Pedestrians around New York City can relax a bit: the Second Circuit has upheld the right of the city’s Transit Authority to remove from his job as a bus driver Curtis Shannon, whose color-blindness renders him unable to distinguish traffic signals. (Shannon v. NYCTA, 332 F.3d 95, summarized at Neighborhood Legal Services site; Second Circuit, search on docket for #02-7266, decided Jun. 13, 2003).
Archive for 2003
FoxNews.com “Blog of the Week”
FoxNews.com’s “Views” section names us its “Blog of the Week“. If you’re interested in strange lawsuits that engage in creative blame-shifting, a good place to start is with our personal responsibility archives (& welcome Howard Bashman readers).
Suit charges lawyers with using fake clients in diet-drug cases
Mississippi: “Civil lawsuits filed in Jefferson County allege that lawyers signed up fake clients for a 1999 lawsuit that resulted in a $150 million jury verdict against the makers of a diet drug.” According to the allegations, lawyers knew that some clients being recruited into the action had never actually taken the diet drug but “looked the other way”. Defendant lawyers called the allegations “ridiculous” and “preposterous”. Federal law enforcers will not disclose details of their investigation of Jefferson County product liability litigation (see Jun. 29, May 7 and links from there), but it is known that the FBI has subpoenaed prescription records from Fayette’s Bankston Drug Store, which is frequently named in suits (see May 4-6, 2001). (Tom Wilemon, Beth Musgrave and Margaret Baker, “Lawyers faked diet-drug case clients, lawsuits claim”, Biloxi Sun-Herald, Jul. 1; “Miss. lawyers accused of wrongdoing in suit”, AP/Jackson Clarion-Ledger, Jul. 2).
Bilking poor clients
“A prominent San Francisco attorney who represented the young, sick and poor was arrested Tuesday on federal charges of stealing $2 million of his clients’ settlement money to support a lavish lifestyle that included a six-bedroom mansion and a 73-foot yacht.” At its website, the successful San Francisco law firm of Tehin + Partners boasts of having “achieved an exceptional record of performance in litigation and trial through our 20 years + experience as a contingency fee-based plaintiff’s law firm”, not to mention “A Legal Philosophy That Sets Us Apart”. Today’s San Francisco Chronicle has a full helping of grotesque details (Stacy Finz, “S.F. attorney charged with bilking underdog clients”, Jul. 16)
It bears repeating that of all the institutions to which the temporal wealth of poor people is entrusted, law firms are among the least regulated; when outside authorities finally step in to clean up the mess, as here, it is typically after the fact, rather than in a preventive way through the sorts of regular disclosure and auditing requirements that banks or pension funds must meet. Nikolai Tehin lists among his affiliations Board of Directors, San Francisco Trial Lawyers Association. Update Apr. 24, 2005: judge sentences Tehin to 14-year sentence.
On the Beeb, etc.
Our editor was interviewed at some length, particularly on pending gun and asbestos legislation, on the BBC World Service’s weekly World Business Review. (Accuracy of transcript not guaranteed.) There’s an audio link, too. Both links may disappear on Saturday when the BBC site updates to the next week’s show.
While on the subject of publicity, our editor’s book The Rule of Lawyers came in for a lengthy review from Neil Hrab of Canada’s National Post in the July issue of Organization Trends, a publication of the Capital Research Center in Washington, D.C. (“More Than Good Friends: Trial Lawyers and Nonprofits“, PDF format, scroll to p. 7). Also, thanks for very kind mentions lately to a number of weblogs you should know about: Ernest Svenson’s Ernie the Attorney, MedRants, Steve Pilgrim’s Rodent Regatta and Aaron Haspel’s God of the Machine (the most philosophical spin on fast-food lawsuits you’ll read this month — it’s not easily paraphrased, just go read it).
Canada: Protect Thyself, Get Arrested
Twice in June, Raj Singh Valcha and Harjeet Singh Saini’s corner store was burglarized. Total cost: $42,000. Total arrests: Zero. Their reply: Take shifts with an aluminum bat, lying in wait for the inevitable third strike. They didn’t have to wait long — before the month was out, they were burglarized again. One criminal was incapacitated, the other escaped. And the storeowners? Cited for aggravated assault. To make matters worse, a reader writes: “Of course the editorials are against defending your own property.” Of course. The first-year law student prospective? No shock here either. When we heard our torts professor mention burglars who slip and fall and sue the would-be victims, mouths drop, people laugh in disbelief, but hey, that wears off by the third day of class. (“Vigilante policing no way to fight crime,” Montreal Gazette,
Jul. 2; also check out a letter to the contrary: “Law now favours robbers and oppressors,” Undated).
Chewing the Shrink’s Ear Off
Mike Tyson is being sued — by his psychiatrist. (If that’s not the start of a good post, what is?) Seems that Iron Mike — a candidate for psychotherapy if there’s ever been one — has been seeing one Mitchell Gibson at the cost of $12k a month, plus $900 for “emergency cross-country visits.” But now Mike won’t pay up the $44,000 he owes the analyst. We’re not one to agree with Tyson, but if the shrink couldn’t talk him out of getting the Che Guevara and face tattoos… well, at least he didn’t bite Lennox Lewis. Yet. (“Tyson sued by his shrink,” Agence France-Presse, Jul. 15; Link via Fark).
And that’s not all! Tyson is doing his part keeping lawyers above the poverty line by beating up bodyguards. Apparently, the former champ “[ran] down the median of I-95 on top of the concrete barrier, with a string of winded people in pursuit” and then punched Izzy Bolton, Don King’s bodyguard, smack in the face. Bolton needed stitches and now claims to suffer from double vision. (“Mike Tyson sued over attack on Don King bodyguard,” Atlanta Constitution-Journal, Jul. 12).
Who am I? And What am I Doing Here?
Hi, I’m Dan Lewis. Pleased to meet you. You may have met me before — I run WhatTheHeck.com, home of the strange eBay auction archive. And I’m a sportsblogger — yes, we exist! — over at my personal site, DLewis.Net. (Yes, .com was taken.)
But why am I here? Glad you asked. Sure, I can, and will, sprinkle some sports posts here. But get this — I’m a first-year law student. That’s right, I’m being trained to come up with “creative legal theories,” not dissimilar from those that have graced OverLawyered for four years strong. It’s my pleasure to be with you for the rest of the week.
“Erin Brockovich’s Junk Science”
“Her new suit against oil companies and Beverly Hills has little scientific grounding” and the one that originally established her fame, over groundwater contamination in Hinkley, Calif., wasn’t much better, argues columnist Leon Jaroff at Time magazine (Jul. 11). We looked into the Brockovich saga a few years ago and came to very similar conclusions (Reason magazine, Oct. 2000); see also numerous posts in this space.
Car-lease liability crisis continues in N.Y., R.I.
Following heavy lobbying by trial lawyers, the lower houses of the New York and Rhode Island legislatures have refused to act to limit auto leasing companies’ currently unlimited “vicarious liability” for their lessees’ crashes, thus apparently ensuring that Ford, Honda and other major automakers will continue fleeing from the two states. We covered the controversy in a Jun. 9 op-ed as well as in earlier posts. New coverage: Ed Garsten, “Firms halt N.Y. vehicle leases”, Detroit News, Jul. 6; Matt Smith, “Auto leasing companies fleeing state”, Ottaway/Middletown Times-Herald Record, Jul. 2; Jeremy Boyer, “Dealers steer way past loss of leasing”, Albany Times-Union, Jul. 3; “Bill Limiting Accident Liability Appears Doomed”, TurnTo10.com (WJAR-TV Providence), Jun. 30 (R.I.). Update Aug. 3: Reform not doomed in R.I. after all, major automakers agree to stay after governor signs one-year fix limiting liability to $300K, leaving N.Y. as only state with unlimited liability.