• Disturbing implications from Lori Drew case of criminalizing website “terms of service” [Kerr @ Volokh and more; earlier]
• Not quite what lawprof proponents of the class action format had in mind? Proposed law in South Korea “would allow businesses who suffer financial losses due to violent public protests to file class actions” against protesters [Korea Times via Karlsgodt, Class Action Blawg]
• BlockShopper retains high-powered First Amendment attorney to fend off Jones Day’s don’t-blog-about-us suit [Ambrogi; earlier here, etc.]
• New filings in pro wrestlers’ labor suit against WWE [Schwartz; earlier here and here]
• “Brits Propose Potential Life Sentence for Johns” [Balko, Reason "Hit and Run"]
• Narrowing “fair report” privilege, N.J. appeals court decides reporters can be liable for publishing defamatory allegations in court filing, while lawyers still immunized when they put those allegations there [Feral Child, Media Law, CT Blue; Salzano v. North Jersey Media Group, PDF]
• It’ll be hard to live up to some of the high praise for my new web project with Heather Mac Donald, John Derbyshire, Razib Khan et al, Secular Right [D.R. Tucker, Human Events "Right Angle"; some other reactions]
• Late in catching up on this, but Target in August agreed to pay $6 million to settle the big lawsuit over accessibility of its website to blind users [The Recorder; Ben Duranske discusses implications for virtual online worlds]

The latest issue of the Federalist Society’s Class Action Watch has many articles of interest to Overlawyered readers:

• William E. Thomson & Kahn A. Scolnick on the Exxon Shipping case;
• Jimmy Cline on Arkansas’s disregard for class action certification standards;
• Jim Copland on the “Colossus” class action;
• Laurel Harbour on the New Jersey Supreme Court decision on medical monitoring class actions;
• Lyle Roberts on lead-counsel selection in securities class actions;
• Mark A. Behrens & Frank Cruz-Alvarez on the lead paint public nuisance decision by the Rhode Island Supreme Court; and
• Andrew Grossman, extensively citing to Overlawyered and my brief in discussing the Grand Theft Auto class action settlement rejection.

If you’re not visiting my other site — or subscribing to it in your RSS reader, or following its Twitter feed — here’s some of what you may have missed lately:

• Sen. Obama’s “I voted for tort reform” talk: maybe not so serious;
• Assaults on arbitration and pre-emption are just the start of the Litigation Lobby’s big plans for next year;
• A new featured column by Richard Epstein on the peculiarly named Employee Free Choice Act;
• Manhattan Institute’s Trial Lawyers, Inc. project is out with a new report on West Virginia;
• U.S. Department of Commerce: foreign investors fear our litigation climate;
• Albany plaintiff’s firm Powers & Santola ladles out campaign money to judges it practices before;
• Through the wringer? Judge Posner is quite severe on a clothes-dryer class action.

The (genuine) International Olympic Committee and other defendants should be made to pay, according to Texas-based class-action lawyer, Jim Moriarty, who wants “millions of dollars” for 400 victims worldwide. “The lawyer alleges the IOC was aware beijingticketing.com was operating with trademarked Olympic symbols emblazoned on the site,” but failed to act speedily enough or effectively in getting the impostor site shut down. (”Olympic ticket scam: class action”, Sydney Morning Herald, Sept. 23).

Two separate lawsuits were filed in federal courts in Minneapolis and Pennsylvania in recent days against egg producers. The Pennsylvania suit, a class action, and the Minneapolis suit, which the plaintiffs are seeking to certify as a class action, both allege various egg makers have engaged in price fixing.

But with the price of chicken feed skyrocketing due to the cost of fuel and the diversion of corn from feed to ethanol, and previous lawsuits by animal rights groups resulting in fewer laying hens occupying more space per hen, it’s no surprise that a carton of eggs–like nearly every other food–costs consumers more money these days.

If it’s going to put me in danger of removal from state to federal court, I guess it must have just been a typo. An Arkansas federal court bought the argument. (CAFA Law Blog, Sept. 18).

As good an argument for the Class Action Fairness Act as any: Trial lawyers sued Compaq in Texas over an allegedly defective disk controller, though none of the plaintiffs had ever suffered a malfunction or a loss of data, alleging a violation of Texas consumer fraud law on behalf of a nationwide class.  No dice: the Texas Supreme Court threw out the case, noting that Texas law did not permit the sort of nationwide class action contemplated by the plaintiffs.  End of story?  Nope: the same trial lawyers filed the same complaint again, this time in Oklahoma state court, and asked the Oklahoma state court to apply Texas law to a nationwide class.  “Sure thing!” the court rubber-stamped–applying an ersatz version of Texas law rejected by Texas courts.  The forum-shopping was able to extract $40 million in attorneys’ fees from a questionable coupon settlement, as an Overlawyered post noted August 6.  The Summer 2008 issue of State Court Docket Watch includes my essay discussing why this is a constitutionally problematic set of decisions by Oklahoma courts–written before, though published after, the Anthony Caso analysis for WLF.

• “Law school is not such a leap” for licensed Nevada prostitute’s next career move — hey, we didn’t say that, Robert Ambrogi at Law.com did [Legal Blog Watch, Bitter Lawyer]
• Today’s representative class-action plaintiff: “For five years, her diet consisted almost exclusively of Chicken-of-the-Sea tuna…” [PoL]
• Prolific California disabled-access filer Jarek Molski ordered to pay fees for “scorched-earth” tactics in one case, but wins a second [Metropolitan News-Enterprise via Bashman]
• Another sperm donor surprised by legal obligation to pay child support [Santa Fe, N.M. Reporter; earlier]
• “Lawyer Fees Jumped 50% After Bankruptcy Law Change” [ABA Journal]
• “Whatever it takes to win a case”, and checking out jurors’ Facebook profiles is the least of it [NLJ]
• High-profile U.K. attorney Nick Freeman registers his nickname “Mr. Loophole” [Times Online a while back]
• When can a plaintiff claiming sexual assault sue anonymously? Courts will apply mushy balancing test [NYLJ]
• Hold on to your hats, looks like Geoffrey Fieger is online [Fieger Time]

Via Point of Law, today’s DC Examiner has a big package of stories on trial-lawyer felon William Lerach:

• How the mighty Lerach has fallen: Power lawyer to prisoner
• Who lost when Lerach won?
• Lerach in short form (timeline)
• Nate Beeler caricature

The “Who lost when Lerach won?” piece quotes me.

I’m quoted at length in a National Law Journal story about criticisms of cy pres awards, the ostensibly charitable contributions demanded in class-action settlements that actually serve to inflate attorneys’ fee awards without requiring actual payments to actual class members. Plaintiffs’ attorneys are using the device to try to get around the requirements of the Class Action Fairness Act, which made it more difficult for attorneys to inflate the nominal value of settlements through coupons, the pre-CAFA means by which plaintiffs’ attorneys inflated settlements. (I’m actually misquoted in one sentence: I said “putative class” to the reporter, and it was written in the article as “punitive class.”  Update: corrected in on-line edition.) (Amanda Bronstad, National Law Journal/law.com, Aug. 11).

Where’s the trial lawyer bringing a class action on behalf of all of the people who were defrauded when they gave money to John Edwards’s presidential campaign?  It’s certainly a much more plausible claim of causation, reliance, and financial injury than the typical class action.

More seriously, I hope someone somewhere is investigating whether Fred Baron violated federal campaign finance law when he set aside tens of thousands of dollars to pay Rielle Hunter hush money without disclosing the payments on behalf of Edwards.  Edwards said he was in the Beverly Hilton to help keep the story from becoming public, which makes it seem unlikely he’s telling the truth when he said that he had no knowledge that Baron moved Hunter to California.  Alas, ABC didn’t ask the right follow-up questions, such as how Edwards thought meeting Hunter in a hotel room would help keep the story quiet.  And “Fred Baron” appears nowhere in the New York Times story, even as he is a major fund-raiser for Barack Obama today.  Obama is still running for president, right?

Hear, hear.  (In re Apollo Group, Inc. Securities Litigation (D. Ariz. 2008) via WSJ Law Blog; Bloomberg).  Plaintiffs will appeal the trial court’s decision to throw out the $277 million verdict.

Yesterday, Judge Shirley Wohl Kram filed a 58-page decision in the Grand Theft Auto class action. How did she decide?

Continue Reading »

“For the second time in less than a week, class action law firm Labaton Sucharow has been reprimanded for overreaching in its attempts to lead a major securities fraud action.” Having attained lead counsel status in one class action against American International Group, the firm sought to combine that case with others pending elsewhere that raised quite different claims against the much-sued insurer.

“As is readily apparent here, lead plaintiff’s Motion for Leave to Amend to add unrelated claims is a calculated attempt at judge shopping,” [Southern District of New York federal judge John] Sprizzo wrote. “It seems apparent that lead plaintiff is trying to usurp lead plaintiff status over claims which are properly in front of other judges.”

The decision came just three days after Southern District of New York Judge Jed S. Rakoff admonished Labaton Sucharow attorneys for perhaps not “fulfill[ing] their professional responsibilities” in their proposal of a co-lead plaintiff in In Re Monster Worldwide Securities Litigation, 07 Civ. 2237.

(Mark Fass, “Labaton’s Newest Bid to Lead Major Securities Fraud Action Rejected”, New York Law Journal, Jul. 22).

It will come as no surprise to anyone who surfs the Web much that many parked domains and 404 error pages on otherwise active websites carry Google keyword ads. (If you don’t know what a parked domain is, this is one; if you don’t know what a 404 error page is, here’s ours.) It might also seem reasonable that ads in these locations would be glanced at and even clicked on by some non-trivial number of visitors, who will often be looking for information on the relevant topic (that’s the idea behind keywords) and, frustrated in their initial search for content, might be ready to check out an advertiser’s substitute content. However, Boston lawyer Hal K. Levitte professes great dismay and consternation that 15 percent of the $887.67 he spent on his ad campaign went toward placements in such inferior spots, resulting in 693 clickthroughs and no actual conversions to prospect or client status. So he’d like class action status to sue for fraud and unjust enrichment on behalf of all other Google ad customers (Legal Blog Watch, Jul. 16).

P.S. From comments, reader J.B.:

Not sure what’s fraudulent here, when Mr. Levitte set up his ad campaign in Google AdWords he was given the opportunity to specify whether he wanted his ads to appear only on Google search result pages, or also in other places such as these parked domains.

In addition, Google gives you the option to pay less for clicks from these “inferior” spots, because as he found out, they often result in less-desirable visitors.

We in the technology world have a saying for people like Mr. Levitte: “RTFM”

In advertising; class actions; Google

Class actions of the lawyers, by the lawyers, for the lawyers? To quote the Law.com summary: “A federal judge has rejected a proposed co-lead plaintiff for the Monster Worldwide securities fraud class action because the representative knew nothing about the case. Southern District of New York Judge Jed Rakoff had some pointed words for lead plaintiffs counsel Labaton Sucharow, saying the Steamship Trade Association International Longshoremen’s Pension Fund was ’simply the willing pawn of counsel’ because it ‘has no interest in, genuine knowledge of, and/or meaningful involvement in this case.’” Judge Rakoff noted that pension fund co-chairman Horace Alston had represented himself under oath as the fund’s most knowledgeable person about the suit. “However, Mr. Alston then testified that he did not know the name of the stock at issue in this case, did not know the name of either individual defendant, did not know whether STA-ILA ever owned Monster stock, did not know if an amended complaint had been filed, did not know whether he had ever seen any complaint in the action,” leading Judge Rakoff to declare that he would “not be party to a sham.” (Mark Hamblett, “Lead Plaintiff Pick Rejected as Merely ‘Pawn of Counsel’”, New York Law Journal, Jul. 17).

• Nothing new about lawyers stealing money from estates, but embarrassing when they used to head the bar association [Eagle-Tribune; Lawrence, Mass., Arthur Khoury]
• Unusual “reverse quota” case: black job applicant wins $30K after showing beauty supply company turned her down because it had a quota of whites to hire [SE Texas Record]
• Who knew? Per class action allegations, pet food contains ingredients “unfit for human consumption” [Daily Business Review]
• U.K.: “A divorcee who won a £1.4million payout from her multi-millionaire husband is suing her lawyers because she claims she should have got twice that amount.” [Telegraph]
• UW freshman falls from fourth-floor dorm window after drinking at “Trashed Tuesday”, now wants $ from Delta Upsilon International as well as construction firm that put in windows [Seattle P-I, KOMO]
• After giant $103 million payday, current and former partners at Minneapolis law firm are torn by feuds and dissension — wasn’t there a John Steinbeck novella about that? [ABA Journal and again, Heins Mills]
• Small firm that used to make Wal-Mart in-house videos sets up shop at AAJ/ATLA convention hawking those videos for use in suits against the retailer [Arkansas Democrat Gazette, earlier]
• When the judge’s kid gets busted [Eric Berlin; Alabama]

Hoosiers who bought losing Cash Blast tickets may be eligible to claim refunds… at least if they’ve held on to tickets in the now-defunct game from the period May 2005-July 2006. (Jeremy Herb, “$20M lawsuit against Hoosier Lottery gets class-action status”, Indianapolis Star, Jul. 10).