Chronicling the high cost of our legal system
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Whether or not these are the very creepiest, Cracked has found some instances where law firms might want to rethink the artwork or slogans on their sites. Not included, mercifully, is the Texas law firm that yanked several tasteless stock photos from its website last year after setting off a blogosphere furor.
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I met the noted criminal defense lawyer once when we appeared on the same talk show. Somehow I didn’t realize he was the one who defended Oliver Jovanovic, target of a dubious (to say the least) sex-crime prosecution in the 1990s. [Gillers, Legal Ethics Forum]
“Peter Q. ‘P’Ta Mon’ John, who advertises himself as ‘The Thugs Lawyer,’ was indicted Thursday on charges that he conspired to have attempted murder charges against two local rap music executives dropped.” [Baton Rouge Advocate via Above the Law] Earlier coverage of John here and here (his advertised $500 “Expungement Special”).
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“‘He was singing like a canary, then we charged him in civilian proceedings, he got a lawyer and shut up,’ [former Senator] Slade Gorton, a member of the 9/11 Commission that investigated the Sept 2001 terror attacks on the US, told The Sunday Telegraph” of 23-year-old Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, charged in the Christmas Day attempted bombing of an airliner over Detroit.
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One way is to leave onlookers reeling at your ads’ tastelessness, as happened with one Texas criminal defense law firm. [Above the Law, A Public Defender, Mark Bennett, Scott Greenfield] Update: followup at Above the Law.
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A bright-line rule in legal ethics: don’t order that witnesses be killed [Philadelphia Inquirer, WSJ Law Blog on prosecutors' allegations in a case against New Jersey criminal defense lawyer Paul Bergrin]
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]
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).
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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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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Point of Law