Two conservative-driven decisions with potentially broad consequences will likely define the just-completed Supreme Court term: freeing corporations and unions to spend as much as they like in campaigns for Congress and president, and ruling that Americans have a right to a gun for self-defense wherever they live.

A key member of the five-justice majorities in both cases, and the author of the guns opinion, was Justice Samuel Alito. Though he has been on the court less than five years, Alito has had an outsize influence in firming up the court's conservative bloc.

His appointment to replace the more moderate Sandra Day O'Connor, more than any other choice in the last decade shows the importance of Supreme Court nominations. It also points up that Elena Kagan's nomination to take the place of the like-minded John Paul Stevens almost certainly will not have the same short-term impact as Alito has had.

"Of all the changes in personnel during this time of rapid change at the court, the Alito-for-O'Connor switch has clearly been the most consequential," said Paul Clement, who was top Supreme Court lawyer for then-President George W. Bush.

Indeed, nothing is likely to alter the court's current path in either direction unless President Barack Obama has the chance to replace a right-leaning justice, or a future Republican president gets to add another solid conservative vote.

The conservative trend on the court might be even stronger as long as Democrats hold Congress and the White House, said Paul Smith of the Jenner and Block law firm in Washington. "The conservative majority is going to continue to feel a need to push back in a lot of areas," Smith said.

The credit, or criticism, for many of the court's high-profile decisions goes variously to Chief Justice John Roberts, the putative leader of the court's conservatives, or Justice Anthony Kennedy, who dislikes the label "swing justice," but is always in the majority when the other eight justices split along liberal and conservative lines.

Their influence certainly was in evidence this term. Roberts was in the majority more than any other justice — 92 percent of the time — and Kennedy wrote the campaign finance decision as well as one in which the liberal justices prevailed, ruling out life prison terms with no prospect of parole for juvenile offenders in other than murder cases.

Arizona officials plan to release a training program Thursday designed to teach police officers to enforce a tough new crackdown on illegal immigration without racially profiling.

An hour-long video and supporting paperwork will be sent to all 170 Arizona police agencies and publicly released Thursday morning.

Officials released an outline for the video in May.

It will emphasize the importance of professionalism, ethics and integrity, as well as an officer's duty to protect civil rights, according to the outline.

Retired immigration agents also will describe how federal officers are trained to avoid racial profiling and the documents that immigrants are required to carry.

And officers will be taught how to contact federal immigration authorities or local officers certified by the federal government to determine someone's immigration status.

Gov. Jan Brewer ordered the Arizona Peace Officer Standards and Training Board to develop the training when she signed the law April 23.

Police bosses will decide the best way to teach their forces. But there is no requirement that all 15,000 Arizona police officers complete the training before the law takes effect July 29.

Opponents have challenged the measure as unconstitutional and have asked that a federal court block it from taking effect. U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton plans to hear arguments on the request later this month.

Arizona's law generally requires police officers enforcing another law to question a person's immigration status if there's a reasonable suspicion that the person is in the country illegally.

The Supreme Court on Monday refused to weigh in on whether software, online-shopping techniques and medical diagnostic tests can be patented, saying only that inventors' request for protection of a method of hedging weather-related risk in energy prices cannot be granted.

The high court unanimously agreed with a lower court ruling that threw out Bernard Bilski and Rand Warsaw's patent, a decision many said could endanger patents in an increasingly high-tech world. But the high court said they did not need to make a broad sweeping decision about patents to dispose of Bilski and Warsaw's case.

"The patent application here can be rejected under our precedents on the unpatentability of abstract ideas," Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the court. "The court, therefore, need not define further what constitutes a patentable process."

The Supreme Court has already said that abstract ideas, natural phenomena and laws of nature cannot be patented. But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit added that a process cannot be patented unless it is "tied to a particular machine or apparatus" or if it "transforms a particular article into a different state or thing."

Lamb McErlane PC, a full service law firm that has built a reputation on delivering the highest caliber of legal service in an environment focused on personal attention and results, has named Thomas P. Hogan as a partner at the firm. Hogan previously joined the firm after working as an Assistant United States Attorney in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania as well as an Assistant District Attorney in Chester County.

"We are thrilled to have Tom join our team of partners," states Managing Partner Joel L. Frank. "He brings tremendous experience as well as dedication and a focus on successful outcomes to his practice and to the firm as a whole."

Hogan's practice includes multiple aspects of corporate and internal investigations, government relations, and complex commercial litigation. He has successfully defended corporations and individuals in securities litigation, class actions, intellectual property disputes, civil rights claims, contract issues, product liability claims, private equity issues, and regulatory litigation. He also serves as coordinating counsel for larger clients dealing with recurring litigation issues on a broad scale. His clients include Fortune 500 companies, public and privately held entities, municipal and educational organizations, and individuals.

Lamb McErlane is a full service law firm, comprised of 30+ attorneys, that has built a reputation on delivering the highest caliber of legal service in an environment focused on personal attention and results. Bringing the sophistication and experience often equated with large, metropolitan firms, Lamb McErlane's effective and efficient approach produces work their clients respect at rates they can appreciate.

When clients call Washington attorney Sue Wang, the clock doesn't start ticking.

Phone calls aren't billed in six-minute intervals and each hour of work won't cost several hundred dollars.

Wang and the four other lawyers in Clarity Law Group aim to reconfigure the billable-hour business model at law firms that she said tends to shut out small and start-up companies with shallow pockets.

"People have been speaking about the death of the billable hour, but people had been saying that for years and they weren't really acting on it," said Wang, formerly of Latham & Watkins.

Clarity Law Group is designed like a timeshare, where clients pay a set fee for access to the entire firm, Wang said. The firm also reduces costs by forgoing the standard luxuries at big-name firms like secretaries, wall art and swanky office space.

The firm opened its Illinois office last October and secured its Washington license in April.

"The relationship between attorneys and clients is not a friendly one," said Kim Le, who works at Clarity. "They're worried all the time about getting billed for every little thing, and that doesn't build a good, trust[ing] relationship."

While other firms around the country are also trying to lower the barrier of entry to legal services, Wang said the idea for Clarity came to her and her former University of Michigan law school roommate, Leah Goodman, while on a recent vacation in Greece.

At Clarity, each client is assigned two attorneys who act as the primary counsel, but any of the lawyers may be called on depending on the legal needs. It's a hybrid model between big-firm contractors and in-house counsel, Wang said.