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• Update: Calif. ADA lawyer suspended (0)
• L.A. attorney ethics beat (6)
• Sued for expressing “glee” over lawyer’s indictment (1)
• Ninth Circuit: Molski “Plainly lied” (3)
• Mass amnesia at bus trial (1)

• Picture of farmer with goose appears on greeting card, he wants $7.5 million [Roanoke Times; earlier]


• More class actions filed over Apple iPhone [Ars Technica on roaming and battery claims, O'Grady's PowerPage, iPhoneWorld; earlier]


• L.A. Times quotes attorney Stephen Yagman on prison overcrowding, but forgets to mention that he was lately convicted of thirteen felonies [Patterico]


• Bad idea watch: compulsory national service [Somin @ Volokh]


• Doing well representing the little guy: Gerry Spence lists his Wyoming residence for sale at $35 million [WSJ/Chicago Daily Herald]


• “Appropriate”, not “perfect”, justice needed: “We simply have to stop killing litigants with kindness,” says chief judge of Australia’s largest state [The Australian]


• Toddler killed after wandering into heavy traffic, trucker should have been more on guard against such a thing happening [Salt Lake Tribune]


• Pennsylvania pro se litigant sues Google, says it spells his social security number upside down [Ambrogi] More: Coyote says “Up next, the owner of Social Security number 71077345 sues Shell Oil for the same reason.”


• Once billed as “King of Torts”, Miami asbestos lawyer faces fifteen years behind bars for stealing $13 million from clients [Sun-Sentinel]


• Groom sues bride, saying she took the ring and presents and never got the wedding paperwork straightened out leaving them legally unmarried [ClickOnDetroit]


• Surgical resident on the hook for $23 million in Wisconsin case; she was the only one of the docs involved not covered by damage limits [Journal Sentinel via KevinMD]

Related posts

• October 2002 archives, part 1 (0)
• October 1999 archives, part 2 (2)
• October 1999 archives, part 1 (0)
• March 2003 archives, part 2 (0)
• March 2000 archives, part 2 (1)

Meanwhile, the city attorney of Los Angeles, Rocky Delgadillo, who’s figured in these columns a couple of times (grandstanding on Grand Theft Auto, Jan. 28 of last year; defending the city’s $2.7 million settlement of the firefighter dog food case, Nov. 22) seems to have landed in an ethical spot of bother himself (more).

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• Update: Stephen Yagman draws three-year sentence (0)
• Update: Calif. ADA lawyer suspended (0)
• December 2000 archives, part 1 (0)
• Vegas columnist, sued for libel, declares bankruptcy (0)
• Update: “Maris family, Anheuser-Busch settle lawsuit” (0)

Two of the attorneys behind an onslaught of ADA lawsuits in California — including at least 20 involving Monterey County restaurants and wineries — have run into serious legal troubles of their own.

Thomas Frankovich, who represented plaintiff Jarek Molski in hundreds of handicapped-access lawsuits over the last five years, was suspended June 19 from practicing in the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles. The six-month suspension came after one judge on the court, Edward Rafeedie, declared Frankovich a “vexatious litigant” and said he would recommend Frankovich for disciplinary action because of his “abusive and predatory litigation practices.”

(Paul Miller, “Indictment, suspension for two ADA lawyers”, Carmel Pine Cone, Jul. 21). Also in June, as was mentioned here in a post at the time (Jul. 5; see also Patterico, Jul. 1), Los Angeles attorney Stephen Yagman, who had represented Frankovich in defense of his ADA practice, was himself indicted on federal charges of tax evasion and bankruptcy fraud. In February 2005, after Judge Rafeedie had threatened Frankovich with sanctions, Yagman had said that “Judge Rafeedie’s mean-spiritedness, his cruelty, and his contempt for civil rights make Hitler look like a humanitarian.” (Paul Miller, “ADA lawyer’s new strategy: Insult the judge”, Feb. 11, 2005). More on Yagman: Jessica Seigel, “Cop griller”, George, Mar. 1998; Patterico, Jun. 3, 2004.

More Carmel Pine Cone coverage of Frankovich and Molski here, here, here and here. Our coverage: Sept. 21 and Dec. 12, 2004, Jan. 8 and Mar. 18, 2005. And for a very different point of view, once again, here’s Mary Johnson, “Jarek Molski’s problem — and I don’t mean access”, Ragged Edge, Oct. 24, 2005, arguing that Frankovich and Molski just aren’t good enough at getting their story out.

Related posts

• Ninth Circuit: Molski “Plainly lied” (3)
• ADA filing mills: “drive-by lawsuits” (0)
• Update: Stephen Yagman draws three-year sentence (0)
• Update: Molski, Frankovich unabashed (0)
• Update: judge restrains frequent ADA filer (2)

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• Update: Stephen Yagman draws three-year sentence (0)
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• L.A. attorney ethics beat (6)
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U.S. District Judge Gregory Presnell of Orlando, Fla., noted in a ruling last year that Jorge Luis Rodriguez, a paraplegic, had filed some 200 ADA lawsuits in just a few years, most of them using the same attorney.

“The current ADA lawsuit binge is, therefore, essentially driven by economics — that is the economics of attorney’s fees,” Presnell wrote. He said Rodriguez’s testimony left the impression that he is a “professional pawn in a scheme to bilk attorney’s fees” from those being sued.

(Kevin O’Hanlon, “‘Drive-By Lawsuits’ Raise Business Concern”, AP/San Francisco Chronicle, Mar. 17).

Speaking of the California saga of Jarek Molski (Sept. 21, Nov. 27, Dec. 12, Jan. 8), last month U.S. District Judge Edward Rafeedie extended from Molski to his lawyer, Thomas Frankovich, a requirement to obtain court permission before filing more suits under the act, a sanction ordinarily reserved for the most vexatious and troublesome litigants. Reports the Los Angeles Daily Journal:

The Los Angeles judge accused Molski and Frankovich of seeking quick cash settlements by filing a suspicious number of lawsuits in short periods of time. Their suits alleged handicap-access violations such as steep ramps, heavy doors and narrow hallways.

Rafeedie noted that the complaints are identical, right “down to the typos.” He said he believed the injuries alleged by Molski “are often contrived.”…

Rafeedie criticized at length Frankovich’s practice of sending letters to defendant business owners at the outset of litigation, urging them to settle the cases before hiring defense lawyers.

According to Rafeedie, Frankovich told the defendants that they did not have good legal defenses to the disability claims and that their insurance carriers could cover any damages.

Rafeedie said the letters were unethical and misleading.

However, Molski and Frankovich’s side of the case has retained prominent civil-rights attorney Stephen Yagman, and Yagman says well-known Duke lawprof Erwin Chemerinsky is also joining the plaintiff’s team, so who knows where matters are headed next. (John Ryan, “Jurist Finds Lawyer’s Conduct ‘Plainly Unethical’”, Los Angeles Daily Journal, Feb. 8, not online). More: blogger Patterico is among Yagman’s non-admirers (Jun. 3, 2004).

Related posts

• Update: Calif. ADA lawyer suspended (0)
• Update: Molski, Frankovich unabashed (0)
• Update: judge restrains frequent ADA filer (2)
• Ninth Circuit: Molski “Plainly lied” (3)
• Californian vexatious-litigant roundup (2)

As readers of this space will recall (see Nov. 30, Nov. 4 commentaries) McClellan in his column on the suit jocularly compared class-action lawyers to bank robbers and then corrected himself, saying the comparison wasn’t fair to bank robbers, who don’t pretend they’re in business for our good. Class-action lawyers Judy Cates and Stephen Katz then proceeded to sue him for $1 million, charging that these sentiments had defamed them. Among the discovery demands they proceeded to make was that McClellan turn over everything he’d written in the past decade that was “in any way critical or mocking to lawyers or lawsuits.” In another of their discovery forays, McClellan advises readers in a recent column, “Cates and Katz were demanding all correspondence I have received relating to their lawsuit. In other words, if you sent me a letter or an e-mail concerning this case, they wanted it. They wanted to see who has written what about them.” Now an agreement has been reached to end the lawsuit — on what terms is not immediately apparent. (Bill McClellan, “This is a situation where even when you win, you lose”, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Feb. 23).

February 29 – Feds’ mission: target Silicon Valley for race complaints. The federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has decided that Silicon Valley employers would make a suitably high-profile target for a series of race discrimination complaints, and now is “scouring” the Valley for likely defendants. A likely charge is that despite the strong representation in high-tech employment of ethnic groups from around the world, local blacks and Hispanics are underrepresented in professional and managerial slots. “We’ve been beefing up our staffing in every place that we see significant economic growth related to high technology,” says EEOC vice chairman Paul Igasaki, a long-time civil rights attorney: “this is an industry in which a message may need to be sent.” A source within the agency puts it more bluntly: “We’re busy looking under every rock we can, looking for a couple of high-profile companies we can hit with a suit.” (Gary Rivlin, “Busting the Myth of the Meritocracy”, The Industry Standard, Feb. 21).

February 29 – Tobacco lawyers’ lien leverage. While states are salivating at the vast new revenue banquet promised by the tobacco settlement — with no need to do anything unpopular, like raise taxes! — some are finding that the trial lawyers who seemed so helpful at first are now proving obstreperous, slapping the states with liens that may prevent the distribution of some or all settlement booty until the lawyers’ share is resolved. In New Jersey, Bergen County plaintiff’s attorneys Terry Bottinelli and Marc Saperstein blocked access to upwards of $92 million in funds, then relented when the state agreed to help document their case for sharing in the fee payday, though in the end it merely made short mention of their work in a press release. (Matt Ackermann, “New Jersey’s Tobacco-Suit Dividends Delayed by Hold-Out Attorneys”, New Jersey Law Journal, Jan. 11; “Holdout Tobacco Lawyers Will Relent If State Documents Their Case for Fees”, Jan. 18; “N.J. Tobacco Settlement Holdouts Drop Appeal”, Feb. 17) (more N.J. tobacco-fee coverage: Oct. 1). In Illinois, Seattle attorney Steve Berman’s Hagens & Berman, San Francisco’s Lieff, Cabraser, Heimann & Bernstein, and two other firms slapped a lien on the state’s $9.1 billion windfall; last fall a national arbitration panel ruled that while the Berman firm had been an important player in tobacco litigation on the national scene, “relatively little was done to advance the case to trial in Illinois”. Berman, quoted in the Chicago Tribune, conceded that not everyone sympathized with his position that he and the other lawyers are nonetheless entitled to as much as $910 million for their Illinois work: “Some people say lawyers have got a lot of money and are overpaid and are bad guys anyway”. (Rick Pearson, “Lawyers demand a bigger piece of tobacco cash pie”, Chicago Tribune, Nov. 23) (more Illinois tobacco-fee coverage: Oct. 16; more on Berman: Feb. 28, Aug. 21).

February 28 – “Medical errors” study. Malpractice lawyers have already seized on a recent federal study (see Feb. 22 commentary) which extrapolated from a study of hospitals in three states to the conclusion that between 44,000 and 98,000 patients die each year nationally because of mistakes in medical care. In a short paper for the Statistical Assessment Service, Iain Murray and Howard Fienberg point out a few of the study’s questionable premises. For example, the study’s definition of medication-related errors, a significant share of the total, “is based on errors that resulted ‘from acknowledged errors by patients and medical personnel’” (emphasis added). “In other words, if a patient takes an overdose or fails to inform their medical advisers of other conflicting medications they are taking, that is regarded as a medical error, rather than misadventure.” (Iain Murray and Howard Fienberg, “Doctoring the Data, Nursing the News?”, “STATS Spotlight”, Feb. 24) (via Junk Science). Plus: a Chicago Tribune editorial urges caution: “Don’t Compound Medical Errors”, Feb. 27.

February 28 – Fifteen years locked away. If you think the day-care-abuse mania of the 1980s has mostly run its course, consider the case of Bernard Baran, convicted of mass molestation in 1985 in Pittsfield, Mass. under the sorts of dubious circumstances that were later to become familiar in such cases. Katha Pollitt’s Nation account mentions in passing that the mother who initiated the accusations, a drug addict living in troubled circumstances, proceeded to file a suit against the center demanding $3.2 million (the case “was settled out of court, reputedly for a small sum”), and that one of the children, whose mother was a friend of the original accuser, “told a therapist after the trial that her mother had told her to say Baran had molested her so they could get toys and money”. Since Baran still insists on his innocence he’s ineligible for parole. (Katha Pollitt, “Subject to Debate: Justice for Bernard Baran”, The Nation, March 13) (via Arts & Letters Daily) (”The Appalling Case of Bernard Baran”, website about the case).

February 28 – Hiring talent from the opposing camp. Seattle plaintiff’s lawyer Steven Berman is among the most feared in the country; a class-action securities specialist, he went on to assume a prominent role in the tobacco litigation (see August 21; his fee from that has been estimated at $2 billion). But now the city’s best known corporate citizen, Microsoft, has quietly hired Berman to help it fend off the wave of class-action lawsuits it’s facing over its antitrust troubles. According to Forbes’s “The Informer”, Berman and Microsoft chairman Bill Gates have become personal friends — notwithstanding a 1989 incident in which, following a sudden drop in the company’s stock price, Berman filed a lawsuit against the company and won $1.5 million. (Elizabeth Corcoran and Tomas Kellner, “The Informer”, Forbes, Feb. 7) (fourth item).

February 28 – Welcome Duke Law visitors. Overlawyered.com is the featured “site of the week” on the Duke Law School “Faculty and Staff Gateway” page.

February 26-27 – Legal ethics meet medical ethics. Two weeks ago, in preparation for his second murder trial on charges of pushing Kendra Webdale to her death on the New York subway last January, Andrew Goldstein went off his antipsychotic medication. Mr. Goldstein’s court-appointed lawyers “advised him to go off his drugs in an effort to demonstrate to the jury the debilitating effects of his mental illness”. Doctors treating the 30-year-old schizophrenic at Bellevue were strongly opposed to the tactic, and some outside observers were also skeptical, such as Columbia law professor Richard Uviller, who said “a lawyer’s first duty is to preserve his client’s health.” However, schizophrenia expert Dr. E. Fuller Torrey called the move legitimate and said he himself “had intentionally given homeless mentally ill patients less medication than they needed before court competency hearings to keep them from being released back onto the street.” Justice Carol Berkman of State Supreme Court in Manhattan “has said she would allow Mr. Goldstein to stop taking his medication for as long as he appeared competent to stand trial. If he appeared not to understand his surroundings, she ruled, he would be forcibly given his medication.” The new trial is expected to last at least a month; the first ended in a jury deadlock and mistrial. (David Rohde, “For Retrial, Subway Defendant Goes Off Medication”, New York Times, Feb. 23 — fee-based archive).

February 26-27 – “Judgment reversed in Seinfeld case”. “An appeals court on Tuesday reversed a $25 million judgment awarded to a man who was fired after a female co-worker complained that he harassed her by discussing a racy episode of ‘Seinfeld.’ … The ‘Seinfeld’ element of the case eventually became secondary and a Milwaukee County Circuit court dismissed a wrongful-firing claim.” Jerold Mackenzie had argued that his bosses at Miller Brewing Co. were already plotting to fire him from his $95,000-a-year management job at a time when they told him his position was safe. (Jenny Price, AP/Washington Post, Feb. 22, link now dead).

February 26-27 – Deep pockets blameable for denial of service attacks? PBS commentator Robert X. Cringely has posted a bunch of emails from his readers concerning the coordinated “distributed denial of service” attacks on major web sites earlier this month. Among them was the following from Jay Kangel: “At some point one of these hacking events is going to cost someone who can hire lots of lawyers with real money. At that point the victim, or the victim’s insurance company, will want to sue for damages. The actual hacker will likely have little or no money. Even if the victim wins such a suit the damages cannot be recovered. The deep pockets are the owners of the zombie machines. Is it negligence if a machine owner does not promptly install security patches and, as a result, hackers take over the machine? I don’t know….” (”The Cat is Out of the Bag”, I, Cringely: The Pulpit, Feb. 24).

February 26-27 – Mayors: liability fears stalling “brownfields” development. A report from the U.S. Conference of Mayors finds that liability fears are among major factors stalling redevelopment of “brownfields” (abandoned or underused industrial sites) in American cities. Environmentalists and urbanists consider brownfields an attractive alternative for new industrial development near the existing workforce, remedying eyesores and bolstering urban tax bases while avoiding development of peripheral vacant land around cities (”sprawl”). The open-ended liability inflicted by the Superfund program, however, menaces new developers, lenders, realtors and users with potential responsibility for the environmental sins of long-departed actors. (”Traci Watson, “Report finds more than 80,000 acres of polluted land in USA”, USA Today, Feb. 25, link now dead; report and news release).

February 25 – Music stores sue Sony. Candidate for the distinction of lamest business-vs.-business suit of the year? You be the judge. The National Association of Recording Merchandisers has filed suit against Sony for the purported offense of including hyperlinks and promotional inserts in or with its music products that enable/encourage consumers to use its online store, thus “diverting” them away from their destined role as future purchasers at the retail outlet. “Few retailers are happy about having to stock Ricky Martin CD’s with hyperlinks to Sonymusic.com [where customers can buy more CDs], but Sony hasn’t provided any alternative,” complains Pamela Horovitz of NARM. This practice amounts, says Horovitz, to “forcing retailers to steer their own customers to competitive sites”. “Forcing”? Well, it seems, the latest Ricky Martin album was just too darn popular for record stores to consider not stocking it by way of punishing Sony for its hyperlink policy.

The retailers insist that Sony has a legal obligation to make available to them CDs stripped of the capability to hyperlink to an online store, much as if newsstand distributors demanded that publishers supply magazines that were free of subscription cards (which of course tend to “divert” readers’ business from further newsstand purchases of the magazine). The complaint also charges Sony with “copyright misuse, illegal price discrimination by favoring its own record club and on-line music retailer (CDNow/ Columbia House) over other retailers, unfair competition, and false advertising.” (”Retailers Sue Sony”, Reuters/Wired News, Jan. 31; NARM press release, Jan. 31; Pamela Horovitz, commentary, Billboard, July 1999 (reprinted at NARM site, second item)).

February 25 – Not to be dismissed. Item from a recent (Jan. 27) edition of Chuck Shepherd’s News of the Weird, under the heading “Fireproof Workers“: “An arbitration panel ruled in July that Toronto Transit Commission janitor Winston Ruhle had been improperly fired and deserved about $115,000 (U.S.) in damages; he was fired in 1995 for padding his recuperation time after surgery, improperly missing 203 days during a 244-day period. And English chauffeur John Forbes, 55, won an employment tribunal ruling in September that it was unfair to fire him simply because he had twice dressed in women’s clothing on the job and flashed his underwear to passing motorists.”

February 25 – Secrets of class action defense. “Some companies facing a multitude of class actions have been accused of shopping for the cheapest settlements by choosing to deal with lawyers willing to seek less for class members, sometimes in return for a hefty legal fee,” reports the Mobile Register in its investigative series (see Feb. 7 commentary). For example, Norwest Financial was accused of overcharging for credit life insurance in a class action filed in Birmingham; it offered a settlement, which was rejected. It then struck a similar deal with a Mobile lawyer to settle the case on behalf of the same class. “‘Defendants can to some degree get different plaintiffs’ lawyers to bid against each other,’ said John Coffee, a professor at Columbia University in New York and expert on class action law. … If one plaintiffs’ lawyer drives a hard bargain and seeks a truly beneficial settlement for a class, a company may seek another lawyer and ask him to file a suit for the purpose of settling, and on terms the company dictates.

“Coffee said it’s ‘a game’ by which a defendant arranges for a plaintiffs’ attorney to agree to a ‘modest settlement for the class but very lucrative attorney’s fees. The defendant might even write up the complaint to make sure it’s competent and covers everything,’ Coffee said.” (Eddie Curran, “Judge: Mobile deal a ‘cheap ticket out of trouble’”, Dec. 27 (full series).

February 24 – Columnist-fest: liberal aims, illiberal means. Three variations on a theme, namely how progressive social goals aren’t always well served by handing ever-greater authority to those who run the legal process:

* Wendy Kaminer understands why feminists would rally behind the Violence Against Women Act, currently up before the Supreme Court in Brzonkala v. Virginia Tech, but wonders whether liberals should really be comfortable arguing for an expansive view of federal police power. “We need to combat sexual violence without making a federal case of it.” (”Sexual Congress”, American Prospect, Feb. 14).

* Stuart Taylor welcomes the idea of extending legal recognition in Vermont to same-sex relationships, but asks: should this advance really be put over by way of a unilateral assertion of power by the state’s Supreme Court? (”A Vote For Gay Marriage — But Not By Judicial Fiat”, National Journal, Feb. 21).

* William Raspberry agrees that loving relatives should be a part of kids’ lives, but still is mystified by the law under review in the Supreme Court’s pending Troxel v. Granville: “If you stipulate the mother’s parental fitness (as both sides seemed to do in last week’s questioning by the justices) then how can you insist that she bow to the grandparents’ desires — or even that she has to explain why she chooses not to?” (”Grandparents’ visitation rights case misses boat”, Detroit News, Jan. 18).

February 24 – House passes liability reforms. President Clinton is going to huff and puff and use his veto to blow down anything that looks like a shelter from the incursions of his good friends in the trial bar, which hasn’t deterred the House from passing two bills this month aimed at extending modest degrees of such protection to small businesses and manufacturers of long-lived capital goods. (”GOP makes little headway in reining in lawsuits”, AP/CNN, Feb. 22, link now dead). The small business bill would restrict punitive damages levied against enterprises with fewer than 25 employees to $250,000 or three times actual damages, whichever is less, and would require plaintiffs seeking punitive damages to show that a defendant acted with “willful misconduct and was flagrantly indifferent to the rights and safety of others.” (”House Passes Bill Shielding Small Businesses From Liability Suits”, DowJones.com, Feb. 16.) The durable-goods bill would bar suits against makers of factory equipment that were filed more than 18 years after the delivery of the equipment to its original user; it would not apply to workers who are ineligible for workers’ compensation. (Paul Barton, “House passes cap on makers’ liability”, Cincinnati Enquirer, Feb. 3). The two bills passed by almost identical margins — 221-193 for the small business bill, and 222-194 for the statute of repose bill — with about two dozen Democrats crossing over to join the GOP majority in favor, and about one dozen Republicans crossing the other way.

February 24 – Blaming good pilots. One of the first lawsuits arising from the Jan. 31 Alaska Airlines crash over the Pacific claims that “the pilots should have ‘immediately … land(ed) the aircraft upon first notice of difficulty in operation.’ … But the second-guessing, and the widow’s lawsuit, are wrong. The pilots did what they were supposed to: Analyze the situation, take corrective action, land as soon as practicable. Hurtling through the skies in a pressurized metal tube has its risks. Slapping the airline with a lawsuit won’t make those risks magically disappear. … The pilots were heroes, keeping their crippled plane over the ocean instead of slamming it into suburban Los Angeles.” (Phaedra Hise, “Aerial ambulance chasing”, Salon, Feb. 18) (more on overlawyered skies: Oct. 8, July 19, Dec. 1, Dec. 9, “Kingdom of the One-Eyed“, “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of a Good Beer“)

February 23 – Crime does pay, cont’d. A federal judge last week refused to dismiss a civil rights lawsuit by family members of a bank robber killed in a spectacular televised shootout with police in North Hollywood, Calif. Emil Matasareanu and Larry Eugene Phillips Jr. “fired more than 1,200 rounds from automatic weapons during a 44-minute battle on Feb. 28, 1997. Both men died, and 11 officers and a half-dozen civilians were wounded.” Attorney Stephen Yagman, representing the family, alleges that police violated Matasareanu’s rights by deliberately “keeping paramedics away from him for an hour as he died on the street….The city has contended that paramedics were needed elsewhere and that authorities initially feared Matasareanu might be booby-trapped.” (”Judge allows lawsuit to go forward in North Hollywood shootout case”, AP/FindLaw, Feb. 16).

February 23 – “How’s the pool?” “It’s okay, but what’s amazing about it is that its construction predates massive lawsuits, so it actually has a deep end. Where most new Las Vegas pools are only three feet deep, this one goes to twelve feet. The diving board has been removed, however.” — from a review of the Frontier Hotel on the website CheapoVegas.com. Better hurry, though: the review advises that “The Frontier is scheduled to be demolished in the summer of 2000″.

February 23 – That Hager case. The Washington Post’s David Segal, who covered the lawyer beat for three years and has now moved on to write about music, last month penned a valedictory column which mentioned one of his regrets: not having taken a harder look at the disciplinary process for D.C. lawyers and in particular “the tale of Mark Hager, the American University Law professor and sometime plaintiffs lawyer.

“He represented a pair of Virginia mothers who wanted to sue Warner Lambert, makers of a lice shampoo, for creating an environmental hazard and for failing to rid critters from their children’s heads. In an out-of-court deal, Warner Lambert offered refunds to the moms and some 90 other buyers of Nix shampoo, a sum that totaled less than $10,000. Hager and a partner, meanwhile, ended up splitting the $225,000 that Warner Lambert paid on condition that the lawyers not bring another, similar suit and — here’s the kicker — not tell their clients about the bargain. (Hager countered that the deal was legit, in part because it doesn’t prevent his clients from suing Warner Lambert in the future. He also said the moms’ demand for a toxic tort-style suit was unreasonable.)

“The moms filed an ethics grievance and a hearing before a committee of the D.C. Board of Professional Responsibility — which recommends disciplinary action — occurred in January. Not a peep has been heard from that committee since, even though it’s supposed to cough up a recommendation within 60 days.”

Concludes Segal: “That’s an outrage. If Washington lawyers want the trust of their clients and abiding respect from the rest of us, devising a more efficient policing mechanism might be a good start.” (Update May 3, 2001: disciplinary panel in Nov. 2000 called Hager’s conduct “shockingly outrageous” and recommended three-year suspension) (Update Jul. 19, 2003: Hager resigns AU post in April 2003).

SOURCES: David Segal, “Hearsay: Verdicts Rendered, a Beat Surrendered”, Washington Post, Jan. 17; David Segal, “Group Says Lawyer Made Secret Deal”, Washington Post, November 4, 1998, and Siobhan Roth, “American University Professor Faces Ethics Charges, Legal Times, Jan. 18, 1999, both reprinted at headlice.org site; “‘Settlement’ in lice shampoo case probed”, AP, Jan. 27, 1999, reprinted at “Safe 2 Use” commercial page; Goldie H. Gider, “Law Professor Faces Ethics Charges”, The Legal Reformer (HALT), Spring 1999 (second item); Deborah Kelly, “Lice infestations on the rise”, Richmond Times-Dispatch, May 29, 1997. In addition to publishing in such outlets as Monthly Review and Z Magazine, Prof. Hager has also distinguished himself for the vehemence of his attacks on liability reformers; see, for example, “Civil Compensation and Its Discontents: A Response to [Peter] Huber,” 42 Stanford Law Review 539 (1990) (not online).

February 23 – “Quadriplegic is given 7 years in prison for selling marijuana”. In another triumph for the drug war, a federal court has sentenced Louis E. Covar Jr., 51, to prison for seven years. Covar, a wheelchair user who cannot control his muscles beneath his shoulders, says he uses marijuana for medicinal purposes but police testified that he was selling it, in violation of probation terms for a conviction for marijuana possession last March. “According to the Department of Corrections, the special care Covar will need will cost $258.33 a day — or more than $660,000 if he serves his full seven years. A typical prisoner costs taxpayers $47.63 per day.” Federal judge J. Carlisle Overstreet said he was aware of the cost-of-custody problem but said Covar had showed “blatant disregard for the law”. (AP/Deseret News, Feb. 19).

February 23 –Overlawyered.com sets new visitor record. Yesterday was our busiest day ever, thanks in large part to the Wall Street Journal’s generous editorial mention and the live link in its interactive edition.

February 22 – Welcome Wall Street Journal readers. In an editorial (”Virtual Sanity“) hailing the anti-food-scare Guest Choice Network, the Journal says that “overlawyered.com, a site run by Walter Olson to track the excesses of the lawsuit industry” is one of “a new breed of Websites… cropping up to keep tabs on the army of lawyers and activists”. (”Virtual Sanity”, Wall Street Journal, Feb. 22 (online subscription required)).

February 22 – Against medical advice. Ignoring the advice of both his own subordinates and the medical profession, President Clinton is expected today to unveil a package of measures aimed at combating “medical errors” among doctors, hospitals and other medical providers. The most controversial measure would subject providers to legal sanctions if they fail to report such errors. Since there’s often much doubt as to whether a particular incident constituted error and whether it contributed to a patient’s bad outcome, institutions could stay out of legal danger only by reporting as “error” many incidents that they might not be convinced are such. Despite supposed safeguards for privacy, the New York Times reports, it will often be possible for outsiders to identify the names of patients and doctors involved, and “public reports could be used to strengthen the hand of plaintiffs’ lawyers in malpractice lawsuits.”

The proposals follow a stampede set off by the release of a federally sponsored study which found high rates of avoidable injury to patients in the medical system. (For skeptical looks at the same Harvard-based researchers’ earlier allegations of an “epidemic” of medical malpractice, see Richard Anderson, 1996, and Peter Huber, 1990 and 1997). Both the American Medical Association and the American Hospital Association have warned that, to quote the Times, “if doctors and hospital employees fear being sued…they will be reluctant to discuss the lessons that could be learned from their mistakes.” Also conspicuous by its absence is any evidence that federally managed health care facilities, such as Veterans’ Administration hospitals, are presently achieving more success at avoiding errors than private hospitals, or any demonstration of why Washington should be imposing untried changes on private hospital management when it has as yet done nothing to demonstrate the workability of the proposed changes in its own facilities.

Indeed, “[e]ven Mr. Clinton’s own advisers had suggested that the administration move cautiously.” Instead, Clinton — fresh from a $500,000 trial-lawyer-hosted fund-raiser in Dallas two weeks ago — overrode their advice. He also insisted that an additional principle be part of the package: no matter how many rights doctors and hospitals are made to give up, no jot or tittle of the right to sue doctors or hospitals for malpractice may be interfered with. (Robert Pear, “Clinton to Propose a System to Reduce Medical Mistakes”, New York Times, Feb. 22 (requires registration)).

P.S.: For the past year, having abruptly reversed its earlier stance of resisting the expansion of litigation, organized American medicine has been cheerleading the trial lawyers’ assault on HMOs; the Connecticut State Medical Society, for example, recently sponsored trial lawyer bigwig Richard Scruggs to come to the state to talk up the subject. This could be seen as a kind of experiment: with the trial lawyers receiving such extraordinary and unexpected assistance from their old enemy, would they ease off on their litigation war against the doctors themselves? The Clinton initiative provides a definitive answer to that question: no, they won’t. (Edward J. Croder, “$300 million lawyer revs up to take on HMOs” (Scruggs speech at Quinnipiac College School of Law), New Haven Register, Feb. 11 — not online)

February 19-21 – “Deaf group files lawsuit against movie theaters.” Invoking the Americans with Disabilities Act, eight hearing-impaired persons in Portland, Oregon have filed what aspires to the status of a national class action seeking to force three large cinema chains, Regal, Century, and Carmike, to install closed captioning devices for films in their theaters. The technology, called MoPix, displays captions in a patron’s cupholder; the plaintiffs say it costs about $12,000 a screen to install. A spokesman for the suit, attorney Dennis Steinman, said the country’s biggest cinema chain, Cinemark, was likely to be added soon to the case as a defendant. (Ashbel Green, “Suit seeks to aid deaf moviegoers”, The Oregonian, Feb. 4).

February 19-21 – Bountiful NYC taxpayers come through again. It happened in 1989: Driver Jack Goldberg, under the influence of heroin, cocaine and methadone, lost control of his car and ran onto a Brooklyn sidewalk, gravely injuring Linda Davis, who’d been waiting with her daughter and grandson to catch a bus. Pleading guilty to assault, Goldberg was sent to prison for two years. But the blame could hardly be allowed to stop there, especially not when a far deeper pocket was on hand. Mr. Goldberg proceeded to aver that he’d swerved to avoid a city sanitation truck that was entering the intersection against the light. This theory outraged city officials, who according to the New York Law Journal “contended that Mr. Goldberg admitted at his deposition that he did not recall even seeing the truck in the area and that he had swerved to avoid striking a boy who had run into the street half a block away.” Nonetheless, on December 16 a Kings County jury proceeded to find the city 23 percent culpable for the incident and hand down a $16 million verdict in the suit brought by Ms. Davis and her relatives; joint and several liability should do the rest. (”Verdicts and Settlements”, New York Law Journal, Jan. 28, not online).

February 19-21 – Harassment-law roundup. A new product called Disappearing Email is set to launch next month which automatically “shreds” and destroys email after a certain length of time as determined by company policy; the target market is companies worried that internal emails will be used against them by lawyers in harassment or other types of litigation. (”Email’s Vanishing Act”, Wired News, Feb. 7). Meanwhile, the Industry Standard takes a look at the widely publicized sexual harassment lawsuits filed by two employees against Juno, the Internet start-up. (Susan Orenstein, “What happened at Juno”, The Standard, Feb. 7). And at Intellectual Capital, reader discussion is in progress about Joan Kennedy Taylor’s book What to Do When You Don’t Want to Call the Cops: A Non-Adversarial Approach to Sexual Harassment, excerpted briefly in this space in November. (Jaime Sneider, “Above the Law?”, Intellectual Capital, Feb. 17).

February 19-21 – Welcome Lucianne.com, Crikey.com.au readers. Readers of Lucianne.com, the popular news forum presided over by Zippergate stalwart Lucianne Goldberg, recently discussed our commentaries “Bill Clinton among friendly crowd” and “Thanks for the memories” (links now dead). And an influx of visitors from Australia over the last week or so owes much to our inclusion as a link on Crikey.com.au, an irreverent investigative site that covers media, government and business down under.

February 19-21 – “Motorists speed more, but fewer die”. When Congress did away with the national 55-mph highway speed limit, opponents called it a “killer bill”; Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety — a be-safe-or-else coalition backed by both insurance companies and the trial-lawyer-allied Ralph Nader complex — predicted that the move “will be the death knell for thousands of American men, women and children“. But in fact “the national crash fatality rate, determined by the number of fatalities for every 100 million vehicle miles driven, has fallen by 11 percent since the United States lifted the national 55 mph speed limit in 1995″. (Tom Greenwood, “Motorists speed more, but fewer die”, Detroit News, Jan. 4; Brock Yates, “Just when you thought bigger was better”, Car and Driver, Oct. 1999, reprinted at Steve Hartford site).

February 19-21 – Update: Cayuga land claim. A Syracuse, N.Y. jury has recommended an amount of $36.9 million as appropriate compensation to the Cayuga Indian tribe for its sale of 64,015 acres to the state of New York two centuries ago. The sum was far below the $335 million sought by the Cayugas and below even the $51 million recommended by appraisers for the state, which was the defendant in the suit. Cayuga attorney Martin Gold lashed out at the ruling as “ridiculous…Apparently nine people didn’t pay attention to the evidence.” The 1795 and 1807 sales were recently declared invalid because they were not approved by the federal government, as required by law (see Feb. 1 commentary). Jim Memmott, “Verdict saddens Cayugas”, Rochester Democrat & Chronicle, Feb. 18.)

February 18 – Bush unveils legal reform plan. On the campaign trail last week, Texas Gov. George W. Bush unveiled proposals for reforming the civil justice system if he’s elected President. (Disclosure: this site’s editor has served as an unpaid advisor to the Bush campaign on the issue.) The proposals include: tougher sanctions for meritless lawsuits and motions; a “Fair Settlement Rule” under which parties who reject a bona fide settlement offer and then do worse at trial will be liable for the reasonable legal fees their opponents expended after the offer; curbs on lawyers’ power to steer actions into courts they view as favorable (”forum-shopping”); a “Client’s Bill of Rights” prescribing more disclosure about fees to be charged and enhanced supervision by federal courts of fees charged in the cases they oversee; and controls on unreasonable fees charged by lawyers representing government bodies. (”Bush proposes higher standards for lawyers”, Reuters/FindLaw, Feb. 9; campaign news release, Feb. 9; fact sheets on tort reform and on Texas record (PDF format); Morton Kondracke, “Bush’s Trial with the Trial Lawyers”, June 28, 1999 (reprinted at Citizens Against Lawsuit Abuse Houston site)).

February 18 – I see riches in your future. ABC has confirmed that it has paid $933,992 to an employee of the Psychic Services Network who sued the network over its 1993 airing of a secretly made videotape on its newsmagazine “PrimeTime Live”. Mark Sanders charged that ABC had ruined his reputation by covertly videotaping him and his colleagues working the telephones in a show aimed at depicting the call-a-psychic business as “a scam and illegitimate”. In 1994 a jury awarded Sanders $335,000 in compensatory and $300,000 in punitive damages, and the total sum owing has mounted through the accumulation of interest as ABC has pursued unsuccessful appeals. (Yahoo/AP, “ABC Pays Damages to Psychic Network”, Feb. 15, link now dead).

February 18 – Lawsuit reform helps Michigan taxpayers. The state’s payout in judgments and settlements, which had been running around $25 to $35 million a year, declined to $12.7 million last year. Democratic state attorney general Jennifer Granholm credited skillful legal work and good economic times for the favorable trend but also, significantly, acknowledged the helpful role of 1995 reforms which bolstered sovereign immunity and curbed the application of joint and several liability, the deep-pocket doctrine by which a defendant one percent responsible for an accident can be made to pay all the damages. (”Tort reform pays off” (editorial), Detroit News, Feb. 2).

February 18 – The trouble with bounty-hunting. “Porcupines [in New England] have never enjoyed the popular status of, say, the armadillo in Texas. They were particularly unpopular earlier in this century, when they returned to reforested areas ahead of their natural predators and consequently boomed. John Barrows, a district forester with the state of Vermont, recalls that Vermont used to offer a bounty of fifty cents for a set of porcupine ears, and in 1952 paid out $90,000. Remarkably, it still had a porcupine problem in 1953 and for several decades thereafter. Barrows explains: ‘There was a time when we thought the state had a lot of money, and a trapper who knew how to use his knife could get ten or twelve sets of ears out of a single animal.’” — from Richard Conniff, Every Creeping Thing: True Tales of Faintly Repulsive Wildlife (Henry Holt & Co., 1998).

February 17 – And so now everybody’s happy. “Last month, the Supreme Court decided not to review an appeals court decision that temporary Microsoft workers must receive the same retirement benefits, including discounted stock, as regular employees…. Already, some companies have reacted to the original Microsoft decision by getting rid of temporary workers before they can be considered permanent, lawyers said.” (David Leonhardt, “Who’s the Boss? Who’s a Worker?”, New York Times, Feb. 16) (& see letters, Dec. 20).

February 17 – Barrel pointing backward. “President Clinton enthusiastically backs the current wave of municipal lawsuits against the gun industry”, yet he’s also proposed giving $10 million in taxpayer money to some of the same manufacturers for the sake of developing so-called smart guns. Some litigation advocates are upset about the inconsistency, including Kristen Rand of the Violence Policy Center, who says: “It makes the lawsuits seem like a charade.” Yes, now she’s getting the idea.

The litigation onslaught may in fact have retarded progress toward smart-gun technology. Colt’s Manufacturing Co. had been at work on a smart-gun venture but folded its effort late last year; the Wall Street Journal’s Paul Barrett quotes John Rigas, a partner in the company’s controlling owner, the New York investment group Zilkha & Co., as saying that “potential punitive damages scared away needed outside investors”. (Paul M. Barrett, “‘Smart’ Guns Trigger a Debate”, Wall Street Journal, Jan. 27 (requires online subscription).)

February 17 – Welcome Kausfiles.com readers. Mickey Kaus’s commentaries on politics, journalism and social policy, among the high points of Slate, are also collected on this freestanding website. He’s just added new features including a desktop-style assortment of columnist and policy links. Check out the ultrabrief descriptions (for this page: “Daily horror stories”.)

February 17 – The fine print. The Boston Globe has backed off at least temporarily from a short-lived effort to save money, trees and ink by reducing the type size of its articles, thus squeezing more onto a page. Readers had protested vociferously, and at least one threatened to sue under the Americans with Disabilities Act: “The Globe cannot simply refuse to serve readers with aging eyes and poor eyesight.” (Jack Thomas, “The incredible shrinking type irks Globe readers”, Boston Globe, Feb. 14, link now dead (via Romenesko, Media News)).

February 17 – Let your fingers do the suing. The Yellow Pages contain many entries for businesses like the A-ABC Locksmith Service and AAA Affordable Auto Glass, and now you can add to that list of eagerly promotional trade monickers the AAAA Legal Center, run by Detroit-area trial lawyer Robert D. Mouradian, though its website has not been updated since April 1999 and could use a spell-check.

February 16 – Welcome Fox News Channel visitors. Our editor was interviewed for a story on how the Americans with Disabilities Act may require the redesign of websites so as to provide “reasonable accommodation” to blind, deaf and other handicapped users. For more details, see his prepared statement presented to a House Judiciary Committee hearing last week; our Dec. 21 commentary, and our subpages on disabled-rights law and Internet law.

February 16 – Update: Connecticut tobacco-fee bonanza. Not long after Connecticut attorney general Richard Blumenthal said last winter he had “no idea” whether law firms were going to rake in excessive fees representing the state in the tobacco settlement (see Feb. 3 commentary), a total fee haul was announced: a handsome $65 million. As previously reported in this space, the three lucky firms selected to handle the in-state work included Blumenthal’s own former law firm of Silver, Golub & Teitell of Stamford. The other two firms? One was Carmody & Torrance of Waterbury, whose managing partner James K. Robertson is personal counsel and counselor to the state’s governor, John Rowland. And the third was Stamford’s Emmett & Glander, whose name partner, Kathryn Emmett, happens to be married to partner David S. Golub of Silver, Golub & Teitell. “I know how it [looks]“, concedes Golub.

A number of other firms that wanted to be considered for the work were cut out; Robert Reardon of New London, a former president of the Connecticut Trial Lawyers Association, couldn’t get even get in the door for a meeting. Though Attorney General Blumenthal was later to disclaim knowledge of the firms’ fee entitlements, the Connecticut Law Tribune reports that he “was extraordinarily active in the litigation and settlement — more so than any other attorney general”. (Thomas Scheffey, “Winning the $65 Million Gamble”, Connecticut Law Tribune, Dec. 8; “After the Lion’s Share”, Feb. 5).

February 16 – Disabled test-accommodation roundup. Salon is the latest to notice this issue. While the share of students getting extra time on the SAT — typically an extra hour and a half on a three-hour exam — is still only 1.9 percent nationwide, “the number jumps to nearly 10 percent in some New England prep schools and wealthy districts in California.” Michael Scott Moore, “Buying Time”, Salon, Feb. 9). AP reports that the percentage of college freshmen describing themselves as disabled more than tripled between 1978 and 1998, from less than 3 percent to 9.4 percent. Forty-one percent of the disabled freshmen in 1998 identified their impediment as a learning disability, up from 15 percent ten years earlier. More chances to attend college for kids who’d have been classified as disabled all along — or just more students being classified as disabled? (”Learning Disabled Advance in School”, AP/FindLaw, Feb. 10). In a case closely watched by college officials, a Boston College senior with attention deficit disorder and a 3.35 grade point average “has sued the Law School Admissions Council, charging the national testing giant violated her rights by denying her extra time to take the all-important exam.” (Andrea Estes, “BC student sues test firm: Wants more time for law school exam”, Boston Herald, Jan. 12).

Related posts

• March 2000 archives, part 2 (1)
• October 1999 archives, part 2 (2)
• November 2000 archives, part 1 (0)
• November 1999 archives, part 1 (1)
• January 2000 archives, part 2 (1)