl Jung in the 1940s.

He isolated 16 distinct personalities that all the people in the world fall into based on untested research, composed of levels of four attributes: Introversion-Extroversion, Feeling-Thinking, Intuitive-Observant, and Prospecting-Judging. The test now claims that people that belong to a certain MBTI personality type will be most successful in a certain career path, or be most compatible with certain other personality types, and achieve their happiness in a certain way. At best these “predictions” can suggest a certain path, at worst they risk creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. 

The Invisible Hand

Think about it. Suppose your MBTI directs you towards a certain career path. You were slightly interested in that career before, but it was nothing you had decided on. Upon seeing it listed as the “perfect” career path for someone of your personality type, you decide to do some research on it. After scrolling down the page to the section detailing the famous people who possess that MBTI, you stumble upon a familiar name who adorned a list of famous Yale alumni. Just your luck, Yale has been your dream school since forever!

And now, you’re ever more certain that that is the career path for you. With such ‘fate’ guiding your hand, how can you now feel doubt about pursuing that career path? Perhaps, without the guidance of the MBTI, you may have decided upon a different path, but the suggestive power of the MBTI and its stalwart claim that it knows better for you than you do for yourself can make you surrender your powers of reasoning to its logic of fate. And such is the pity.

But even if such predictions were true, there’s no guarantee you’ll fall into the same MBTI again. It’s been widely noticed that people can often test different MBTI when taking the test multiple times. It’s something I have experienced myself, having tested INFP, INTP, and ENFP in the few times I’ve done it for both fun and business. With such reliability of the test itself, why should we rely on it to make major life decisions for us?

Thinking Outside the Box

To a lot of us, our MBTI has become a box we put ourselves into to define our likes and our dislikes, our weaknesses and our strengths. And in doing so, we try to mold those parts of us that do not fit to better represent our MBTI. In a way, the MBTI is to Gen Z what horoscopes were to Millennials. I’m not saying you shouldn’t have a bit of fun by going through your MBTI or having a late-night laugh or introspection session with your friends about it. Just be careful to not rely too heavily on these ‘insights’ into yourself and forget to accumulate your own.

Similar to the MBTI, there are far more boxes we try to fit people into. These boxes may be based on supposed personality types, on sexuality or gender identity, on academic capabilities or intellectual interests, on athleticism and physical fitness or many, many more. While such categorisations may be useful to describe, to an extent, all of these come with their own preconceived notions or attributes that work to erase the individual for the collective. So when viewing yourself—and others—do remember that no membership or belief in a group or idea can sum up a person.  

Some entrepreneurs think that a boss defines a business. However, it is often the team members and the staff on the ground that truly determine whether a company achieves success. No matter how inspired or talented a business owner is, they will invariably need the support of dedicated individuals who can match their work ethic and motivation.

What is the Role of HR?

To put it simply, HR ensures that your workforce is happy and performing at its best. The role of an HR professional begins even before an employee joins your company. HR professionals can help a business draft job descriptions and recruit the most suitable candidates for the team. Once these individuals are selected, HR will handle the hiring procedures from interviews and salary offers to paperwork.

When a new employee joins a company, HR is important during the onboarding process where the employee is orientated to the company culture, company expectations, and their role. They are often also in charge of training employees as they take on different responsibilities or upgrading the skill level of the workforce on the whole.

Another crucial aspect of HR is to establish and uphold company culture. This can consist of diversity, equity, and inclusivity (DEI) training, conflict resolution, and investigations into employee complaints. HR may likewise confirm compliance with federal and state laws such as verifying visa status and ensuring that employees are duly certified as required.

On a macro scale, HR is responsible for designing and instituting strategies for organizations and their people to propel them towards their business goals. Whether a company is just starting out, changing direction, or looking to expand, HR is the beacon that leads the workforce. Therefore, HR is about managing your workforce, from a single employee to the overall team.

Fulcrum HR Consulting: Who We Are

Many people who have worked in corporations will sigh or roll their eyes when HR is mentioned. Sadly, HR consultants have become viewed as dreaded mouthpieces of business owners or the “fun police.” This old-fashioned and punitive approach to managing staff members is outdated and redundant in today’s fast-paced business landscape.

Fulcrum HR Consulting prides itself on developing advanced HR strategies that have evolved to work with the modern business ecosystem. Instead of clinging to traditional and stagnant practices, the company focuses on ROI (return on investment) and how to increase business revenue through improving HR quality across the board.

This expertise comes from experience. The founders of Fulcrum HR Consulting have run several businesses over the last decades and come from diverse backgrounds including sales, business brokerage, and business coaching. This valuable real-world experience helps them to understand and address the challenges faced by your company.

Rather than wasting time and energy on policing people, creating unnecessary policies, and pursuing unsustainable recruitment ideals, strategic HR services can help your business achieve scalable HR functions. You will build a lean, effective workforce, allowing the humans in your organization to truly become a profitable resource.

How does Fulcrum HR Consulting help you to do this? They use advanced assessments, specialized software, training and strategy, and their years of industry insight to elevate your business to new heights. As an HR consultancy with a full range of services, they can help companies to develop and maintain scalable end-to-end HR strategies from hire to retire.

By engaging the expertise of the best HR consulting professionals in the business, companies can save time, increase productivity, enhance employee engagement, improve employee retention, and maximize ROI. Skilled HR professionals can also take care of tough tasks like HR investigations, compensation planning, or specialized recruiting.

Meet Kelly Kubicek

Kelly Kubicek is the CEO and co-owner of Fulcrum HR Consulting and an HR consultant in a class of her own. Kubicek oversees the onboarding of every business signed on to Fulcrum HR Consulting to ensure that her clients receive nothing but excellence, value, and legendary service. Based on the overwhelmingly positive testimonials from her clients, Kubicek has delivered just that.

According to Kubicek, “(traditional) HR really did not have a seat at the table and was failing to get there by expecting the business to speak the HR language.” Instead of subscribing to outdated strategies, Kubicek and her partners developed innovative approaches to help businesses optimize their workforce so that they become part of the top one percent.

This cumulated to Fulcrum HR Consulting’s motto—“The New HR: Human ROI Return on Individuals.” Through Fulcrum HR’s consulting services, businesses have received structure, accountability, growth, financial stability, and the room to expand their business strategies. To date, businesses of all sizes have benefited from their cutting-edge HR consulting.

HR is an essential aspect of every successful business. Fulcrum HR Consulting makes use of exclusive software and workshops to maximize your talent and align your teams to your business objectives. By tapping into the full potential of your team, companies can reach unprecedented heights and become leaders in their field.