Posts tagged as:

defense lawyers

Cliches of lawyerspeak

by Walter Olson on November 17, 2009

The phrase “looks forward to his day in court”, notes Christopher Fountain, yields 74,500 Google hits [For What It's Worth]

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A Texas DWI lawyer speaks incautiously to the press, and fun ensues [Houston Press, Above the Law, Defending People and more]

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October 30 roundup

by Walter Olson on October 30, 2009

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August 21 roundup

by Walter Olson on August 21, 2009

  • NYC criminal defense lawyer and TV commentator Robert Simels convicted of witness tampering in closely watched case [NY Daily News and more, NYLJ, Greenfield, Simon/Legal Ethics Forum]
  • Title IX suit says harassment by other students pushed school girl into anorexia, school should pay [Pittsburgh Post-Gazette]
  • Federal judge upholds some Louisiana restrictions on lawyer advertising, but says rules on Internet communication unconstitutionally restrict speech [WAFB, Ron Coleman]
  • “Woman Claims Display Was So Distracting, She Fell Over It” [Lowering the Bar; Santa Clara County, Calif. Dollar Tree]
  • Associated Press now putting out softer line on blogger use of its copy, but is it a trap? [Felix Salmon, earlier]
  • Update: Google ordered to identify person who set up nasty “skank” blog to attack NYC model [Fashionista, earlier here and here]
  • Some speak as if lawsuits over “alienation of affections” a thing of the past, alas not so [Eugene Volokh, more, yet more; earlier]
  • Connecticut: “State Holds Hearing On Whether Group Can Hand Out Food To The Poor” [Hartford Courant; "Food Not Bombs" group at Wesleyan]

Note: post was mistakenly titled as “August 22 roundup” at first, now fixed; thanks to reader Jonathan B. for catching.

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Connecticut Post: “Attorneys representing the Stamford Marriott Hotel & Spa and other firms being sued by a woman raped in their parking garage in 2006 withdrew special defenses Monday that claimed the woman was negligent and careless and that she and her children failed to ‘mitigate their damages.’” [via Christopher Fountain and followup] More: John Bratt, Baltimore Injury Law (with kind words for this site).

To “neutralize”, “eliminate”, “destroy” or “kill” a hostile witness. [NYLJ, Gothamist] More on Robert Simels trial: NY Post, NYDN, Greenfield.

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Don’t

by Walter Olson on May 21, 2009

Maybe we need to create some “super-Don’t” label for when a story like this comes along: “A defense attorney and former federal prosecutor whose clients have included rap stars and a soldier at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq was charged Wednesday with arranging the killing of one witness and trying to hire a hit man to kill another.” [AP/1010WINS]

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Prestigious honorific? Marketing gimmick? Eric Turkewitz does some digging, and also passes along this tangential but memorable anecdote:

My father likes to tell the story of the first lawyer to lose a million dollar malpractice case in New York. Rather than hurting his reputation, he became the million dollar go-to lawyer for the big cases.

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Regarding the Philadelphia narcotics squad scandal, Scott Greenfield has a word of advice for cop lawyer George Bochetto, namely: before you proclaim to the media that there isn’t “a scintilla of truth” to the allegations against your client, make sure there isn’t actual video out there of his doing the deed.

“Lawyers who defended the men prosecuted for a plot to kill thousands of innocent people using massive fertilizer bombs were paid £7.16m in legal aid, it emerged last night. The 2007 trial was one of the biggest in British legal history and followed raids by the Metropolitan Police across London and the Home Counties. The judge described five of the men convicted for their part in the foiled terror attack as ruthless and devious misfits who had betrayed their country of birth.” Two other defendants won acquittal. [The Independent]

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June 29 roundup

by Ted Frank on June 29, 2008

  • New FASB regulation may provide fodder for trial lawyers: publicly disclose your internal analysis of liability (thus giving away crucial settlement information and attracting more lawsuits), and/or face lawsuits when your disclosure turns out to be incorrect. [CFO.com; CFO.com; NLJ/law.com ($); FASB RFC]
  • NBC settles a “You-made-me-commit-suicide-by-exposing-my-pedophilia” lawsuit. [LA Times; WSJ Law Blog; Conradt v. NBC Universal]
  • A victim of overwarning? 17-year-old loses hat on Six Flags Batman roller-coaster ride, ignores multiple warning signs to jump multiple fences into unauthorized area, retrieves hat, loses head. [FoxNews/AP; Atlanta Journal-Constitution; TortsProf]
  • Lots of Ninth Circuit reversals this term, as per usual. [The Recorder/law.com]
  • A no-Twinkie defense doesn’t fly in a maid-beating case. [CNN/AP via ATL]
  • The Chinese government demonstrates that it can enforce laws against IP piracy when it wants to [Marginal Revolution]
  • “Justice Scalia said he thought that the United States was ‘over-lawed,’ leading to too many lawyers in the country. ‘I don’t think our legal system should be that complex. I think that any system that requires that many of the country’s best minds, and they are the best minds, is too complex. If you look at the figures, where does the top of the class in college go to? It goes into law. They don’t go into teaching. Now I love the law, there is nothing I would rather do but it doesn’t produce anything.’” [Telegraph]
  • Above the Law commenters decidedly unimpressed by my looks. Looking forward to feminists rushing to my defense against “silencing insults.” [Above the Law]

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The recent flurry of press attention to medical apology prompted this anecdotal recollection from Michael O’Hare at Same Facts (May 18) of his work 25 years ago on a Massachusetts state commission to address the malpractice issue:

The story was that soon after [in-house hospital lawyer] Fred arrived, he was assigned to get on top of malpractice claims, and he sat down with six months’ worth of files. All of them, he discovered, began with a collection action for non-payment of a bill. So he ordered the accounting office to send him every overdue account before any efforts at collection, and invited the deadbeat patient into his office for a conversation. Invariably, the patient was withholding payment because he thought he had been mistreated. Often, the patient was right. The next meeting was with the practitioner accused of having screwed up, and the outcome was sometimes an apology and a promise to fix the problem for free (for example, another operation at no charge to retrieve the forgotten sponge), sometimes an expression of regret for a bad outcome with an explanation that the hospital hadn’t actually erred: not everything in medicine works every time. Of course this required that Sanders and Fred drive out fear, so the staffers could be honest and sympathetic.

The result of this was a really spectacular reduction in malpractice costs, even counting in the “warranty service” repairs; I don’t remember the numbers but it was on the order of more than half, partly in fees to defense lawyers, partly in claim payments. Frequently the bill even got paid. The reduction in lawsuits occurred both when the hospital was wrong and said so, and when it was right and said so; it turned out a lot of the injured patients just wanted to tell a live person what had happened to them and get an apology. Of course the public relations benefits are enormous, if hard to measure. And quality always goes up when your own people aren’t afraid to talk to each other about instructive mistakes.

It’s notable that Fred’s pay didn’t depend on how many cases he litigated….

Full post here. More thoughts on medical apology: Melissa Clouthier, May 19.

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