A spoof TV lawyer ad; Robot Chicken Star Wars Episode II. (Meredith Woerner, io9, Nov. 13).

Lawyer-directory firm Avvo has an iPhone app by the name of “Last Call” that

allows you to calculate your blood-alcohol level to determine if it’s safe for you to drive after drinking. If not, use Last Call to call a cab. Last Call also provides a list of top local DUI lawyers on Avvo to call for help if you need it.

(h/t Denise Howell). More from Scott Greenfield:

I wonder whether some developer at Avvo field tested the concept at the local bar and grill, numerous times, before declaring it a winner? There are many areas where this app could fail, from inputting error (hey, you’re drunk, right?) to claims of encouraging drunk driving by the false sense of security of knowing that a list of DUI attorneys are only a click away. This is a far cry from “just say no.”

On the other hand, when the cop grabs your iPhone at the time of arrest and sees that you’ve used the application, input information that showed you to be intoxicated and drove anyway, even the best DUI attorney will have his hands full explaining that away. …

If you read the marketing language with care, however, you find this: “Last Call is provided for entertainment purposes only.”

It’s always amusing as well to contrast the marketing with the legal disclaimers, as it would be wrong to expect the app to serve the purpose for which it’s sold. No detrimental reliance here.

In alcohol; chasing clients

• “Friend named superlawyer five years after she quit practice” [@vpynchon] #
• Unreality meets unreality: inmate Jonathan Lee Riches files third-party brief in World of Warcraft case [Duranske, Virtually Blind] #
• Uh-oh: new White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel is on record as a supporter of “universal citizen service” [Lindgren @ Volokh] #
• Ralph Nader is vile (but you knew that) [Weigel, Reason "Hit and Run"] #
• U.K.: new pet welfare regs could mean jail for owners who fail to put obese dogs and cats on a diet [Daily Mail via Bookworm Room] #
• Frum: GOP future should be in going after educated voters [National Post] #
• Idea for re-use of McCain-Palin yard signs [Steve Hayward, NRO Corner] #

• District court tosses $5.2 million punitive damage award against TASER in closely watched case [CalPunitives, Feral Child]
• You mean demanding that opponent submit to a “PET brain scan” is vexatious? [The Briefcase, Stemple v. Dunina, Ohio]
• Election’s implications for federal courts [NLJ, NYT, Steven Calabresi @ WSJ]
• Don’t even think of using “the cash machine legal clinic” as your slogan if Louisiana implements tough new lawyer-ad rules [New Orleans City Business]
• Our long national slide toward “election by litigation” [Hillyer, D.C. Examiner] Plus: America’s Most Irresponsible Public Figure® RFK Jr. emerges as “election law huckster” [Weigel, Reason "Hit and Run"]
• While privacy laws ratchet ever tighter on private actors, publicly available court documents blare out Social Security numbers and other sensitive data [Ambrogi]
• Which is the worse deal, using your own bank’s ATM or patronizing one of those awful payday-loan outfits? No peeking [Coyote]
• “DMCA: Ten Years of Unintended Consequences” [EFF]

• NYC judge tosses injury suit against Lawyers Athletic League filed by a player on Milberg’s team [NYLJ]
• Kentucky fen-phen lawyers Gallion and Cunningham disbarred [Lexington Herald-Leader]
• Worker’s comp doc claims he noticed abnormal lab result and told patient to check with his primary doc. Patient didn’t and harm ensued. Malpractice? [CalLaw Legal Pad, KevinMD, Happy Hospitalist]
• Federalist Society publishes text of Judge Dennis Jacobs’s speech on pro bono, but Chemerinsky digs in rather than apologize [PoL]
• Are HIPAA privacy rules suspended during emergencies? No, and what lovely situations that’s likely to cause [HIPAA blog, more]
• One of the more unusual personal injury lawyer websites is “like a touchy-feely hybrid of Myst and The Office” [Above the Law]
• Gold-collar criminal defense work? McAfee decides $12 million too rich a sum for defending CFO Prabhat Goyal [Bennett & Bennett, Greenfield]
• Sounds promising: “Texas Supreme Court decision could end peremptory strikes in jury selection” [SE Texas Record]

• Bulgarians employ “decoy lawyers” to get around corruption in official bureaus [Cowen, MargRev]
• Forum-shopping vol. MMMCCXII: Taiwan company claims Apple broke California unfair-practices law so of course it sues in Texarkana [AppleInsider]
• “U.S. produces far too many lawyers for society to absorb” and one reason is that law schools want warm seats on chairs [Greenfield]
• Second Circuit: lawyers can’t buy their way out of sanctions for filing meritless lawsuit [Krauss, PoL]
• Some reasons furor over free speech in Canada is relevant this side of the border [Bernstein @ Volokh]
• We’re quoted on the subject of those websites that offer “point-and-click access to trial lawyers” [Business First of Columbus]
• Tight lid kept on study of disposable diapers’ environmental impact since findings were … inconvenient [Times Online (U.K.) via Stuttaford]
• Judge backs Kentucky’s bid to seize domains of online gambling sites, implications for everyone else [Balko, "Hit and Run"; earlier here and here]

• Hey, that Jon Bon Jovi baseball anthem sounds familiar, make the check out for $400 billion please [Boston Herald]
• Cyrus Sanai, known for dogged campaign against Judge Kozinski, is back with a new 80-page complaint which also names “10 other district court and 9th Circuit judges who have been assigned to his family’s case at one time or another.” [NLJ]
• More on English “no barbed wire on allotments” rules: “I am replacing the glass in the windows of my house with tissue paper, so that burglars — poor lambs — will not cut themselves while breaking and entering.” [Dalrymple, City Journal]
• Ethical alarms should go off when criminal defense lawyers’ marketing hints at insider pull or former-prosecutor clout [Greenfield]
• Annals of public employee tenure: firing a cop in Chicago sure isn’t easy [TalkLeft, FOI files on Gerald Callahan and William Cozzi cases at Chicago Justice Project]
• Gigantic government database of cellphone users planned for U.K. [Massie]
• Babies only, please: Nebraska backs off from its dump-a-teen “safe haven” parental abandonment law [Althouse, earlier]
• Some Israelis may be overly cheery in welcoming presumed benefits of consumer class actions [Karlsgodt citing Jerusalem Post editorial]

Reader Milan Vydareny of Chicago writes:

I was watching CNN the other day while on a treadmill at the gym at 5:00 AM. There was a commercial from a legal firm seeking to promote litigation over some medical device that had been recalled. The announcer intoned “If you or a loved one have died because of using….”

The thought that came to my mind was: “Just how many dead people are listening to CNN at this hour?”

In advertising; chasing clients; Chicago

Aggressive solicitation by lawyers has been raising hackles in Los Angeles since the commuter train crash. (Carol J. Williams, “Lawyers swoop in after the Metrolink crash, looking for clients”, L.A. Times, Oct. 5)(earlier)(via Stier, Mass Tort Prof).

Two Milwaukee-based law firms, Hupy & Abraham and the McNally Law Offices, have been gathering up vehicle-crash police reports in the famously litigation-friendly Illinois counties east of St. Louis, and then soliciting persons named in the reports to file injury claims. “Some local police departments, including Belleville, Edwardsville, O’Fallon and the Madison County Sheriff’s Department,” have resisted the demands, based on worries about citizen privacy and identity theft, or have sought to charge for per-report access, which would discourage mass scooping up of names. The McNally firm, however, “sends a copy of a letter from Attorney General Lisa Madigan’s office, which states the police have to allow viewing of the reports, at no charge.” (Brian Bruegemann, “Ambulance chasing? Lawyers zero in on metro-east clients”, Belleville News-Democrat, Sept. 28). Ron Miller at Maryland Injury Lawyer says the practice contributes toward giving the plaintiff’s bar a bad name, and corresponds with attorney Michael Hupy whose firm figures in the story. We covered the phenomenon earlier here and here.

It doesn’t actually hang together as a phrase, but it does contain plenty of promising keywords for lawyers trolling for business from the fatal commuter wreck north of Los Angeles, so it rates highly on Google. (Kevin O’Keefe, Sept. 19).

Perennial Overlawyered favorite Hagens Berman seems to be doing that to promote a Verizon late fee suit (Kevin O’Keefe, Sept. 16, via @kevinokeefe — yes, our first Twitter-derived post). Update: Tweet retracted.

Another entry into the genre of for-profit websites offering to match aggrieved visitors with lawyers, this one is said to be based on a slightly tweaked format (including “talk to a live lawyer” options) sidestepping certain potential pitfalls ethical and otherwise. (Siobhan Morrissey, Time, Aug. 6). Per its press release:

…The unique process used by WhoCanISue.com also ensures that cases are not jeopardized inadvertently, a common pitfall of some other approaches to online matchmaking. Because WhoCanISue.com does not require submission of open-ended descriptions of the facts of the user’s claim, users are not forced to divulge information that could be deemed a waiver of the attorney-client priviledge [sic] resulting in the information being introduced in court and used against them.

WhoCanISue.com does not generate “leads” to potential clients, a method commonly used in online legal marketing that violates ethical rules governing most attorneys’ advertising. Instead, WhoCanISue.com’s patent pending model allows attorneys to bid on real-time ad placements – usually limited to five attorneys – delivered to users who have completed question paths to determine their qualification for a particular claim.

An earlier entry in the legal-matchmaking field, SueEasy.com, has come in for a fair bit of criticism in and out of the profession (”hairball generator“, “incredibly stupid” idea, “like a carpool for ambulance chasers“, etc.).

Reactions: Bill Childs does some legwork on the site’s sponsorship, throwing cold water on hasty, sloppy, or gullible speculation in some circles that the site might be a false-flag operation. Eric Turkewitz and Carolyn Elefant aren’t any more impressed this time around than they were with SueEasy.com.

Justinian Lane crows: Pfizer fined by an Australian trade group! Indeed it was; drug reps went off the reservation of what they were supposed to talk about without telling managers, and exaggerated the health effects of a competing drugs for personal profit. (Note that there was no need for a regulator or plaintiffs’ attorneys to get involved; this was entirely an Australian free-market self-policing arrangement through contractual agreements that fined Pfizer. Lane forgets to mention that part.)

Lane thinks this is a just result worth noting. So let us consider that trial lawyers do the same thing every day: lie about or exaggerate health effects of drugs for profit (just Google the name of any prescription drug to get a lawyer’s ad)–and without the intermediating effects of doctors to assess the claims and correctly inform patients, so it is clearly worse. But the lawyers do so with impunity, with no consequences for the adverse health effects on patients. (E.g., POL June 2007; POL Feb. 12.) There’s no private cause of action; and the trial bar and its professional organizations lionize such tactics, rather than punish them. All we can do is criticize plaintiffs’ lawyers for putting profits before people.

Apparently a few of the ones with exotic striations have enough radioactive mineral content that you might have to worry if you spent many of your waking hours strapped to them as to a hospital gurney. (Staying even a few inches away should be enough to lower the risk to pretty much zero, which is fortunate given that the posture most of us use while chopping celery does not involved prolonged whole-body contact.) Nonetheless, per a New York Times account yesterday that does little to discourage reader alarmism, “Personal injury lawyers are already advertising on the Web for clients who think they may have been injured by countertops.” (Kate Murphy, “What’s Lurking In Your Countertop?”, Jul. 24).

Let me be the first to predict that if such litigation has any future, it will not be in recovering large sums for the unprovable (because almost certainly nonexistent) toxic effects, but in $20,000 claims against insurers and contractors for rip-out and replacement*, which, in the usual circular fashion, will be stimulated by alarmist accounts like the one in the Times. And the predominant injury risk from a chunk of hewn granite will continue to be, as it has always been, being in the way when it drops.

*I’m not sure why people choose a countertop material that will dull their knives and chip their china, to say nothing of being cold and ungrateful to the touch. But that’s another topic.

P.S. The EPA has a statement (scroll).

Three years ago we noted (following reporting by Ed Lowe and J.E. Espino of the Appleton, Wis. Post-Crescent) (more) that

Representatives of the Hollywood, Fla.-based law firm of Schwartz Zweben & Associates have played a substantial role behind the scenes in helping organize, promote and support the Ms. Wheelchair America pageant and some of its state affiliates. And lawyers with the firm have filed more than 200 lawsuits in at least seven states and the District of Columbia on behalf of at least 13 pageant participants, “including state and national titleholders, state coordinators and pageant judges”.

Now the Birmingham, Ala. News follows up on the case of Colleen Macort, Ms. Wheelchair Florida 2002, who has filed more than 73 disabled-accessibility actions in Alabama “but has never spent a day in court because of settlements”. Local law provides that Macort cannot be compensated for filing the lawsuits, but the Wisconsin paper reported that the firm of Schwartz Zweben had engaged her as a consultant on other cases. The reporter is kind enough to quote me and mention this site (Liz Ellaby, “Bessemer woman crusades to address disability act violations, provoking critics”, Birmingham News, Jul. 3).

In the state of Washington, Ms. Wheelchair Washington 2005, Michelle Beardshear, has teamed up with the Florida firm to file 15 lawsuits, of which twelve have been settled, against enterprises in Clark County (Kathie Durbin, “Advocate for disabled not hesitant to sue for access”, The Columbian, May 27 courtesy Chamber ILR). And in March, Schwartz Zweben & Slingbaum (as it is now called) swooped down to sue twelve defendants in the Tucson area, including a number of well-known restaurants, alleging ADA violations. (Josh Brodesky, “12 Tucson businesses facing suits alleging Disabilities Act problems”, Arizona Daily Star, Mar. 28).

Plaintiffs firm Berman DeValerio sued attorneys Eran and Susan Boltz Rubenstein, former Coughlin Stoia attorneys, for breach of contract; in their counterclaim, the Rubensteins claim they were hired on a contingent fee basis to wrangle international clients to serve as plaintiffs in securities class actions. Lyle Roberts has the details, and the complaint and counterclaim. Alas, the case settled before details of this interesting arrangement came to light in discovery or other court filings, and it is perhaps too much to ask for questions to be asked in the nonexistent Congressional investigation of the practices of the securities class action bar.

• Educator acquitted on charges of roughness toward special ed student sues Teacher Smackdown website over anonymous comments criticizing her [NW Arkansas Morning News, Citizen Media Law Project, House of Eratosthenes]
• Lorain County, Ohio judge who struck down state’s death penalty has Che Guevara poster in his office, though Guevara wasn’t exactly an opponent of killing [USA Today]
• Privatization of U.S. Senate food service is a parable for wider issues [Tabarrok]
• Low-end strategies for acquiring criminal-law clients include trolling the attorney visiting area at the federal lockup, paying the hot dog guy in front of the courthouse [Greenfield]
• A Canadian Senator on why his country’s medical malpractice law works better than you-know-whose [Val Jones MD leads to audio]
• U.K.: convicted rapist sexually assaults and murders teenage girl after housing authority is told evicting him would breach his human rights [Telegraph]
• No word of legal action (yet, at least) in Salina, Kansas car crash that driver blames on “brain freeze” from Sonic restaurant frozen drink [AP/K.C. Star]
• In Michigan, some mysterious entity is trying to drop an electoral anvil on two of our favorite jurists [PoL]