• Nothing new about lawyers stealing money from estates, but embarrassing when they used to head the bar association [Eagle-Tribune; Lawrence, Mass., Arthur Khoury]
• Unusual “reverse quota” case: black job applicant wins $30K after showing beauty supply company turned her down because it had a quota of whites to hire [SE Texas Record]
• Who knew? Per class action allegations, pet food contains ingredients “unfit for human consumption” [Daily Business Review]
• U.K.: “A divorcee who won a £1.4million payout from her multi-millionaire husband is suing her lawyers because she claims she should have got twice that amount.” [Telegraph]
• UW freshman falls from fourth-floor dorm window after drinking at “Trashed Tuesday”, now wants $ from Delta Upsilon International as well as construction firm that put in windows [Seattle P-I, KOMO]
• After giant $103 million payday, current and former partners at Minneapolis law firm are torn by feuds and dissension — wasn’t there a John Steinbeck novella about that? [ABA Journal and again, Heins Mills]
• Small firm that used to make Wal-Mart in-house videos sets up shop at AAJ/ATLA convention hawking those videos for use in suits against the retailer [Arkansas Democrat Gazette, earlier]
• When the judge’s kid gets busted [Eric Berlin; Alabama]

Updating our Mar. 29, 2006 post: “Computer store owner Charles Smith has won a two-year legal battle with Wal-Mart, which has demanded he stop making and selling T-shirts and other items with slogans such as ‘Wal-ocaust’ and ‘Wal-Qaeda.’ U.S. District Judge Timothy C. Batten Sr. found that Smith’s products qualified as protected noncommercial speech because his goal was to criticize Wal-Mart, not to make a profit from his products. The judge noted that Smith had sold only 62 T-shirts, including 15 to one of Wal-Mart’s outside law firms.” (Janet L. Conley, “Parody of Wal-Mart Trumps Its Trademark”, Fulton County Daily Report, Mar. 26; Likelihood of Confusion, Mar. 22; Randazza, Mar. 23).

Pharmacist Cynthia Haddad, when she left the pharmacy unattended, allowed a technician to use her computer security code to issue prescriptions, including a fraudulent prescription for a painkiller, something that could have exposed Wal-Mart to enormous liability if someone had been injured by the illegally dispensed drugs. So Wal-Mart fired Haddad. Haddad sued, claiming that the real reason Wal-Mart fired her was because she had asked for a raise to a manager-level salary, though she did not perform manager-level duties such as budgeting, and that it was thus sex discrimination. (Haddad claims that Wal-Mart “never” fired a male manager for her infraction, which seems implausible at best; Wal-Mart says it did fire male pharmacists for this. Why is this even a factual dispute for decision for a jury? This seems like a matter that merits a partial summary disposition to prevent one side from out-and-out lying.) This somehow got to a jury, which awarded $2 million, including $1 million in punitive damages. Among the questionable procedures used to railroad Wal-Mart at trial was permitting Haddad to present an attorney to testify as an expert witness on human resources procedures. Wal-Mart indicated it disagrees with the jury’s decision and is studying whether an appeal is worthwhile. Massachusetts courts are not a friendly place for defendants. Wal-Mart’s attorney did not comment to the press, permitting the plaintiffs’ lawyer to generate rather one-sided press coverage. [Berkshire Eagle June 19; Berkshire Eagle June 20; Reuters/USA Today; Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly]

In 1995, 70-year old Marlene Fett pressed the wrong pedal on her Lincoln Town Car, and smashed into a carousel in front of an Arkansas Wal-Mart, killing one boy and severely injuring his brother. The Chapman family settled with Fett, and blamed Wal-Mart and Ford, Wal-Mart on a theory that it should have anticipated the possibility of a car hitting a merry-go-round at 30 mph, and Ford on that old plaintiffs’ lawyer claim of “sudden acceleration,” a “defect” that somehow is six times more likely to strike elderly drivers. The case made the front page of USA Today in 2004 (resulting in an Apr. 19, 2004 Overlawyered story), though the newspaper kindly noted the lack of science behind the claim:

Little Rock attorney Sandy McMath, who is representing the Chapmans, says the Town Car’s cruise control put Fett on a “rocket ship to Mars” after she pulled out of her parking place. He petitioned NHTSA to investigate what he says is a defect in Ford and Lincoln models’ cruise control that causes the accelerator to stick.

In a lengthy 1999 [sic] report denying McMath’s petition, NHTSA investigator Bob Young wrote that even if such an occurrence took place and didn’t leave evidence of a mechanical malfunction, the situation should be reproducible through in-vehicle and laboratory tests. None of NHTSA’s testing could do so.

The Wal-Mart theory was similarly bogus, and refuted when an expert demonstrated that the plaintiffs’ proposed safety measure wouldn’t have stopped the speeding car. (For Illinois’ take on premises liability for auto accidents: Jun. 23.) An Arkansas jury also rejected the claims, and, after years of litigation, now the Arkansas Supreme Court has affirmed that decision in a not-especially-interesting Dec. 14 opinion, Chapman v. Ford Motor Co. Wal-Mart and Ford are still out the hundreds of thousands of dollars they spent defending themselves in the lottery litigation, not to mention the cost of bad publicity from sudden acceleration claims and quacks like the Center for Auto Safety trumpeting a non-existent problem. Arkansas acquits itself better than a South Carolina federal court did in a story we covered Aug. 7.

For those who care about these things, Justinian Lane demonstrates a fundamental lack of reading comprehension in a response to my earlier post. Lane writes: “If I do the very thing I oppose, that does indeed make me a hypocrite.” This is technically inaccurate in a prescriptivist sense (look it up), but even under the descriptivist definition, Lane continues to confuse the idea of “I believe that X is bad public policy” with “I believe those who take advantage of X are immoral.” This is precisely the error I pointed out in the original post, but Lane says nothing to rationalize the conflation other than to repeat the assertion. He then proceeds to insult me for taking a legal tax deduction. Let’s be clear: I don’t oppose individuals taking Schedule A deductions for state taxes; that’s just common sense, and one’s tax rate is already higher to reflect the fact that deductions are available. I oppose the government’s policy of offering deductions for state taxes. There’s no hypocrisy, any more than there is hypocrisy because Lane pays his federal taxes even though his taxes are used to support the war in Iraq or some other government spending that he might object to, or because Lane votes for an elected official who doesn’t agree with Lane on every single jot and tittle.

Lane opposes making people better off through lower prices and higher wages, as Wal-Mart does; that is his right, and (unlike John Edwards) he can feel good about his abnegation that he goes without a toolbox because Wal-Mart is the only store that provides a reasonably priced model (though I don’t see Lane demanding to pay his supermarket and other stores more money to reflect the fact that they lowered prices to match Wal-Mart’s competition, so he’s not completely innocent of taking advantage of the benefits Wal-Mart brings to the economy). But it’s not remotely analogous to the scenario I describe.

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News clips reporting on large verdicts and settlements cross my desk regularly, and most do not seem on their surface to be worth blogging about. Most are terse summaries of a case’s outcome, and others do not present any indication (again, on the surface at least) that a case might have problematic aspects. The other day, however, I ran across a story in the Charleston (W.V.) Gazette describing a case in which a plaintiff had been terribly injured after a retailer sold what the reporter bluntly stated was a “defective mower.” This particular newspaper story was so one-sided that I thought there almost had to be more to it than was being reported — and I had no idea how right I was in that suspicion. This is a long post, but I hope worth readers’ while. It certainly makes me wonder how much I’m missing when I don’t go into the dockets to fact-check other seemingly run-of-the-mill cases.

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It’s blatantly a parody, coupled with social criticism of the world’s largest retailer, but Wal-Mart had its lawyers fire off nastygrams to computer store owner Charles Smith and, perhaps more effectively, to CafePress. Now things have proceeded to court. Smith’s website is here. (Abigail Goldman,”Wal-Mart Parodist Sues to Sell Products”, L.A. Times/Chicago Tribune, Mar. 7)(via Housing Panic).

Kevin Brancato, a Ph.D. candidate at George Mason who heads the masthead at the economics blog Truck and Barter, also publishes a weblog entirely devoted to following the fortunes (policy and otherwise) of the Wal-Mart Corporation, by the name of AlwaysLowPrices.net (see our cites to it on Apr. 13, 2004 and Apr. 6, 2005). In contrast to the Wal-Mart-bashing line taken by so many other sites, Brancato frequently, though not invariably, rises to the defense of the company and the efficiencies of its way of doing business. This has done nothing to prevent Wal-Mart’s lawyers from sending him a cease and desist letter ordering him to vacate the name and URL “AlwaysLowPrices”, a phrase which is of course Wal-Mart’s service mark. (T&B, Apr. 5). Kevin Heller at TechLawAdvisor (Apr. 6) doesn’t think he stands much of a chance if Wal-Mart goes to court.

“Encouraged by the press criticism, entrepreneurial trial lawyers, eyeing Wal-Mart’s deep pockets with glee, have made it perhaps the biggest private-sector target of the nation?s plaintiffs’ bar. In just ten years, the number of pending lawsuits against Wal-Mart has increased fourfold, to 8,000, and the company has tripled the size of its litigation department. … Wal-Mart faces a growing number of potentially costly class action lawsuits, exemplified by a sex-discrimination suit brought by the Cohen, Milstein, Hausfeld & Toll firm, notorious for getting Texaco to pay $176 million to black employees in a discrimination suit.” (Steven Malanga (Manhattan Institute), “What Does the War on Wal-Mart Mean?”, City Journal, Spring). See Jul. 7-9, 2000 and more links: Feb. 1, 2004; Dec. 4, 2003; Jan. 11, Jun. 14, and Aug. 29-30, 2001; Sept. 6-7, Sept. 25-26, Nov. 15, and Dec. 13-14, 2000; and Dec. 2, 1999. More: we are linked by Always Low Prices — Always, a blog whose mission is to chronicle “The Best and the Worst about Wal-Mart” and which is put out in part by Kevin Brancato of George Mason U. and the economics blog Truck and Barter. (More: Apr. 19, 2005).