- There are “almost certainly” many innocent persons in prison today wrongly convicted of shaking a baby to death [Radley Balko, Reason] Harris County, Texas forensic examiner under scrutiny [same, Reason "Hit and Run"] L.A. Times on forensics reform [same]
- Feds order large private insurer Humana to pull criticisms of Obama health plan from its website [David Henderson, Eugene Volokh and followup]
- Why would anyone market lawyers’ services through blog comment spam? Especially at Popehat? [first and second posts]
- “Revolving door” for officials of regulatory agencies tends to lead to law firms [Naked Capitalism]
- Tenure trouble: teacher’s union head “would protect a dead body in the classroom” [Ron Bailey, Reason on Brill "Rubber Room" article, earlier]
- Google asked to unmask user in another defamation suit (Turks & Caicos developer) [Brian Kumnick, FindLaw "Injured"]
- “Fired Ave Maria Law Prof Gets Tenure in Whistle-Blower Settlement, Lawyer Says” [ABA Journal, background Washington Monthly]
- Ted Frank on Ameritrade settlement [Center for Class Action Fairness, earlier]
Tagged as:
class action settlements,
free speech,
Google,
Houston,
law schools,
teacher tenure,
Ted Frank
- Pants litigation still not over; Roy Pearson takes wrongful termination suit to D.C. Circuit [NLJ, FindLaw "Injured", my WSJ piece two years ago]
- Microsoft wins stay of “alter Word or stop selling it” ruling [Bloomberg, earlier] More: WSJ Law Blog, Legal Ethics Forum, American Lawyer]
- Masry & Vititoe, law firm of Erin Brockovich fame, files for bankruptcy (she’s no longer with them) [NLJ, background]
- One blogger turns thumbs down on Google Books settlement [Patrick at Popehat] “Laundering orphan works legislation through a class action lawsuit”? [James Grimmelmann, ACS Blog via Mass Tort Lit] Much more: Lynn Chu/Writer’s Reps (who, I should note, has represented my literary interests on matters unrelated to this); WSJ Law Blog; Pasquale/ConcurOp; Kennerly.
- Dire lesson for lawyers in how not to do social media marketing [Mark Bennett/Defending People, Scott Greenfield, Patrick at Popehat, Carolyn Elefant/Legal Blog Watch]
- Tab-divider scam? For a million bucks? Against a big, sophisticated law firm? [ABA Journal, WSJ Law Blog]
- Lawyer who filed “splashy-dolphin” slip-fall action against Chicago-area zoo is heard from [On Point News, earlier]
- Turnabout fair play? “A Doctor’s Plan for Legal Industry Reform” [Richard Rafal, WSJ]
Tagged as:
chasing clients,
Erin Brockovich,
Google,
Microsoft,
Roy Pearson,
social media
- California: “Feds Say Lawyer Took Bribe to Encourage Client to Lie in Immigration Case” [NLJ]
- “Before you celebrate [the] seemingly wise anti-litigation statement [of the "Skanks in New York" blogger], take note that she’s suing Google…” [Althouse, earlier here, here, etc.] Dispute is female-vs.-female, but feminist lawprofs inevitably spot gender discrimination [Citron, ConcurOp; Greenfield]
- “Ousted members of Florida chess board sue to reclaim their volunteer positions” [St. Petersburg Times]
- Man freed after serving 22 years on dubious child abuse charges, but prosecutor who went after him is doing fine [Radley Balko, Reason "Hit and Run", Bernard Baran case, Massachusetts]
- Khalid bin Mahfouz, plaintiff in celebrated “libel tourism” case against Rachel Ehrenfeld in England, is dead at 60 [Wasserman/Prawfsblawg]
- Colorful University of Connecticut law professor lands in a spot of bother again after girlfriend’s arrest [Above the Law]
- Federal judge says prosecutor in Chicago U.S. Attorney’s office allowed witness to testify falsely [WSJ Law Blog]
- Deja vu? “‘Seinfeld’ joke gets man canned for harassment” [Des Moines Register, earlier Wisconsin case; & see Ted's caveat in comments]
Tagged as:
child abuse,
Connecticut,
Google,
harassment law,
immigration law,
law schools,
Massachusetts,
prosecutorial abuse
- 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.
Tagged as:
alienation of affection,
bullying,
Connecticut,
copyright,
defense lawyers,
ethics,
Google,
Louisiana,
Pittsburgh,
Title IX
- Transportation Security Administration detained comic book artist based on art he was carrying with him [Popehat]
- More unease over Federal Trade Commission move to regulate bloggers’ freebies [Citizen Media Law, CEI "Open Market", earlier] “I could care less that Milly the Yarn Spinner at millysworldofyarn.com is getting free samples of yarn to review on her blog.” [John Dvorak, PC Mag]
- “Judge Calls Frivolous Suits Against Attorneys a ‘Disturbing Trend’” [NYLJ; Staten Island, N.Y.]
- Sad news: Excellent online music service Pandora, unable to negotiate rights affordably, shuts down for customers outside the U.S. [Prefixmag, earlier]
- Joseph Stiglitz says the UN has a key role to play in “reforming the global financial and economic system”, which “is a bad idea. It is a very bad idea.” [Tyler Cowen]
- All assemble for trial: more installments in White Coat’s saga of his malpractice case [Emergency Physicians Monthly, parts seven and eight]
- Netherlands: site gets sued because of the way Google indexed it [TheNextWeb.com]
- Phone company faces grievance after disallowing workers’ metal facial jewelry as electricity-conducting risk [eight years ago on Overlawyered]
Tagged as:
bloggers and the law,
FTC endorsement rules,
Google,
medical malpractice,
Netherlands,
United Nations
“Inventor of Vibrating Toilet Seat Sues Google Over Allegedly Defamatory Search Results” [Citizen Media Law]
P.S. Also in the news this morning, a less colorful lawsuit against Google over search results: the principals of the New Haven, Connecticut personal injury law firm of Stratton Faxon are incensed that when you search on their firm’s name in Google, you get along with the results an auto-generated ad from a competitive firm.
Tagged as:
advertising,
Connecticut,
Google,
libel slander and defamation
- Driving through town of Tenaha, Texas? Might be better to get accosted by the robbers and not the cops [San Antonio Express-News via Balko, Hit and Run]
- Location-tracking Google Latitude application could pose liability problems for unwary employers [PoL]
- EMTALA law obliges hospital ERs to treat many patients. OK, so how about ELRALA next, for lawyers? [White Coat Rants]
- New Jersey judge dismisses defamation suit by three women whose picture appeared in book “Hot Chicks with D-Bags” [Smoking Gun, earlier here and, relatedly, here] More: Taranto, WSJ “Best of the Web”, scroll.
- Myrhvold, often assailed as patent troll, sponsors quote/unquote neutral Stanford study of patent litigation [MarketWatch]
- Some thoughts on much-publicized tussle between Associated Press and Shepard Fairey over Obamacon photo [Plagiarism Today]
- Creative uses of immigration law: get that little homewrecker deported [Obscure Store]
- More than a few real estate lawyers were “hip-deep in mortgage fraud”. Will they tiptoe away? [Scott Greenfield]
- Roundup on the awful Employee Free Choice Act [PoL]
Tagged as:
art and artists,
Employee Free Choice Act,
EMTALA,
Google,
immigration law,
libel slander and defamation,
patent trolls,
privacy
“Wouldn’t that make for an entertaining factual inquiry: ‘The court finds as a matter of fact that the supermodel is/is not “a skank”‘” (Planet Kauai, Jan. 7). Underlying story:
Canadian model Liskula Cohen has sued Google for a number of snarky remarks that were made by a blogger using the company’s Blogger service. The NY Daily News reports that the former Vogue cover girl has been called ’skanky’ and ‘an old hag’ by an anonymous blogger on a website called Skanks in NYC (could be deemed NSFW).
(Robin Wauters, TechCrunch/Washington Post, Jan. 7). It should be noted that the site seems to have little purpose but to engage in vitriolic attacks on Cohen, not all of which are as obviously grounded in “opinion” as those quoted. More: ArsTechnica, Bayard/Citizen Media Law.
Tagged as:
Google,
libel slander and defamation,
online speech
- Nastygrams fly at Christmas time over display and festival use of “Jingle Bells”, Grinch, etc. [Elefant]
- Claims that smoking ban led to instantaneous plunge in cardiac deaths in Scotland turns out to be as fishy as similar claims elsewhere [Siegel on tobacco via Sullum, Reason "Hit and Run"]
- Myths about the costs and consequences of an automaker Chapter 11 filing [Andrew Grossman, Heritage; Boudreaux, WSJ] Drowning in mandates and Congress throws them an anchor [Jenkins, WSJ]
- Mikal Watts may be the most generous of the trial lawyers bankrolling the Texas Democratic Party’s recent comeback [Texas Watchdog via Pero]
- Disney settles ADA suit demanding Segway access at Florida theme parks “by agreeing to provide disabled guests with at least 15 newly-designed four-wheeled vehicles.” [OnPoint News, earlier]
- Update on Scientology efforts to prevent resale of its “e-meter” devices on eBay [Coleman]
- Scary: business-bashing lawprof Frank Pasquale wants the federal government to regulate Google’s search algorithm [Concurring Opinions, SSRN]
- Kind of an endowment all by itself: “Princeton is providing $40 million to pay the legal fees of the Robertson family” (after charges of endowment misuse) [MindingTheCampus]
Tagged as:
colleges and universities,
disabled rights,
Disney,
eBay,
feeing frenzy,
Google,
Mikal Watts,
nastygrams,
Scientology,
smoking bans,
Texas
Seattle attorney Shakespear Feyissa was accused of attempted sexual assault while attending Seattle Pacific University in 1998. He was never charged with a crime and naturally, not convicted. But since the allegations were covered in the school paper’s online edition they are cached in Google and easily uncovered for anyone who searches his name.
SPU agreed to remove the story from the school paper but when administrators approached the student editors they said no way. Chris Durr, editor of The Falcon Newspaper said:
We explained to them, if they wanted to start down a path of removing historical archives and pulling it from the public sphere, what they’re doing is censorship. We basically said, sorry, we have principles in journalism that don’t allow us to put stuff in the memory hole and pretend it never happened.
(“Seattle attorney finds that the Internet won’t let go of his past”, Seattle Times, Aug. 15).
Tagged as:
bloggers and the law,
Google
Benjamin Legeri, a/k/a BennyBaby, wants $1 million in damages, saying he wouldn’t have posted sketch and parody videos had he known he wouldn’t get a chance to be cut in on the ad revenue. (David Chartier, “YouTube user sues Google for his slice of the traffic”, Ars Technica, Aug. 15).
Tagged as:
Google,
YouTube
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”
Tagged as:
advertising,
class actions,
Google
- Federal judge: asking employee to get coffee not an intrinsically sexist act [Legal Intelligencer]
- Kilt-clad Montgomery Blair Sibley, at press conference, adds certain je ne sais quoi to tawdry Larry Sinclair sideshow [Sydney Morning Herald]
- Remind us why Florida Gov. Crist is supposed to be an acceptable veep pick? [PoL]. Also at Point of Law: Hill’s FISA compromise may end pending telecom-privacy suits; interesting Second Circuit reverse-preference case on New Haven firefighters.
- Virginia bar authorities shaken by charges that Woodbridge attorney Stephen T. Conrad pocketed $3.4 million in injury settlements at clients’ expense [Va. Lawyers Weekly; case of Christiansburg, Va. lawyer Gerard Marks ties in with first links here]
- U.K.: Local government instructs staff that term “brainstorming” might be insensitive to persons with epilepsy, use “thought showers” instead [Telegraph; Tunbridge Wells, Kent]
- Big personal injury law firm in Australia, Keddies Lawyers, denies accusations of client overcharging and document falsification [SMH]
- Will this be on the bar exam? Massachusetts law school dean eyes war crime trials culminating in hanging for high officials of Bush Administration [Ambrogi and more, Michael Krauss and I at PoL]
- “Just another cash grab”? New Kabateck Brown Kellner “click-fraud” class actions against Google AdWords, CitySearch [Kincaid, TechCrunch/WaPo]
- Former Rep. Bob Barr, this year’s Libertarian presidential candidate, is no stranger to the role of plaintiff in politically fraught litigation [six years ago on Overlawyered, and represented by Larry Klayman to boot]
Tagged as:
Australia,
click fraud,
firefighters,
FISA,
Florida,
Google,
international law,
Larry Klayman,
Larry Sinclair,
law schools,
Montgomery Blair Sibley,
sexual stereotyping,
Virginia
And so the divorce case winds up generating massive demands for hard drive contents and other electronic discovery. Draconian spoliation sanctions, as exemplified in the Morgan Stanley-Perelman and Zubulake-UBS Warburg cases, make a potentially fatal trap for the unwary:
Defense lawyers complain that their clients often are forced to supply voluminous information at great cost with little benefit. And because there is so much more information potentially subject to a discovery order, the chances are greater that a client might violate the order by inadvertently deleting data.
“Does this enhance justice? Not usually,” said Tess Blair, a partner at Morgan, Lewis & Bockius L.L.P., who heads the 1,350-lawyer firm’s electronic-data-discovery unit. “It becomes a weapon in many cases.”
(Chris Mondics, “Ediscovery profoundly changing lawyering”, Philadelphia Inquirer, Jun. 8).
Tagged as:
discovery,
divorce,
Google,
hard drive,
sanctions,
spoliation
- Screening firm hired by Beaumont, Tex.’s Provost Umphrey to do mass silicosis x-rays at Pennsylvania hotels is fined $80,500 for breaking various state rules, like the one requiring that a medical professional be on hand [Childs]
- Milberg Weiss’s special way of obtaining perfectly pliant clients — that is to say by bribing them under the table — harmed other class members by increasing fees but not settlement sums, suggests a new study by St. John’s lawprof Michael Perino for Ted’s project at AEI [Carter Wood @ PoL]
- Time for Texas to join many other states in requiring lawyers to inform clients when practicing without professional liability insurance [SE Texas Record; earlier here, here and here]
- Lawyers, in concert with their public pension fund allies, jockey for control of securities case against Bear Stearns [Gerstein/NY Sun]
- Another court, this time in California, rules that a screw maker can’t sue a law firm on the claim that its solicitation of potential claimants wrongly portrayed the company’s products as defective; amicus brief from state trial lawyers group and Sen. Sheila Kuehl says relevant provisions of state’s “SLAPP” law were “meant to protect plaintiffs groups, not companies” [The Recorder via ABA Journal; earlier case from Tennessee]
- Most lucrative Google AdSense words still dominated by asbestos and other personal injury practice, the top terms being “mesothelioma treatment options” ($69.10 per click, and the point of obtaining the click is not to provide treatment options), “mesothelioma risk” ($66.46), and “personal injury lawyer michigan” ($65.85) [CyberWyre via NAM "Shop Floor"; more here, here, etc.]
Tagged as:
AEI,
asbestos,
Bear Stearns,
California,
chasing clients,
Google,
mass screenings,
Milberg Weiss,
Provost Umphrey,
silicosis,
Texas,
x-rays
I’ve now succeeded in transferring the site’s pre-2003 archives to the new WordPress platform, which means they’ll be indexed along with more recent posts; no more having to do separate searches in each of two indexes. Moreover, I’ve gotten the old URLs of those archives to redirect seamlessly to the new. Coming up soon: getting the old URLs of the MT-based 2003-2008 archives to redirect to the new, as much as possible.
One unexpected result of the archive changeover: Google News interpreted the arrival of the archived files on WordPress as if they’d been newly published, which has (temporarily) much expanded our presence on that site. Fortunately, the archives are prominently marked as such, which should keep readers from mistaking them for recent reportage.
Also, Ted and I have been busy “tagging” a selection of recent and older posts. Tags display on the post itself, and those most used appear in a “tag cloud” toward the bottom of the rightmost column. Bear in mind that we’ve only made a small start toward tagging past posts, so if you follow the “California” tag, for instance, it will lead you to only seven California-related posts as of the moment.
Finally, the little gavel favicon in the navigation bar is back.
Tagged as:
about the site,
Google,
WordPress
- Ninth Circuit, Kozinski, J., rules 8-3 that Roommates.com can be found to have violated fair housing law by asking users to sort themselves according to their wish to room with males or other protected groups; the court distinguished the Craigslist cases [L.A. Times, Volokh, Drum]
- Class-action claim: Apple says its 20-inch iMac displays millions of colors but the true number is a mere 262,144, the others being simulated [WaPo]
- U.K.: compulsive gambler loses $2 million suit against his bookmakers, who are awarded hefty costs under loser-pays rule [BBC first, second, third, fourth stories]
- Pittsburgh couple sue Google saying its Street Views invades their privacy by including pics of their house [The Smoking Gun via WSJ law blog]
- U.S. labor unions keep going to International Labour Organization trying to get current federal ground rules on union organizing declared in violation of international law [PoL]
- Illinois Supreme Court reverses $2 million jury award to woman who sued her fiance’s parents for not warning her he had AIDS [Chicago Tribune]
- Italian family “preparing to sue the previous owners of their house for not telling them it was haunted”; perhaps most famous such case was in Nyack, N.Y. [Ananova, Cleverly]
- Per their hired expert, Kentucky lawyers charged with fen-phen settlement fraud “relied heavily on the advice of famed trial lawyer Stan Chesley in the handling of” the $200 million deal [Lexington Herald-Leader]
- Actor Hal Holbrook of Mark Twain fame doesn’t think much of those local anti-tobacco ordinances that ban smoking on stage even when needed for dramatic effect [Bruce Ramsey, Seattle Times]
- Six U.S. cities so far have been caught “shortening the amber cycles below what is allowed by law on intersections equipped with cameras meant to catch red-light runners.” [Left Lane via Virtuous Republic and Asymmetrical Information]
Tagged as:
AIDS,
Alex Kozinski,
compulsive gambling,
Craigslist,
fair housing,
fen-phen,
Google,
haunted house,
Illinois,
international law,
Italy,
Kentucky,
Kentucky fen-phen settlement fraud,
Ninth Circuit,
Pittsburgh,
red light cameras,
roundups,
Seattle,
Stan Chesley,
tobacco
