The blue-tinged xenon headlights of the Nissan Maxima have become a popular target for thieves who rip them from a car and sell them on the black market, including 277 incidents in Newark alone. The State of New Jersey, noting the epidemic of thefts in its state, has decided to take action — by suing Nissan. Nissan should have anticipated that its customers would be victimized, says the State, and warned them before they bought the car. (Ronald Smothers, “Nissan Sued Over Theft-Prone Headlights”, NY Times, Mar. 9; Crissa Shoemaker, “Lawsuit: Nissan withheld headlight theft risk”, Courier-News, Mar. 9; Mitch Lipka, “Headlight theft wave spurs state to sue Nissan”, Philadelphia Inquirer, Mar. 9). According to a recent article in the Boston Globe, Nissan was a leader in taking steps to prevent headlight thefts, so if this suit has legs, look for copycat lawsuits against other auto manufacturers–and this ludicrous theory of liability could end up being extended to other car parts or even carjackings. (Peter DeMarco, “Left in the dark”, Boston Globe, Feb. 26; Rod Gibson, “Most-stolen cars? It’s debatable”, bankrate.com, Sep. 23, 2003).
Archive for March, 2004
Chicago’s ADA filing mill
After South Florida, California and Philadelphia, Chicago’s time was bound to come: a lawyer/complainant team has tagged some 175 businesses, mostly in the Lincoln Park area, with charges of lack of disabled accessibility. Previously, complaints in the city had been running at about 30 annually. “They’re settling for cash,” said David Hanson, commissioner of the Mayor’s Office for People with Disabilities: $100 for Stuart L. Smith and $485 for Alan J. Morgan, his lawyer, plus minor upgrades to store entrances and the like. Steve Starr, owner of a jewelry and antique shop, says he has spent thousands in legal fees fighting one of the complaints. (John Schmeltzer, “Disability lawsuits rile North Side businesses”, Chicago Tribune, Mar. 7).
Malpractice plaintiff database
By reader acclaim: trial lawyer allies are crying “blacklist” about a fledgling service, DoctorsKnow.us, which makes available to paying subscribers the names of patients who have filed suits against doctors in the past, along with their lawyers and expert witnesses. “You may use the service to assess the risk of offering your services to clients or potential clients,” the Web site says. The site’s slogan is: “They can sue, but they can’t hide.” (Ralph Blumenthal, “In Texas, Hire a Lawyer, Forget About a Doctor?”, New York Times, Mar. 5)(Slashdot thread) Sydney Smith, MedRants and Cut to Cure all comment. The site DoctorsKnow.us is blank as of Monday evening, and, no, we don’t know why. Update: site is back up, with what looks like changes meant to answer/acknowledge criticism. Older version here. Plus: Chris Rangel (RangelMD) turns a definite thumbs down.
USA Today on magnet jurisdictions
USA Today has a front-page story on magnet jurisdictions. (Martin Kasindorf, “Robin Hood is alive in court”, Mar. 8). It leaves unrebutted the false claim by Public Citizen’s Joan Claybrook that “federal courts are judicial hellholes” because “the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago recently denied class-action status to people who allegedly were harmed when Firestone tires blew out on their Ford Explorer SUVs”; the class that the Seventh Circuit rejected was a nationwide class of all Explorer owners, including those who had suffered no harm. Consumers who were injured by Firestone tires have many lawsuits pending unaffected by the Seventh Circuit’s decision; indeed, as the Seventh Circuit pointed out, anyone who had a significant injury would likely have been advised to opt out of a class action rather than risk having their claim subsumed by the class action. (In re Bridgestone/Firestone, Inc. Tires Products Liability Litigation opinion; see also Jul. 8).
It is telling that Ms. Claybrook is suggesting that a court that refuses to countenance a class action on behalf of people who have suffered no harm is “anti-consumer”–it demonstrates that to her, “pro-consumer” means a pure wealth transfer from shareholders to lawyers.
USA Today also understates the problem of Madison County (see Sept. 26, Jan. 5, etc.): it’s not just that class actions have gone to 107 in 2003 from 60 in 2001; in 1998, there were only three class actions filed in Madison County. “There’s some merit to the accusations of bias in Madison County, says retired circuit judge John DeLaurenti, who heard cases there for 27 years until 2000. ‘I don’t know if it’s a judicial hellhole, but just figure it out,’ he says. ‘When people come from hither and thither to file these cases, there’s gotta be an inducement, doesn’t there? They’re not coming to see beautiful Madison County.'”
Disclosure: My law firm represented Ford in the Firestone class action litigation before the Seventh Circuit; my colleague, John Beisner, is quoted by USA Today.
Foiled our son’s school-shooting plan? We’ll sue
This February, Sacramento and Elk Grove police arrested two 15-year-olds who were allegedly planning a Columbine-style attack at their high school. After a tip from a fellow student, they found evidence that the two had attempted to burglarize a sporting goods store for weapons, and one of the them had admitted to his father and others that he intended to shoot black students.
They’ve been rewarded with a $6 million claim that is the precursor to a lawsuit. The school district is being blamed for failing to provide adequate counseling in advance of the incident, and the Sacramento police are being sued for their comments on the case. “Either the police and now the DA have made a mistake on the hate-crime motivation, or the minor is lying to his parents and to me,” the lawyer, J. Jeffries Goodwin of the law firm California Fen-Phen Litigation Associates, explained. (Ramon Coronado and Gwendolyn Crump, “Accused student is called victim”, Sacramento Bee, Feb. 19; Ramon Coronado, “Students face racial charges”, Sacramento Bee, Mar. 2; Sam Stanton, Emily Bazar and Michael Kolber, “Plan to attack school alleged”, Sacramento Bee, Feb. 11) (via Jacobs).
“Gravestones pulled down in safety scare”
“Tens of thousands of gravestones across Britain are being deliberately toppled by local authorities, often without the knowledge of relatives of the dead. The cull is being undertaken because councils fear legal action if a wobbly headstone were to fall over and injure or kill someone.” Several children have died in stone-toppling incidents. “Bereaved relatives visiting cemeteries are frequently unaware of the council’s plans, and are horrified when they come across hundreds of stones lying on their sides. In some cases, they have rung the police to report vandals, only to find that their elected representatives were to blame.” (Jonathan Petre, Daily Telegraph, Dec. 26).
Courts compete for bankruptcy cases
“As [energy company] Mirant’s Chapter 11 unfolds in North Texas, the region’s bankruptcy bar is keenly aware that the region is playing for high stakes. The area has been trying for years to bag a big-ticket bankruptcy. Its first catch was Mirant, the 10th-largest bankruptcy in U.S. history. It’s been very, very good to Fort Worth.” Large-firm bankruptcies are enormously lucrative to lawyers, other professionals and support industries, but the competition for a business once dominated by Manhattan and Delaware puts pressure on judges to issue rulings pleasing to the managers and lawyers of debtor companies. “Judges who don’t deliver are dooming themselves and their local peers to backwater status: Let a big bankrupt company leave unhappy, and nobody else will come back.” In the 1980s, one-third of big bankruptcies were filed away from the bankrupt firm’s headquarters, an indicator of forum-shopping; since then the figure has risen to two-thirds (Margaret Newkirk, “Courts compete to bag big cases”, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Feb. 29).
Banquet hall liable for gang shooting
The Troostwood Banquet Hall rented out its space to a man who was holding a dance. People who lease the hall are required to provide uniformed security officers, but on November 26, 2002, that didn’t stop a gang member from firing shots into a crowd, killing 17-year-old Kristi Carroll. A Jackson County jury held the owner of building liable. The plaintiffs’ lawyer, Michael Fletcher, “told jurors to remember that police had been called to the two square blocks around the banquet hall 200 times in the past two years,” so apparently business owners in high-crime areas are now responsible for the crime that occurs on or near their premises. (Joe Lambe, “Jury awards $5 million in slaying”, Kansas City Star, Mar. 5; “Police investigate teen’s death”, AP, Nov. 26, 2002).
Lawsuit: illegal to create “empty space”
Kelly McGinley, a Christian radio broadcaster in Mobile, Alabama, sued over the removal of a monument of the Ten Commandments on the grounds that the empty space left behind acted as a monument to “nontheism,” thus violating the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. It will be no surprise that the lawsuit was dismissed at the district court level and that the dismissal was affirmed by the Eleventh Circuit. (Stan Bailey, “Judges say monument lawsuit lacks merit”, Birmingham News, Mar. 6; McGinley v. Houston).
QFC mad cow class action
In other grocery lawsuit news: you may remember back in December that a single Canadian cow was found to have mad cow disease, and as a safety precaution, tens of thousands of pounds of beef were voluntarily recalled in addition to the 10,510 pounds the USDA ordered recalled. Well, it seems that a Seattle-area woman, Jill Crowson, is bringing a class action against supermarket chain QFC. Says the suit, it wasn’t enough for QFC to merely pull the meat from its shelves, post signs, and make public announcements; even though coverage of the lone mad cow dominated headlines for a week, QFC should also have taken the individual step of contacting customers who purchased beef to warn them–and presumably have managed to accomplish this instantaneously on Christmas Eve, since QFC learned about the beef on December 24 and Ms. Crowson ate it on December 25.
Now, it’s exceedingly unlikely that Ms. Crowson or her family has suffered any injury from her Christmas-day tacos. First, it’s unlikely that Ms. Crowson had any meat from the infected cow; second, it’s extremely unlikely (and there is no evidence) that one will contract variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease from the muscle meat of a cow (the real danger is the relatively unpopular brain and spinal cord); third, even those who do eat infected brain and spinal tissue are unlikely to contract vCJD, which has stricken 150 people out of the millions exposed worldwide. Ms. Crowson probably suffered more risk driving to and from the grocery store or her lawyer’s office. Nevertheless, she wishes damages for the ”stress and fear” of vCJD–though if such longshot risks cause her such anxiety, one would think she would do more due diligence in life. (Lewis Kamb, “QFC says it acted appropriately in beef recall”, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Mar. 6; “Seattle family sues grocery chain over mad cow claim”, AP, Mar. 6; Kyung M. Song, “Clyde Hill woman sues QFC over suspect meat”, Seattle Times, Mar. 6; complaint; QFC statement).