Chronicling the high cost of our legal system
From the monthly archives:
Hey, we took a risk suing the ailing auto giant on behalf of its investors, say the entrepreneurial lawyers. The company might have gone bust while our suit was pending, and then where would our payday have come from? But a judge cut the fees from a requested $60 million to a mere $45 million. “That adds up to a rate of $1,825 per hour, said U.S. District Judge Gerald Rosen for the Eastern District of Michigan,” notes AP. At least they’re not overpaid executives.
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A Twitter user found this “AttorneyOne” promotion site for “Hudson Plane Crash”, which Patrick @ Popehat (aka SSFC) mentions funnily. On closer examination, however, one finds that this site was not thrown up in response to USAir #1549’s dramatic landing in the Hudson River. Its URL contains the words “Summit” and “Ohio”, meaning that it was aimed at plane crashes connected with this community in northeastern Ohio. Indeed, it was a website prearranged just to be sitting there should a plane crash take place connected with the town of Hudson, Ohio. A bit of URL-tinkering confirms that one can generate a similar AttorneyOne page hawking attorneys’ services for a hypothetical plane crash in Chillicothe, Ohio. So don’t compare this sort of thing to online ambulance chasing. It’s more like camping out online and waiting for the accident to come to you.
Hope that clears things up.
P.S. Considerably more on the topic from Eric Turkewitz here and here (congratulations, Jonathan C. Reiter) and from Robert Ambrogi. And while I originally credited this Twitter user with stumbling across the find, it appears it was first found by Greg Lambert of Three Geeks and a Law Blog and passed on from there.
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Cal Law’s Legal Pad speculates on some of the reasons why the felonious class-actioneer may have parted ways with his high-profile criminal defense lawyer (via California Civil Justice Blog).
TV’s biggest lawyer-advertiser is Boston’s James Sokolove, whose ad budget of $20 million/year makes him a widely recognized figure (and much parodized on YouTube). He’s reportedly offered $1,500 apiece for mesothelioma leads, seen his name in an episode of “The Sopranos”, and even advertised for patent plaintiffs. Turns out he hasn’t seen the inside of a courtroom in nearly thirty years, instead farming out his callers to others. [Boston mag via Ambrogi] “The message behind his ads, he says, is simple: Injured? Free money.”
Now his Sokolove Charitable Fund is giving him a shot at new respectability with help from no less august an institution than Stanford Law School (thank you, Prof. Deborah Rhode), It’s bankrolling something called the Roadmap to Justice Project, which will push the much-criticized-in-this-space “Civil Gideon” idea (a newly invented Constitutional entitlement to taxpayer coverage of lawyers’ fees in civil lawsuits).
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There go trailers, right? “An attorney for the family of the 10-year-old killed when the 2006 Rogers [Minnesota] tornado hit is arguing that faulty construction, not an act of God, is to blame.”
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Great for lawyers’ image when that happens: “A New York surrogate court judge has approved a $91,000 payment to an estate executor, despite a provision in the decedent’s will prohibiting commissions to anyone.”
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The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Monday upheld the conviction of Vicksburg lawyer Robert Arledge, convicted of bilking the drug company Wyeth of more than $6.7 million over the diet drug Fen-Phen….
U.S. District Judge David Bramlette sentenced Arledge to six years in prison for knowingly allowing clients to make claims of about $250,000 each for health complications although they had no legitimate reason.
Seems it was a clergy scandal as well as a lawyer scandal:
Regina Reed Green of Fayette, who pleaded guilty to tax evasion involving false Fen-Phen claims, testified Arledge knew about the scheme to defraud the drug company. She said he told her every resident of 9,740-population Jefferson County would get $1 million.
“The evidence showed that when Green became concerned that she might be caught fabricating the prescriptions and expressed a desire to stop her illegal activity, she contacted (the Rev. Gregory) Warren,” the appeals court wrote. “Warren tried to convince Green to continue fabricating the prescriptions, but Green was not assuaged.”
Green testified Arledge persuaded her to continue: “And he said … I wasn’t going to get in any trouble because like (Warren) said, they were going to box all those files up, put them away, and never be seen again.”
Much of the alarm over the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA), the federal law enacted last year in response to panics over Chinese toys with lead paint and the phthalates found in plastic, has focused on the effect it will have on toys and related kids’ products, driving many of them from the market because it is too costly for handcrafters and small-run manufacturers to pay for the testing of every lot. (One protest site is entitled National Bankruptcy Day, after Feb. 10, the day the law is set to go into effect.) But the law is much wider in application than that. It also applies to a sweeping array of children’s goods including clothing, bedding, Scouting patches, and countless other fabric and textile goods for kids’ use; paper goods, school supplies, homeschooling kits, as well as library books and audiobooks, board games, baseball cards, and the like; outdoor gear, bikes, backpacks, telescopes and sporting equipment; home furnishings when marketed for use in kids’ rooms; and much more.
Endangered Whimsy is “a gallery of handmade products endangered by the CPSIA”. Just Add Charm has a CPSIA Awareness Series with other examples of products that could soon be withdrawn. There’s at least one Flickr group, too.
And that just scratches the surface. A familiar high point of many ethnic and heritage festivals is the children’s dance or ceremonial troupe in traditional costume. Yet handcrafted kids’ clothing, especially if intricate and including numerous components (beads, pendants, lace inserts, etc.) is likely to be highly expensive to test in compliance with the law. The same applies to the moccasins, buckskins, and dance gear that are cherished traditions for many Native American kids at powwows.
Some of the local press has been paying attention in recent days and the issue is beginning to reach the national press as well. The Wall Street Journal editorializes today. That attention has come only after weeks of mounting outrage at the grass-roots level, which as John Tozzi at Business Week has noted, has offered an emblematic example of the role of the new social media in giving voice to public concerns: besides alarm-raising at hundreds of blogs and forums (including Etsy and eBay), there’s been a torrent of Twitter discussion, a Ning group, YouTube, and nine Facebook groups so far. Even six month old babies are upset, or so their relatives say.
The initial reaction of many small businesspeople was to ask for as slight a modification in the law as they could, but it has become apparent that the law’s unreasonableness is across-the-board and systematic. Rick Woldenberg explains why a maze of exemptions and proliferation of categories would itself prove highly onerous, perhaps unworkable, for small businesses. Sarah at Just Add Charm writes, “it seems to me that a repeal of the CPSIA may be a better solution than trying to amend it to make it workable”. More on that idea here. I agree. Congress must repeal this bad law.
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And so Nicolai Grushevski of Corpus Christi, Texas is off to court with a class action suit against restaurant chain Hooters of America, known for its buxom serving staff (complaint, PDF, courtesy CourthouseNews.com). Legal pressure on the winks-and-wings purveyor to hire male waitstaff is nothing new: see this post and this one on the long crusade to that effect by the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
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Patrick @ Popehat (otherwise known to our readers as SSFC) takes a look at a sequel to the mad-cow affair. To quote Steven Mikulan at L.A. Weekly:
Spearheaded by about 50 of their fellow countrymen from the Los Angeles area, 1,020 Korean Americans have filed a $735 million lawsuit against Seoul TV broadcast company MBC. The suit claims that, by sounding a new alarm about mad cow disease and U.S. beef, which has been banned in South Korea since 2003, MBC caused the Korean Americans to be “humiliated . . . and subjected them to mockery in the United States.” A spokesman for the plaintiffs claims that MBC implied that anyone eating American beef would contract the disease, and that Koreans living in the U.S. were held in low regard as consumers of the beef.
More coverage: Korea Times, Brian in Jeollanam-do.
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More on that suit filed by the Colombian coffee growers’ association against cartoonist Mike Peters: per David Giacalone, “We’re pleased to see that some of Colombia’s most respected cartoonists are scoffing at the law suit and calling it a waste of time.” (Unrelatedly, David also discusses the controversy over service animals and disabled-rights law).
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Of course they (and blind people, mentally disabled people, and persons who do not speak English well) are perfectly entitled to sit as jurors, right? Isn’t it their right not to suffer discrimination? Well, maybe not, argues New York criminal defense lawyer Scott Greenfield. For starters, “Part of the determination of whether a witness is telling the truth comes from observation of a witness’ demeanor,” tone of voice, and so forth. The empanelment of a competent jury
is not an affront to the rights of the citizens to serve, but a debt owed by society to a defendant. The ability to determine the credibility of a witness requires the use of three out of five senses minimum, as well as the absence of numerous other deficits. This may be politically incorrect, but it beats living in a fantasyland.
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George Will raves about this new book by the well-known author on topics dear to this site. I’m much of the way through my review copy and I can say if you like this website, you’ll almost certainly enjoy this book. Author/lawyer Philip K. Howard (The Death of Common Sense) is also a very skillful writer, and, with his organization Common Good, a longtime friend of this site. So why not order a copy today?
P.S. Canadian law student site Law Is Cool interviews Howard. And — equal time dept.: — plaintiff’s lawyers Ron Miller, Max Kennerly, and Brooks Schuelke offer very different views.
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Readers may recall the remarkable case last year in which student employee Keith John Sampson was hauled up on university disciplinary charges at IUPUI (Indiana University) for supposed racial harassment because a co-worker had observed him reading a book about the historical struggle against the Klan. A successful campaign ensued (led by FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) to get the discipline reversed and an apology issued. Now filmmaker Andrew Marcus has produced a short documentary about the incident, viewable at FIRE’s site.
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Get your copy today! My new book tackles the question of why so many bad ideas come from the law schools. "Cutting-edge commentary, hard-hitting, witty, astute." -- Publisher's Weekly. "Excellent... A fine dissection of these strangely powerful institutions" -- Wall Street Journal.
Individual liberty, free markets, and peace: the world's premier libertarian think tank. Publishes Cato at Liberty, where I blog on contemporary policy issues.