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Griffin Bell, Carter AG dead at 90, was (among much else) respected Democratic voice for litigation reform [Atlanta Journal-Constitution]
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“700,000 squiggles”: historic NY high court crackdown on trial lawyers’ pothole map [NYT; D'Onofrio v. City of New York slip op h/t reader Andrew Barovick; way back, City Journal]
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Judge gets off pretty easy after her drunken crash into cop car [Hartford Courant via ChicTrib] Connecticut’s wild-n-crazy judiciary [Courant]
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Follow the rules and seat Burris: National Journal quotes me in its bloggers’ poll [Illinois Senate appointment]
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Legal history moment: Statute of Anne, 1710, turned copyright law into force for liberty [Cathy Gellis]
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Blind editorial squirrel finds acorn: NY Times editorial on Calif good-Samaritan liability not half bad [yes, NYT]
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“Win yourself a $50,000 bounty by busting a patent” [Forbes]
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Dental student dismissed from University of Michigan wins $1.7 million from four profs, argued that claimed academic deficiencies were just ruse [ABA Journal]
Tagged as:
colleges and universities,
Connecticut,
copyright,
Good Samaritan,
NYC,
patent quality
In the Bayou case, the most notable recent case of massive investment fraud, lawyers had some success going after investors who’d pulled money out of the fund before its collapse — but according to Bloomberg News, quoting investor lawyer Carole Neville, $20 million of the $33 million they recovered went to pay legal fees. The piece quotes law professor Lynn LoPucki, now of Harvard, being scathing on the subject: “Bankruptcy trustees ’spend huge amounts of money trying to get money from some investors and give it back to other investors,’ LoPucki said. ‘The incentive of the trustee and the lawyers is to churn, to bring lots of cases, spend lots of time and charge lots of fees.’”
Tagged as:
bankruptcy,
securities litigation
After tinkering with some of the file and cache issues I should have handled more carefully during the WordPress upgrade, I may have succeeded in solving the problem reported by many users of a front page frozen at Jan. 3. It may be necessary to do a forced-refresh (SHIFT click reload page) to produce the current page. If this still doesn’t work for you, please let me know in comments or email.
Tagged as:
about the site
Many readers are reporting that their Overlawyered front page is stuck on the Jan. 3 version, although they can still navigate to posts like this one through, say, Google or RSS. The front page displays correctly for me (including its more recent posts) in Firefox, but when I try it in Safari it returns the Jan. 3 version readers are complaining about (at a moment just before I upgraded to WordPress 2.7).
Just to make matters more confusing, the site’s RSS feed seems to have slowed down but not frozen; at the moment the most recent Overlawyered post in my Google Reader is from the early hours of this morning, which means several more have failed to appear in the feed.
Reports, comments and explanations would be welcome, including those from IE users. I wonder whether I made some mistake in copying cache files in replacing the old install with the new, in such a way as to freeze the site in some browsers but not others.
Has there been a more dramatic year than 2008 in the securities-law world since the 1930s? I’ll be among the participants tomorrow (Tuesday) afternoon at 2 p.m. Eastern in the first of an ongoing series of webcasts on a new “Securities Litigation and Enforcement Channel” being launched by prominent securities-law blogger Bruce Carton. It’s free, but registration is required: details here. I’ll be the relative amateur, with the other seats at the table held by some very highly qualified observers of the securities law scene: Lyle Roberts (The 10b-5 Daily), Kevin LaCroix (D&O Diary), Francine McKenna (re: The Auditors), and Thomas Gorman (SEC Actions), as well as Carton (cross-posted and updated from Point of Law, where I do most of my blogging on the subject).
Tagged as:
securities litigation
Last month we noted the controversy about a video purportedly showing police misconduct caught on hidden tape, namely the raiding of a fake “drug house” in Odessa, Texas without probable cause. Orin Kerr @ Volokh writes that it’s looking increasingly likely that there’s less (or more) to the story than meets the eye, and that many bloggers’ initial assumption of police misconduct was too hasty.
Tagged as:
illegal drugs,
police
So Estelle Stamm, 65, is suing for $10 million, saying she’s protected under the Americans with Disabilities Act because the animal protects her from panic attacks and other mental symptoms as well as assisting her with her poor hearing. The city denies she’s disabled at all and cites online postings in which Stamm said the dog has “tremendous killing power” and asserted: “Livestock guard dogs in the subways is a wonderful sight to behold. The seas of people part before us.” Stamm, a former ad agency manager, says being questioned about her disability while using transit has itself caused stress reactions. [NY Daily News via Obscure Store; more coverage of service animals litigation]
Tagged as:
NYC,
service animals
You may remember Professor Rodwin and I debating his paper on Point of Law; that debate has spilled over onto the pages of the November/December issue of Health Affairs, which published a short letter from me criticizing the Rodwin study and a muddying response from the authors:
Marc Rodwin and colleagues’ highly publicized conclusion that Massachusetts does not have a malpractice insurance crisis (May/Jun 08) is not supported by the data in their paper.
First, the sole finding supporting the conclusion, that malpractice insurance rates declined 1 percent from 1990 to 2005, is an artifact of the Simpson Paradox. Rates for low-risk doctors increased 14 percent; rates for high-risk doctors increased 45 percent. The mean decreased entirely because the mix of doctors changed, and the percentage of insured doctors with expensive high-risk policies declined substantially…
Tagged as:
Marc Rodwin,
Massachusetts,
medical malpractice insurance
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Must stores let in “social support” goats? Hot ADA issue we’ve often covered makes it into NYTimes mag [Rebecca Skloot] And Time mag tackles scandal of ADA-suit mass filing for $$, long familiar to our readers [Alison Stateman]
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Can you guess mechanism by which snow globes turned out to cause fire hazard? (Then check link.) [K.C. Business Journal]
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“Do Not Track” legislation could torpedo online-advertising models [ReadWriteWeb h/t @lilyhill]
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What if plea-bargaining defendants could give D.A.s eBay-style feedback? [Greenfield]
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UK cabinet minister wants govt to regulate Net with aim of child safety, Brit blogger says – hell, no! [Perry de Havilland, Samizdata]
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As lawyer-driven mummeries go, which is worse, coffee machine overwarning or medical “informed consent”? [Happy Hospitalist]
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Bogus memoirs nowadays spawn real lawsuits, as we remember from James Frey case [Elefant]
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Is health care prohibition in our future? [KevinMD]
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Massachusetts child support guidelines said to be highly onerous for dads already and getting worse [Bader, CEI]
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Kid gloves from some local media for Connecticut Sen. Chris Dodd & his magic mortgages [Christopher Fountain and again]
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Had Robertson v. Princeton donor-intent suit gone to trial, lawyers might have billed $120 million hourly fees. How’d the number get that high? [Kennerly, Litigation & Trial and again]
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A reminder: these microblog posts are based on a selection of my contributions to Twitter, which you can “follow” here.
Tagged as:
ADA filing mills,
charitable trusts,
child support,
colleges and universities,
Connecticut,
feeing frenzy,
James Frey,
Massachusetts,
privacy,
service animals
I expect to be doing a little upgrading to the site in coming days, so don’t be surprised if it becomes unavailable for short periods (or even longer periods, if something goes wrong).
Update late Saturday evening: looks like the upgrade to WordPress 2.7 has been successful, with only about half an hour of downtime. If you notice problems in the way the site runs, by all means let me know.
Tagged as:
about the site
I don’t know how many times I’ve seen generic versions of this story, but this is the latest, filed by four Piqua, Ohio, workers who want a $41 million share of the $207 million lottery payout. “The four said they were out of the office and unavailable to contribute to the office pool for the Dec. 12 drawing” but allege an oral agreement that winnings would be shared whether workers happened to be around to contribute or not. (Nancy Bowman, “Piqua lottery winners sued by co-workers”. Dayton Daily News, Dec. 23).
Tagged as:
lottery,
Ohio
Ohio: “The 88-year-old Blue Ash woman arrested after refusing to give a 13-year-old neighborhood boy his football back after it landed in her yard has sued the youth’s parents, alleging emotional distress. The lawsuit by attorney H. Louis Sirkin on behalf of Edna Jester contends that Paul and Kelly Tanis “and their minor children ‘regularly and without permission’ enter Jester’s yard to retrieve footballs and other play items that have been ‘carelessly tossed’ onto her property, the suit adds. …The Blue Ash city solicitor and city prosecutor later dropped the misdemeanor theft charge filed against Jester after she refused a police officer’s order to return the Tanis boy’s football.” (Barry M. Horstman, “Football keeper files lawsuit”, Cincinnati Enquirer, Jan. 3).
Tagged as:
Cincinnati,
emotional distress,
Ohio,
recreation
About two weeks ago SSFN posted an item on the threat to independent toymakers of a new law passed by Congress in response to the lead-paint-on-Chinese-toys panic. A day or two later the Washington Post covered the issue and the story has been spreading to other media. Maybe the next Congress, though not exactly business-friendly in many other ways, will act before any general wipeout of the economy’s handcrafted-toy sector.
Tagged as:
CPSIA,
CPSIA and toys
Many thanks to SSFC for his reader-applauded (and marathon-length) stint guest blogging while I finished a deadline over the holidays. Be sure to check out his blogging at Social Services for Feral Children, where he’s written a nice post on his experience here. I have a feeling we’ll be seeing him back in this space before too long. 
On a different note, today is the last day of voting in the ABA Journal’s annual best law blog contest, so it’s the last occasion for us to pester you on it. We’ve run up a very decent vote but two other sites put on a big effort to win the “Niche” category this year and we’ll probably lose to one of them (unless Michelle Malkin tells her readers to vote for us or something). Whether or not we win, a strong showing brings visibility to this site, so thanks again for voting. And I’m happy to learn that Overlawyered has now made it to the finalist list for the first time at a second and quite well-known blog award competition. That one hasn’t started yet, so I’ll wait on giving it a proper announcement until Monday when voting begins, but you can see a preview here.
Tagged as:
accolades,
guestbloggers
