A law firm active in Henderson and Las Vegas is suing the state over rules requiring licensing of non-attorney employees working on mortgage loan modifications.

Cogburn Law Offices LLC filed suit last week in Clark County District Court against the Department of Business and Industry, Division of Mortgage Lending.

Court records indicate the law firm won a temporary restraining order against the division on Friday. District Judge Valorie Vega also set a Friday hearing on Cogburn's request for a preliminary injunction, which would extend the restraining order while the issue is litigated.

The lawsuit was filed by attorney Terry Coffing of the firm Marquis & Aurbach.

Coffing said Monday that Cogburn Law Offices has not received any notification of enforcement action against it by the Mortgage Lending Division and that the restraining order should preserve the status quo until Friday's hearing.

Coffing said the State Bar of Nevada, which regulates the legal industry, has expressed concern over the rules and he hopes the bar intervenes in the case on Cogburn's side.

He said Jamie Cogburn, co-founder of the law firm, supports regulation of the loan modification industry to ensure consumers are not harmed by scam artists.

But the division's rules are too broad, including provisions attempting to regulate the practice of law, Coffing said.

Arizona state legislators and the state superintendent of public instruction want to be freed from federal court oversight of the state's programs for English learners. They've been ordered by a lower court judge to spend potentially hundreds of millions of dollars to comply with rulings in a 17-year-old case.

Parents of students attending southern Arizona's Nogales Unified School District sued the state in 1992, contending programs for English-language learners in Nogales were deficient and received inadequate funding from the state.

In 2000, a federal judge found that the state had violated the Equal Educational Opportunities Act's requirements for appropriate instruction for English-language learners. He ordered state legislators to create a plan to provide sufficient funds and placed the state's programs for non-English speaking students under court oversight.

Since then, the two sides have fought over what constitutes compliance with the order. Arizona has more than doubled the amount that schools receive per non-English speaking student and taken several other steps prescribed by the No Child Left Behind Act, a broader education accountability law passed by Congress in 2002.

Plaintiffs say that's not enough to comply with federal law and a judge agreed. But the state appealed, and now the high court will answer the question.