Chronicling the high cost of our legal system
From the monthly archives:
U.S. District Judge William Smith in Providence vacated a $388 million award to Uniloc, a Singapore-based company, ruling that the jury “lacked a grasp of the issues before it and reached a finding without a legally sufficient basis.” [Bloomberg]
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A Missouri statute raises various civil-liberties and Bill of Rights problems. [Columbia, Mo. Tribune]
John Steele at Legal Ethics Forum finds much to unpack in a lawyer’s statement defending his zealous advocacy in a California discovery dispute.
T-shirts tweaking San Francisco transit? “Like so many things, it’s all fun and games, until you get sued” — in this case, a threat of suit from New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority. [SF Weekly] And the MTA has dropped its claims against Greenwich, Ct. blogger Chris Schoenfeld (“Station Stops“), who puts out an iPhone app providing train schedule information [Greenwich Time]
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The trial will consider whether the law firm is entitled to a $42 million contingency fee under circumstances criticized by Ted in this space two years ago and David Giacalone more recently. [NYLJ]
Don’t gamble away your clients’ $2 million class action settlement on stock market day trading and lose it [Sandeep Baweja of Orange County, Calif., who has agreed to plead guilty; earlier]
Stuart Taylor, Jr. on the need for malpractice reform:
Whatever the number, surveys of doctors and anecdotal evidence — even allowing for self-serving exaggeration — suggest that the occurrence [of defensive medicine] is high. A stunning 93 percent of Pennsylvania specialists in high-risk fields admitted practicing defensive medicine, according to a 2005 survey by the Journal of the American Medical Association. So did 83 percent of high-risk specialists in a 2008 Massachusetts Medical Society survey. That study also found that respondents’ fear of liability accounted for almost 30 percent of the CT scans and MRIs they ordered and had spurred 28 percent of them (including 44 percent of OB-GYNs) to avoid treating high-risk patients. …Similar considerations explain why we already have specialized courts without juries for vaccine liability, workers’ compensation, bankruptcy, and tax cases.
(cross-posted from Point of Law)
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What, you mean the phthalate provisions in CPSIA might have been an overreaction? [Scientific American, July]
More: “Why It’s Impacting Textile Screen Printing” [Ed Branigan, International Coatings Blog]
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Indian rights, religious freedom, equality claims and strict criminal penalties have gotten into a tangled mat [Marcia Zug, Prawfsblawg] Earlier on eagle feather law here, here, and here.
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Or they might get coffee spilled on them [Daily Mail via Free Range Kids]
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So let’s not-quite-clink our glasses to safety, always safety first. Authorities are concerned that the glass vessels familiar for hundreds of years are too often used as weapons. [Lowering the Bar]
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Some are anticipating that, per this line in Washington Post coverage:
Still, discussion [at a recent conference] centered on what employers could do to minimize the spread of the virus and to keep their doors open.
If a customer contracts the virus from the business “there’s an increased liability,” said Elizabeth Lewis, a partner at the law firm Cooley Godward Kronish.
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By Peter Robinson, at Uncommon Knowledge (site):
Lawyering is an essential component of democratic capitalism, but too much lawyering can be too much of a good thing. A disproportionate amount of our talent in the United States goes into law as opposed to business, which creates wealth. Lawyers redistribute the wealth, but they do not generally produce wealth.
Judge Silberman’s classic 1978 article, “Will Lawyering Strangle Democratic Capitalism?” — originally published at my old magazine Regulation, though before my time there — is available in PDF form from Cato here.
Related: “Scalia: ‘We Are Devoting Too Many of Our Best Minds to’ Lawyering” [WSJ Law Blog]
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A “judge ordered the Office of Disciplinary Counsel to lock [Allen] Feingold out of his offices” after he went on practicing law notwithstanding his suspension and eventual disbarment, even going so far as to use another lawyer’s letterhead and electronic-filing code without his permission. That was aside from the question of whether he’d earlier attempted to choke, or only attempted to strike, a judge who’d ruled against him on an arbitration matter. [Above the Law, Legal Intelligencer, AmLaw Daily]
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Unnecessary testing and prescribing is often the first example that comes to mind in discussions of defensive medicine, but Stuart Turkewitz, M.D., explains why needless hospital admissions, especially of older adults and those with chronic medical problems, should also be seen as a prime example. Just to lend interest, Dr. Turkewitz, an internist and geriatrician, contributes the views as a guest blogger at the New York Personal Injury Law Blog, published by his lawyer brother Eric.
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