Overlawyered » fishing expeditions

Suspended Montgomery Blair Sibley still getting press coverage

Ted Frank — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 23:34:25 +0000

Welcome readers of the Mary Ann Akers blog in the Washington Post (via M&N). It’s not clear why anyone is still covering the press releases of Mr. Sibley, who has been suspended from practice in the District of Columbia, and thus has no basis to be filing anything in court. While Sibley has appealed his suspension to the U.S. Supreme Court, I will happily wager that the application for a stay is denied, followed by the denial of the writ of certiorari. This is, after all, Mr. Sibley’s twelfth petition for certiorari on his own behalf, and the first eleven (along with five on behalf of clients who were not Mr. Sibley) have all been denied.

Sibley’s latest stunt is to claim that he will call 800 witnesses who were alleged clients of Palfrey’s call-girl service at the civil forfeiture proceedings over Deborah Jeane Palfrey’s estate. It’s not going to happen: as a suspended attorney, Sibley is ineligible to appear in federal court, which is why the government filed a notice of suspension on May 21. (The victims of Sibley in Larry Sinclair’s lawsuit against bloggers have yet to file such a notice. Not clear what they’re waiting for, though, technically, under the local rules, it is Sibley’s obligation to notify the federal court he has been suspended and is ineligible to practice.) Moreover, the US government has opposed his proposed substitution on behalf of the late Palfrey in Case No. 06-1710, United States v. 803 Capitol Street–Sibley was fired by Palfrey, has no one to represent since there is no executor to the Palfrey estate as of yet, and has a conflict of interest with the Palfrey estate because he filed a claim on his own behalf to the property in question: even if he weren’t suspended, the district court would be exceedingly unlikely to let him intervene in the forfeiture case, much less turn it into a circus, and, indeed, it ordered that the government need not file a formal brief. (Note that Sibley’s motion to substitute acknowledges that he hasn’t sought permission from his alleged client, Blanche Palfrey.) The question is why reporters are permitting themselves to be marionettes to broadcast whatever Sibley blasts as an e-mail, when he has repeatedly demonstrated that he shouldn’t be taken seriously.

March 25 roundup

Walter Olson — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 00:04:22 +0000

Speaking of patients who act against medical advice and sue anyway: doctor who advised against home birth is cleared by Ohio jury in $13 million suit [Plain Dealer and earlier via KevinMD]
UK: “A feud over a 4ft-wide strip of land has seen neighbours rack up £300,000 in lawyers’ bills, and left one family effectively homeless.” [Telegraph]
Last of the Scruggs judicial bribery defendants without a plea deal, Dickie’s son Zack, takes one [Folo]
By reader acclaim: securities trader sues over injury from lap dancer’s attentions [AP/NY Sun]
Amid the talk of FISA and retroactive telecom immunity, it would be nice to hear more about the actual lawsuits [Obbie]
Australian worker loses suit over firing despite a doctor’s note vouching that stress of worrying about upcoming football game made it medically necessary for him to take day off to go see it [Stumblng Tumblr]
Megan McArdle and Tyler Cowen toss around the question of federal FDA pre-emption of drug liability suits, as raised by Medtronic;
Should Coughlin Stoia have bought those stolen Coke documents? For one lawprof, question’s a real head-scratcher [David McGowan (San Diego), Legal Ethics Forum] And WSJ news side is oddly unskeptical of trial lawyers’ line that the affair just proves their power to go on fishing expeditions should never have been curtailed [Jones/Slater]
Dashboard-cam caught Tennessee cops red-handed planting marijuana on suspect, or so Jonathan Turley suggests — but could it be a little more complicated than that? [WSMV, AP/WATE] (& Greenfield)
“Heck Baptists don’t even sue you for disagreeing with them,” though no doubt there are exceptions [Instapundit; NYT on Danish cartoons; Ezra Levant with more on those Canadian speech tribunals]
Bestselling authors who sue their critics [four years ago on Overlawyered]

Tags: Australia, Canada, Cleveland, Coca-Cola, Coughlin Stoia, Danish cartoons, Dickie Scruggs, FISA, fishing expeditions, free speech in Canada, Ohio, preemption, roundups, San Diego, strippers and exotic dancers, telecom immunity, Tennessee, United Kingdom

December 7 roundup

Ted Frank — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 06:52:35 +0000

Speaking of privacy, consider what happens when lawyers get a hold of your email. (When will we see law professors eager to create new causes of action consider the privacy-destroying implications of ediscovery?) [Fulton County Daily Report/law.com; Toronto Globe & Mail; Point of Law] Earlier: Jan. 9 and links therein.
Speaking of privacy and reputation, Mary Roberts goes to trial, but Above the Law doesn’t mention our coverage (June 2004; Sep. 2005; Feb. 6; Mar. 19; May 17), and misses the juicy details.
Oy: “Woman who ‘lost count after drinking 14 vodkas’ awarded £7,000 over New Year fall from bridge.” News from the compensation culture not entirely bad: damages were reasonable, and the court did hold the woman 80% responsible, the exact opposite of the McDonald’s coffee case. [Scotsman.com]
No good deed goes unpunished: Sperm donor liable for child support, judge rules. [Newsday/Seattle Times]
Bad attorney gets fired, sues DLA Piper for discrimination, represents herself pro se, demonstrates firsthand why she got fired: law firm wins on summary judgment. [ABA Journal; update: also New York Law Journal]
Romney on tort reform; McCain on medmal. [Torts Prof Blog; Torts Prof Blog]
Another day, another Borat lawsuit. I’m still waiting for the consumer fraud lawsuit from moviegoers upset that it was not actually a Kazakh documentary. [Reuters; earlier]

Tags: Borat, child support, fishing expeditions, John McCain, Mitt Romney, personal responsibility, pro se, Roberts sextortion, Seattle

Jackpot justice: $20M for $25,000 insurance claim

Ted Frank — Sat, 07 Oct 2006 07:59:38 +0000

Ted Fields was injured in an auto accident with Jimmy Woodley; Woodley’s insurer went bankrupt, so Fields, on January 30, 1997, asked Allstate to pay $25,000 in medical bills and lost wages. Allstate sent Fields forms to fill out, and he did so three weeks later; when Allstate didn’t pay instantaneously, he sued them in March 1997 for bad faith. Fields turned the discovery process into a far-reaching investigation of all of Allstate’s claim procedures; the judge refused to constrain irrelevant deposition questioning, at which point in 1999 Allstate offered Fields the full amount of his $50,000 policy limit rather than waste hundreds of thousands in trial. Fields refused; his attorneys filed several separate motions of default rather than litigate the underlying issues after the trial court denied a summary judgment motion. An appellate court found that Allstate was entitled to summary judgment because of the lack of any evidence of bad-faith in responding to Fields’s claims; the Indiana Supreme Court overturned that ruling on a procedural technicality that the appeal was premature.

The trial court ruled that Allstate was not allowed to present evidence that it was not liable for actual or punitive damages or that it acted “with anything other than dishonest purpose, moral obliquity, furtive design, and/or ill will.” A jury, hearing this one-sided sham of a trial, awarded $20 million in damages, though one would hope the Court of Appeals, hearing a timely appeal, makes the same decision it made before. Press coverage fails to mention that Allstate wasn’t allowed to defend itself at trial; the plaintiff told the jury that the dispute caused high blood pressure, heart problems, and a stroke, though then the question becomes why he isn’t suing his attorney. (Ken Kosky, “Valpo man wins $20 million verdict v. Allstate”, Northwest Indiana Times, Oct. 6).

Tags: Allstate, bad faith, fishing expeditions, Indiana, insurance, jackpot justice, procedure

“Sex, lawyers, secrets at heart of sealed legal case”

Ted Frank — Sun, 13 Jun 2004 18:50:33 +0000

According to a story in the San Antonio Express-News, husband-and-wife legal partners Ted H. and Mary Schorlemer Roberts received money in a curious sequence of events. Mary, claiming to seek “no strings” discreet encounters, would seduce men over an Internet dating service. Ted would then write the men (in legal documents sometimes typed by Mary) and notify them that he planned to seek intrusive and public civil discovery to investigate whether the affair brought forward potential causes of action that were flimsy at best; the men would pay tens of thousands of dollars for a release and confidentiality agreement. (As the law firm’s web site puts it, “We believe in a team approach.”) Because of Texas’s permissive legal ethical rules, prosecutors decided they couldn’t pursue extortion charges; state law permits Roberts to bring “creative” claims and to take discovery in advance of filing a lawsuit, and the prosecution had no way of proving that Roberts’s intent in submitting the documents was a bluff rather than a “legitimate” lawsuit.

The newspaper found out only because another lawyer, Robert V. West III, sought to raise the scheme as part of a separate business dispute with the Roberts; fans of poetic justice will note that the Roberts accuse West of blackmail, and brought disciplinary charges against West and his lawyer to the state bar. The bar is investigating West, but, apparently, not the Roberts. Everyone involved denies any wrongdoing. Roberts unsuccessfully brought suit to prevent publication of the story, but the court records remain sealed. (Maro Robbins and Joseph S. Stroud, Jun. 13) (via Bashman).

Tags: ethics, fishing expeditions, legal discipline, legal extortion, Roberts sextortion, Texas

Overlawyered » fishing expeditions

Suspended Montgomery Blair Sibley still getting press coverage

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