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).

• Beck and Herrmann fisk a NEJM anti-preemption editorial. [Beck/Herrmann; NEJM]
• Lessons of the Grasso case. [Hodak]
• You think BigLaw has it bad? Plaintiffs’ attorney who invented the benefit-of-the-bargain theory for pharmaceutical class actions where no one has suffered any cognizable injury, has made his firm tens of millions, but still hasn’t made partner. “Zigler said he never meets most of the people he represents in these high-profile cases.” [St.L. Post-Dispatch; related analysis from Beck/Herrmann]
• Speaking of harmless lawsuits, “an atrocity in Arkansas,” as Arkansas Supreme Court ignores basic principles of due process and civil procedure to certify an extortionate pre-CAFA class action from MIller County. [Hmm, that's Beck/Herrmann again; General Motors v. Bryant; related from Greve]
• Speedo competitor: unfair competition to say your innovative swimsuit has an advantage just because 38 out of the last 42 world records (as of June 30) were broken in the suit. [Am Law Daily]
• Background on bogus shower curtain scare story (earlier). [NYT; related AEI event]
• EMTALA-orama: don’t discuss payment in the emergency room if you don’t want to get sued. [ER Stories]

The hearing is in a New York City courtroom this morning, and the NY Times is there, complete with a photo of me.

Continue Reading »

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.

• Are plaintiffs’ attorneys judge-shopping by filing and dismissing and refiling identical class-action complaints in the highly-publicized restaurant menu case against Applebee’s? [Cal Biz Lit]

• You won’t be surprised that most of the nine worst business stories picked by BMI involve spoon-feeding by plaintiffs’ attorneys to a credulous press. [Business & Media Institute]
• “There’s no justification whatsoever for the agency to take any kind of action,” said Julie Vallese, a spokeswoman for the Consumer Product Safety Commission. “The claims being made about the dangers of shower curtains are phantasmagorical. It’s ridiculous.” Yeah, but the lawsuits are bound to happen anyway. [NY Daily News]
• Jack Thompson stays in the news when U.S. Marshals pay him a visit after a letter to a judge. [GamePolitics (h/t J.L.)]
• “A City lawyer who is demanding £19 million in compensation for work-place bullying faked a nervous breakdown to secure a larger payout, an employment tribunal was told.” [London Times via ATL]
• Did defensive medicine almost kill a patient when doctor worries more about potential lawsuit than whether nurse could save patient’s life? Heck if I know, but the underlying medicine is debated in the comments. [EM Physician blog]
• Hair-stylist fined £4,000 for “hurt feelings” after refusing to hire a Muslim stylist who wouldn’t show her hair at work. [Daily Mail (h/t Slim); earlier on Overlawyered]
• Disturbing turn in the Adam Reposa disciplinary hearing over his obscene gesture in court: state bar introduces satirical magazine as evidence because they “thought it was indicative of Reposa’s lack of respect for the law and the court system.” [Texas Lawyer/law.com] Mind you, this is the same Texas legal discipline system that refused to take action against Fred Baron and gave a slap on the wrist to the lawyers who tried to fake evidence in a product liability suit against Chrysler. As long as your priorities are straight.