Related posts

• U.K.: Footballer sues over “negligent” tackle (3)
• U.K.: defending assumption of risk (0)
• U.K.: compensation-culture roundup (1)
• The horn is now silent (0)
• September 24 roundup (2)

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.

Related posts

• With a little help from their friends (1)
• Why Philip Morris wants tobacco regulated (2)
• Wet T-shirt follies: a calm discussion (10)
• Welcome Dallas Morning News readers (0)
• Welcome “All Things Considered” listeners (1)

Related posts

• Latest issue of Class Action Watch (2)
• Grand Theft Auto: Class Action Settlement – $26,505 for the unrepresented class, $1 million fee request (12)
• Grand Theft Auto: Class Action – The Frank Brief (16)
• CCAF amicus brief in fen-phen fees case (0)
• Vioxx settlement: Judge Fallon caps fees at 32% (3)

Through her attorney, Kevin Mulhearn, she’s sued Szul Jewelers for $5 million. Mulhearn claims there’s no release, which while implausible, may be true. If so, she has a point, though the ad damnum claim is ludicrous: and far more people are going to watch the supposedly image-damaging video now that Mulhearn has gone to the press. And, of course, she didn’t have to roll around on the bed in the first place. (One hopes that I’m not aiding and abetting a publicity stunt for the jeweler.) [Daily News; AP/New York Times]

Related posts

• Update: Fields v. Allstate (1)
• Truck-driver father runs over own daughter; guess who is to blame? (23)
• Flashback: the tort system in action in the case of Curtis Campbell (12)
• Driver falls asleep: jury blames Ford to tune of $61M (14)
• Dillard’s pays $15M to settle escalator suit (0)

Related posts

• November 2001 archives, part 1 (0)
• February 11 roundup (1)
• May 2002 archives, part 3 (1)
• May 2002 archives, part 2 (1)
• March 2001 archives, part 1 (0)

Now… he’s suing that attorney, claiming that the contract he signed was unfair and asking that the court declare it void:

Autrey, a 50-year-old Bronx construction worker, says in court papers that the contract is “a one-sided agreement” he was induced to sign by “fraud” and that it gives the lion’s share of everything he earns to Kleiman and her business partner, Marco Antonio Esposito, operator of an entertainment production company.

[...]

Autrey’s lawsuit, filed Friday, says the contract gives Kleiman and Esposito exclusive rights to exploit his name and reputation and gives them ownership of intellectual property rights to his story.

The contract also gives Kleiman and Esposito the right to receive all gross receipts from commercial exploitation of Autrey’s name and to keep half those receipts, whether or not they helped generate the money, court papers say.

Whether the contract is fair or not, I can’t say; Autrey claiming he signed it without reading it certainly doesn’t win him any sympathy points with me.

Normally, a lawyer fired by a former client will simply express disappointment that the relationship did not work out. But Kleiman decided to take a more aggressive approach:

Diane Kleiman [...] said the construction worker must not have been thinking straight when he saved a stranger while his daughters stood on the platform.

“Some people call it heroic, but in some sense, it is stupid,” she said. “Quite frankly, he should have been more worried about his little kids.”

Just to ensure that nobody would ever save her if she fell in front of a subway car, she added, “He’s a 50-year-old guy with three kids who owes tens of thousands of dollars and doesn’t pay his bills,” and, “There is nothing incredible about Wesley Autrey.”

Related posts

• When Good Samaritans sue (0)
• October 25 roundup (4)
• No good deed goes unpunished (0)
• Model’s suit: You used the video you took of me (2)
• Microblog 2008-12-19 (4)