Eric Turkewitz doesn’t hold back, but tells us what he really thinks of the camera-friendly Los Angeles attorney.
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From the monthly archives:
May 2009
President Obama has nominated South Carolina lawyer and former schools commissioner Inez Moore Tenenbaum to chair the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and former CPSC staffer/academic Robert Adler as a member of the commission (White House press release). The appointments are likely to bring important implications for CPSIA reform, since they would double the number of active CPSC commissioners (joining Republican Nancy Nord and Democrat Thomas Moore) and since many Democrats on Capitol Hill have refused to work with Nord, the current acting chair. Unfortunately, the new appointments carry with them some definite elements of bad news for the cause of CPSIA reform, and it takes some fairly strenuous guesswork and supposition to see this bad news as balanced by any good news.
- Start with the relatively good (or at least neutral) news. Inez Tenenbaum, the designated chair, is an important political ally of President Obama’s (background: Howard Fineman, Newsweek) best known for her work on a different subject, education (and in fact evidently tossed the CPSC as a consolation prize for not getting the job she wanted, the Cabinet post of Secretary of Education). An optimistic view would be that because Tenenbaum has not spent the past year digging into an entrenched defense of CPSIA and all its works, she might be free to rethink the issue, developing more nuanced or moderate positions that acknowledge the views of CPSC career staff on the law’s various defects. And because of her background as an education advocate, she might be particularly sympathetic to the pleas of libraries and schools harmed by the law. That’s the optimistic theory, anyway.
- Let’s be frank: for virtually any Democratic administration, an overriding political consideration in staffing the CPSC is finding someone acceptable to the plaintiff’s personal injury bar, the one anchor-tenant Democratic constituency that cares intensely about the agency’s work. Tenenbaum appears to pass this test: in her 2004 Senate campaign, she drew substantial contributions from two of the South’s best-known injury law firms, Motley Rice ($17,250) and Beasley Allen ($19,000). Incidentally, Tenenbaum lost that 2004 race to none other than Republican Sen. Jim DeMint, who emerged in recent months as the sponsor of the most serious and far-reaching bill to reform CPSIA. Most likely it’s sheer coincidence, but let’s hope DeMint wasn’t relying on a sympathetic ear from CPSC for his legislation.
- Obama also announced that he is calling for an expansion of the CPSC from three to five seats, and that he intends to nominate for one of the new seats veteran Washington consumer-safety hand (and now University of North Carolina professor) Robert Adler, who participated in the CPSC transition effort on behalf of the incoming Obama-Biden team. Few figures are more closely identified than Adler with the cluster of Washington institutions and personalities that brought us CPSIA: after serving in a staff capacity at CPSC for many years he joined the staff of none other than Rep. Henry Waxman, where his work included overseeing the agency. As the White House press release also notes, Adler “has been elected six times to the board of directors of Consumers Union, publisher of Consumer Reports magazine”; in its blind and clueless advocacy of a maximally onerous CPSIA, Consumers Union has taken a back seat only to Public Citizen and PIRG. Another online source describes Adler as a “longtime colleague” of Pamela Gilbert, a key figure both in the litigation lobby (Public Citizen, PIRG, trial lawyer lobbying) and in CPSC affairs.
- Among early press coverage, Bloomberg News is out with a reasonably fact-filled account that at least acknowledges in a passing sentence the continuing outcry over CPSIA’s calamitous effects on producers and sellers. That contrasts with the short, lame account in the New York Times, and the longer, much-worse-than-lame account in the L.A. Times, from which you’d think the only controversial thing about the agency was that it was too lenient on the regulated. You do have to wonder whether L.A. Times reporter Mark Silva even reads the stories in his own paper.
More: Deputy Headmistress has been thinking along very similar lines. And Sen. DeMint has kind words for nominee Tenenbaum.
Public domain image courtesy ChildrensLibrary.org: Walter Crane, illustrator, The Baby’s Aesop (1887).
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In Mississippi Litigation Review blog, Philip Thomas argues that Kim Strassel’s article (which we discussed Sunday) overemphasizes the role played by U.S. Silica’s CEO. I think that’s more the doing of the WSJ headline writers (which do pitch the story of one guy standing alone against the plaintiffs’ bar) than Strassel; as Thomas himself acknowledges, Ulizio doesn’t try to take undue credit, and Strassel merely (and correctly) notes that lawyers alone couldn’t defeat the silica lawsuits without the support of the business community willing to stand up against the tort bar.
Thomas also objects to Ulizio’s characterization of the victory as “luck,” but luck definitely played a huge role. The scandal came to light solely because Judge Janis Jack held mass Daubert hearings at an abnormally early stage in the litigation. In fact (and I seem to be the only person who has ever made this point), Jack’s ruling was especially abnormal, because she made the Daubert ruling before she made a jurisdictional ruling—and her jurisdictional ruling found that 99% of the cases in front of her lacked complete diversity and needed to be remanded. In other words, Judge Jack’s famous condemnation of plaintiffs’ experts was largely an ultra vires advisory opinion (which is why her sanctions order was for only a couple of thousand dollars).
The luck of the MDL draw had everything to do with that result. Another judge might not have held Daubert hearings at such an early stage; another judge might not have actually applied Daubert even if she had held the hearings; another judge might have preferred to empty her docket immediately, rather than stalling on the eventual remand.
And these aren’t purely hypothetical musings: in the welding fumes MDL in Ohio, there has been plenty of evidence of mass tort fraud, yet the judge has refused to throw out cases, so they slowly continue to proceed to trial.
In that sense, Ulizio is absolutely right: “When you have an entire system that condones these lawsuits, that does nothing to police its own, where there are no consequences, right or wrong has nothing to do with it. It’s a coin flip.” The lawyers who brought these fraudulent cases are still practicing law; thousands of fraudulent mass tort lawsuits continue to be brought since Judge Jack’s ruling without consequence to the unethical lawyers who bring them.
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“A Massachusetts federal judge recently ruled that Americans with Disabilities Act and related claims against New England Law | Boston can move forward in a lawsuit against the school for expelling a student with learning disabilities who failed two courses. … According to court papers, the plaintiff, Seva Brodsky, was expelled after failing two courses in the spring of 2005, and later learned from medical testing that his ‘memory and organizational deficits’ likely stemmed from an accident in the early 1980s.” He was denied readmission even though, he alleged, he presented medical evidence of his disability and had completed satisfactory work in a law program in Israel. [Sheri Qualters, NLJ]
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Washington state jails are overcrowded, so—presumably to avoid lawsuits over overcrowding—Washington State Patrol policy is to arrest nonviolent offenders without jailing them. In the case of Bellingham resident Janine Parker, drunk driving in the early morning hours of January 4, Trooper Chad Bosman arrested her, and drove her home, telling her not to drive until she was sober. Nevertheless, Parker, an hour later, found a taxi to take her nine miles to her car left by the side of the road, and drove drunk head on into Hailey French’s auto, causing the innocent 22-year-old driver many injuries.
French sued Parker, of course, but also the Washington State Patrol and Whatcom County (the latter apparently failed to put an ignition-interlock device in her car as Parker’s probation from an earlier conviction provided). (Miraculously, she doesn’t seem to have sued the taxi company.) A Skagit County jury found the two governmental entities jointly liable for $5.5 million. According to press accounts, the two defense attorneys each tried to get the jury to blame the other deep pocket: apparently, making the suggestion the person responsible for the drunk driving was the person responsible was beyond either hope or comprehension, though a web commenter to the article claims that Parker testified that the accident was entirely her fault. (Peter Jensen, “Whatcom County woman’s suit against county, State Patrol in jury’s hands”, Bellingham Herald, Apr. 24; May 1 post-trial press release of victorious plaintiff’s attorney).
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Harrowing story of Brian Leckie, an Ontario therapist and crisis counselor cleared on charges of sexual assault; the legal fees ate up his life savings, and there’s nowhere he can turn to get his good name back. “Only the ER nurses seemed to give me the benefit of the doubt, because they’ve seen it. They’ve seen the lies and the accusations that come through emergency rooms. They see it all the time.” Meanwhile, the two accusers whose charges a judge found to have “no credible” basis cannot even be named in the press because of a publication ban [Mark Bonokoski, "Justice for an innocent man", Toronto Sun, May 4, via Amy Alkon]
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Per Free Refills America, “the only thing better than winning a lawsuit is winning a lawsuit you didn’t even know about. God Bless America!” (via Karlsgodt).
By tortuous steps, the dispute continues to advance in a New Jersey courtroom over whether, as part of a settlement of discrimination claims by some of its employees, Prudential made a side payment to the law firm representing the workers, and if so whether that was proper. Both the giant insurer and the law firm, Leeds Morelli & Brown, have disputed the clients’ accounts and denied wrongdoing. [Newark Star-Ledger via ABA Journal, earlier]
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One out of ten colonoscopies result in nausea and vomiting; about one in 1000 colonoscopies will accidentally perforate the intestine, with potentially life-threatening side effects if not treated in a timely fashion. Kristen Freeman was one of the unfortunate one in 1000. While she complained of nausea and vomiting, she disregarded the instructions given to her about reporting her other symptoms, and so medical staff treated it like a more common case of nausea. By the time she admitted that her situation and pain was more dire, complications set in, and she suffered cardiopulmonary arrest, which in turn led to severe brain damage.
I won’t quibble with the jury’s assessment of damages of $12 million: Freeman was 33 and is now disabled for life, and in the randomness of noneconomic damages, $12 million isn’t the craziest award out there. But that the Hamilton County, Tennessee jury found gastroenterologist Michael Goodman 51% liable seems arbitrary. If doctors are required to assume that every patient reporting nausea but denying their situation is an emergency might be hiding more serious symptoms, and require them to go to the emergency room for testing (as the plaintiffs’ attorney argued Goodman should have done here), then that’s 100 wasteful emergency room cases for each real case—and not even a prevented case, since most patients follow instructions and report to the ER on their own when symptoms specific to perforation appear.
The article is on the Chattanooga Free Press web site, but the interesting discussion is in the comments, with friends of Freeman and seemingly knowledgeable doctors kibitzing. Freeman’s supporters argue that she did not actually experience any emergency symptoms and thus was not at fault at all. Even if true, that implies that they feel Goodman should be held responsible because he did not anticipate that Freeman was actually having an emergency when she presented asymptomatically: again, a demand for defensive medicine.
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Don’t offer reductions in your legal fees to clients who agree to have sex with you (Florida lawyer James Harvey Tipler, disbarred over offenses that also included having “altered evidence and caused a witness to unknowingly give false testimony”, taken clients’ money and neglected their cases, and much more).
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A Queens, N.Y. man has sued Starwood Hotels and American Express, saying that at an Amex-recommended hotel in Sardinia he and his sons were held hostage by hotel staffers, sometimes at gunpoint, and forced to spend upwards of a hundred thousand dollars on hotel, jewelry, boutique and nightclub charges. [Adam Klasfeld/Courthouse News, New York Post] Cityfile expresses a marked degree of skepticism toward Alexander Maryasin’s story and links “13 different lawsuits that [he] has filed in Queens alone in recent years”.
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Per child protective services in Arlington, Va., parents should not let their eight-year-olds out to play in the yard unattended “for any period of time”. David Bernstein and many of his commenters dissent.
More: Interesting, related website: Free-Range Kids, by Lenore Skenazy (via Alkon).
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From the Times Online:
A former television presenter who became one of Britain’s highest-earning solicitors has been struck off for “disgraceful” misconduct in his handling of sick miners’ compensation claims.
Andrew Nulty, who earned £13 million from the claims in one year, joins a growing list of solicitors punished for their role in the coal health scandal, exposed by The Times.
Earlier: Feb. 3, 2009; Feb. 19 and Dec. 12, 2008; May 8, 2007.
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At a Dix Hills, Long Island golf course, Dr. Azad Anand was injured when his golfing buddy hit the ball flying without yelling the traditional cry of “fore”. A New York appellate court, however, “said getting hit by an errant ball is an ‘inherent risk of the game of golf.’” [AP/Staten Island Advance] More: John Hochfelder discusses the concept of the “foreseeable danger zone“.
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“The first time we ever lost a case in trial, it was 2001. We tried it in Beaumont, Texas, and lost $7.5 million. . . . The judge sat there through the trial reading a newspaper. At one point an objection was made, the bailiff taps him on the shoulder and says ‘judge, objection is being made.’ He looks at our lawyer and says ‘overruled.’ The plaintiffs’ lawyer raises his hand and says ‘no, judge, it was me.’ He says ’sustained’ and goes back to reading the paper.” …
[U.S. Silica CEO John A.] Ulizio shares a memo that plaintiffs’ lawyer Joe Gibson sent to silica defendants in 2004 with a blunt offer: Settle our 9,000 cases for $900 million, or pay $1.5 billion in pretrial discovery alone, plus an even bigger verdict. “That’s the genius of the economics of litigation from the plaintiffs’ perspective. Sue a lot of people, sue on behalf of a lot of plaintiffs, get into an adverse jurisdiction, and then don’t make too big of a demand, so you can settle it for a relatively small percentage of the cost of defending the case,” Mr. Ulizio says.
Kim Strassel has a must-read account of how U.S. Silica beat a mass-tort fraud attempting to steal its solvency—and did so almost entirely by the luck of the MDL draw, as a different judge might have refused to conduct the hearings that exposed the wrongdoing. (See also Michael Krauss at Point of Law.)
Note that that $900 million proposal for 9000 bogus cases works out to $100,000/case—which is exactly what the Vioxx litigation settled for.
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The former FDA chief and inveterate nanny-state advocate, David Kessler, has a new book arguing that chain restaurant food is excessively palatable, to the point where it effectively addicts the chains’ customers. Jacob Sullum at Reason accords Kessler’s theories all the respect they deserve.
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