Life without elevators is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

“Failed to warn escalator was not moving” is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

Rand Paul, the ADA, and the gotcha narrative is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

“Plaintiff Who Alleged Airport Concealment Has Litigation History” is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

August 7 roundup is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

July 16 roundup is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

He got a lawyer, and came to believe that returning to work might signal a degree of mental fitness detrimental to litigation. Instead, he spent eight weeks in Anguilla. Eventually, Business Week had to let him go. The lawsuit he filed, for twenty-five million dollars, against the building’s management and the elevator-maintenance company, took four years. They settled for an amount that White is not allowed to disclose, but he will not contest that it was a low number, hardly six figures. He never learned why the elevator stopped; there was talk of a power dip, but nothing definite. Meanwhile, White no longer had his job, which he’d held for fifteen years, and lost all contact with his former colleagues. He lost his apartment, spent all his money, and searched, mostly in vain, for paying work. He is currently unemployed.

Looking back on the experience now, with a peculiarly melancholic kind of bewilderment, he recognizes that he walked onto an elevator one night, with his life in one kind of shape, and emerged from it with his life in another. Still, he now sees that it wasn’t so much the elevator that changed him as his reaction to it. He has come to terms with the trauma of the experience but not with his decision to pursue a lawsuit instead of returning to work. If anything, it prolonged the entrapment. He won’t blame the elevator.

NB also that White never would’ve gotten in the elevator if not for anti-smoking laws requiring him to leave the building to have a cigarette, not that I’m suggesting anyone sue the city or the tobacco companies over that remote causation.

Lawyers making clients worse off department: Nicholas White’s elevator ride is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

Escalator mishap: federal judge wanted $21 million is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

Here come the Crocs suits is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

Bennett A. Cohen kept getting hurt in elevators — or so he claimed. The lawyers he hired to exact compensation from the culprits responsible for the injuries he allegedly sustained in four elevator mishaps between 1989 and 1992 must have suspected that their litigious client might eventually turn on them, as he did. When the last of the elevator tort claims collapsed, Cohen sued the law firm for malpractice for allegedly mishandling his slam-dunk tort suits.

A lower court in Brooklyn refused to dismiss Cohen’s suits, but the Appellate Division said that law firms can’t be guilty of malpractice for failing to properly prosecute cases without any merit to begin with.

I’m sure that’s of great comfort to the elevator maintenance companies who were originally sued by the law firm on behalf of Cohen.

(Too bad Cohen was representing himself pro se in his lawsuit against Wallace & Minchenberg. Otherwise he could have sued the lawyers who represented him in this lawsuit for failing to win against his former lawyers.)

Litigious clients file lawsuits is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system