“Gary Prentice, 45, a former forklift truck driver, looks certain to lose the executive home, worth an estimated ?200,000, that he bought with the pay-out. … [As] news spread of the payment five years after the accident, neighbours began to question Mr Prentice’s version. They said he had not broken his ankle on a grassed area maintained by East Cambridgeshire district council but had done it while playing with his stepson.” Moral: watch out for those pesky neighbors (David Sapsted, Daily Telegraph, Sept. 11). “Speaking in Los Angeles on Monday, Lord Levene, Lloyd’s chairman, attacked America’s compensation culture as ‘pernicious, cancerous and ruinous’ and added that Britain was ‘falling into the same abyss’.” (“A litigious nation” (editorial), Daily Telegraph, Sept. 17).
Archive for September, 2003
“Man who claimed he fell down pothole must pay back ?238,000”
“Gary Prentice, 45, a former forklift truck driver, looks certain to lose the executive home, worth an estimated ?200,000, that he bought with the pay-out. … [As] news spread of the payment five years after the accident, neighbours began to question Mr Prentice’s version. They said he had not broken his ankle on a grassed area maintained by East Cambridgeshire district council but had done it while playing with his stepson.” Moral: watch out for those pesky neighbors (David Sapsted, Daily Telegraph, Sept. 11). “Speaking in Los Angeles on Monday, Lord Levene, Lloyd’s chairman, attacked America’s compensation culture as ‘pernicious, cancerous and ruinous’ and added that Britain was ‘falling into the same abyss’.” (“A litigious nation” (editorial), Daily Telegraph, Sept. 17).
“Man who claimed he fell down pothole must pay back ?238,000”
“Gary Prentice, 45, a former forklift truck driver, looks certain to lose the executive home, worth an estimated ?200,000, that he bought with the pay-out. … [As] news spread of the payment five years after the accident, neighbours began to question Mr Prentice’s version. They said he had not broken his ankle on a grassed area maintained by East Cambridgeshire district council but had done it while playing with his stepson.” Moral: watch out for those pesky neighbors (David Sapsted, Daily Telegraph, Sept. 11). “Speaking in Los Angeles on Monday, Lord Levene, Lloyd’s chairman, attacked America’s compensation culture as ‘pernicious, cancerous and ruinous’ and added that Britain was ‘falling into the same abyss’.” (“A litigious nation” (editorial), Daily Telegraph, Sept. 17).
“Man who claimed he fell down pothole must pay back ?238,000”
“Gary Prentice, 45, a former forklift truck driver, looks certain to lose the executive home, worth an estimated ?200,000, that he bought with the pay-out. … [As] news spread of the payment five years after the accident, neighbours began to question Mr Prentice’s version. They said he had not broken his ankle on a grassed area maintained by East Cambridgeshire district council but had done it while playing with his stepson.” Moral: watch out for those pesky neighbors (David Sapsted, Daily Telegraph, Sept. 11). “Speaking in Los Angeles on Monday, Lord Levene, Lloyd’s chairman, attacked America’s compensation culture as ‘pernicious, cancerous and ruinous’ and added that Britain was ‘falling into the same abyss’.” (“A litigious nation” (editorial), Daily Telegraph, Sept. 17).
“Man who claimed he fell down pothole must pay back ?238,000”
“Gary Prentice, 45, a former forklift truck driver, looks certain to lose the executive home, worth an estimated ?200,000, that he bought with the pay-out. … [As] news spread of the payment five years after the accident, neighbours began to question Mr Prentice’s version. They said he had not broken his ankle on a grassed area maintained by East Cambridgeshire district council but had done it while playing with his stepson.” Moral: watch out for those pesky neighbors (David Sapsted, Daily Telegraph, Sept. 11). “Speaking in Los Angeles on Monday, Lord Levene, Lloyd’s chairman, attacked America’s compensation culture as ‘pernicious, cancerous and ruinous’ and added that Britain was ‘falling into the same abyss’.” (“A litigious nation” (editorial), Daily Telegraph, Sept. 17).
Latest newsletter
The latest edition of our email newsletter, summarizing items from Aug. 23 to Sept. 16, went out to subscribers earlier today. You can read the current or past issues of the newsletter — or sign up easily as a subscriber yourself — at this link.
$200 K for Moose carding?
Gregg Easterbrook’s new and already indispensable weblog for the New Republic has some harsh words (Sept. 15) for former Montgomery County, Maryland police chief Charles Moose, of sniper-investigation fame. In an episode that has received little press attention, Moose extracted something on the order of $200,000 from the Marriott hotel chain after threatening a race-bias lawsuit over an incident last December in which a guard demanded to see his room key at an exclusive beach in Hawaii (“Top cop in sniper case settles isle bias lawsuit”, AP/Honolulu Star-Bulletin, Aug. 8).
After the church settles, fees
“The $85 million settlement in the Boston clergy sex abuse scandal will set a record not only as the most expensive abuse settlement in the history of the Catholic Church, but also as the largest payday for lawyers who sued on behalf of abuse victims: an estimated $30 million in legal fees, lawyers said.” (Ralph Ranelli, Boston Globe, Sept. 11). Meanwhile, Forbes investigates the ties between abuse-survivor groups and the plaintiff’s lawyers that are often their chief financial supporters. For example, the biggest national claimant group, Survivors Network Abused by Priests, which played a pivotal role in getting the California legislature to reopen old statutes of limitations so as to permit the filing of decades-old claims, lists a Stockton, Calif. plaintiff’s lawyer with a large abuse-client roster as its biggest contributor. But not all survivors’ groups feel comfortable taking money from that source: “I would hate to be seen as a lead generator for plaintiff lawyers,” says Paul Baier, founder of the Boston group Survivors First, which refuses such donations. And attorney Mitchell Garabedian, prominent for his work on the plaintiff’s side in the Boston case, declines to donate money to the victim groups “because he believes the practice violates legal ethics guidelines. ‘It’s sort of a solicitation,’ he says.” (Daniel Lyons, “Paid to Picket”, Forbes, Sept. 15)(& welcome EthicalEsq? readers).
Before he reached the Senate
The Boston Globe looks into Sen. John Edwards’s career before he came to Washington and finds “he was more than just a practitioner of medical malpractice law. He was one of its most prominent specialists, stretching the reach of the law for nearly two decades. But he also came to personify some of the alleged excesses that reformers have sought to curb.” Among them: emotionally manipulative trial arguments, selection of deep pocket defendants and suits on behalf of victims who had contributed to their own victimization, including a woman who committed suicide and whose survivors successfully sued the hospital with Edwards’ help. (Wendy Davis, “Edwards’s career tied to jury award debate”, Sept. 15).
Slightly off-topic general announcement
I’m just the second banana to Walter here, but blogging from me will be light-to-nonexistent over the next few days while I’m helping out on the appeal from today’s Ninth Circuit decision to enjoin the California recall election. Professor Glenn Reynolds (Sep. 15) has links in the meantime, and Professor Eugene Volokh (Sep. 15) asks an interesting question.