Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Archive for March, 2005

Priceless pets, cont’d

Boston: “The family of Cassius, the dog killed by leaking electricity from an old NStar Electric lamppost site, said last night it had turned down $200,000 in ‘comfort money’ from NStar and is demanding $740,000 from the utility or it will sue. The family said it picked the dollar figure because it equals NStar chief executive Thomas J. May’s annual salary.” It’s so hard to be an ordinary family grieving for a lost pet — much fairer if we were an affluent family grieving for a lost pet (Peter J. Howe, “Dog’s family demands $740,000”, Boston Globe, Mar. 8). For earlier stories on pets’ sentimental value and the dollar figures attached thereto, see Jul. 30, Nov. 21 and Dec. 10, 2003, etc.

More: Robert Ambrogi (LawSites) thinks I should have included more details from the Globe story that tend to cast the DeVito family’s suit in a more sympathetic light, such as that (his words): “The family would donate most of the $750,000 to the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and the Animal Rescue League.” My response:

I wonder how you reach the conclusion that the family “would donate most of the $750,000” ($740,000 per the Globe) to animal charities. At the press conference, according to the Globe, attorney John G. Swomley — who was at pains to portray the suit as not a money grab — said the family plans on “keeping $200,000, plus enough to pay for four years of college for Kyle and his brother Alec, 10”. At, say, Boston College (currently $37,413 room and board, and who knows how high the figure’ll be by the time the boys are grown?) that amounts to roughly another $300,000 ($37K x four years x 2 boys), leaving $240,000 of the settlement. And assuming Swomley takes, say, 30% of the $740,000 = $220,000 for his fee, that would leave a grand total of $20,000 to go to the animal charities — assuming there aren’t expenses and that sort of thing to be charged against the remainder.

You’re probably right that I should have expanded my three-sentence summary of the case at Overlawyered to delve further into these matters, since they afford valuable insight into how lawyers can manage the p.r. aspects of their cases.

Further: his response. (& letter to the editor, Mar. 15).

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Chimpanzee victim St. James Davis v. West Covina

Former NASCAR driver St. James Davis is in critical condition after losing a nose, a cheek, an eye, his lips, a foot, all of his fingers, his testicles, and part of his buttocks to a disturbingly gruesome chimpanzee attack at a wildlife sanctuary Thursday; his wife, LaDonna, also lost a thumb before the escaped chimps were shot by the sanctuary owners.

The Davises were visiting a different chimpanzee, their former pet, Moe. They had previously settled a civil rights lawsuit against West Covina for $100,000 as part of the fallout stemming from the city criminally charging the couple for keeping a dangerous animal. His lawyer, Gloria Allred, accused the city of overreacting when Moe bit a policeman and a woman in separate incidents, and succeeded in creating enough of a press-storm that the city backed down after having poured a quarter million dollars into Moe-related legal fees. (The policeman required $250,000 in medical treatment.) Davis won a previous lawsuit against West Covina in the 1960s allowing him to keep his chimpanzee in town because a judge held the chimp “doesn’t have the traits of a wild animal and was somewhat better behaved than some people.” But never fear, Ms. Allred is on this case also, and has been cited by the press as demanding “immediate answers”; the couple hasn’t decided whether they’ll sue. (David Pierson and Mitchell Landsberg, “A Primate Party Gone Horribly Awry”, Los Angeles Times, Mar. 5; Christina L. Esparza, “Saga of Moe takes a bizarre twist”, San Gabriel Valley Tribune, Mar. 3; Christina L. Esparza, Ruby Gonzales, and Karen Rubin, “Moe’s owners mauled”, San Gabriel Valley Tribune, Mar. 4; AP, Mar. 5; “Woman Has Faith in Chimps Despite Attack”, Good Morning America, Mar. 7; “Officials try to find what caused chimp attack”, KGET-17, Mar. 7; Cara Mia DiMassa, “2 Cities Can’t Get the Hang of Chimp’s Situation”, Los Angeles Times, May 10, 2002; Linda Deutsch, AP, Oct. 15, 1999; AFP, Feb. 4, 2000 (kibo commentary); Richard Winton, “Los Angeles to remain Moe-less”, Los Angeles Times, Jul. 21, 2001; Jeff Jardine, “Chimp charm is film illusion”, Modesto Bee, Mar. 6). Once upon a time, Moe was considered a leading candidate for the principle that animals should have court standing. (Amanda Onion, “Lawyers: Animals Should Be Able to Sue”, ABC News, May 13, 2002).

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Iowa Poetry Awards

“An online group of self-described ‘literary watchdogs’ is threatening a class-action lawsuit against the UI Press, alleging that recent awards for poetry were unfairly given to writers with ‘illicit’ ties to the program. Postings at foetry.com demand a return of $20 reading fees after the 2004 Iowa Poetry Awards — open to anyone inside or outside the university — were given to people with ties to the UI. University officials note that the contest employs blind judging, in which the authors’ names are removed from the manuscripts.” (Drew Kerr, “Two allege bias in UI Press poetry awards”, Daily Iowan, Feb. 28)(via Schaeffer who got it from Maud Newton).

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Ford’s $31 million sweetheart verdict

The famously pro-plaintiff jurisdiction of Zavala County, Texas once again lived up to its reputation the other day when one of its juries returned a $31 million verdict against the Ford Motor Co. in the case of the rollover of a 2000 Explorer which killed two occupants and injured two others. Legal commentators around the web are abuzz about the most remarkable angle of the story, namely that until deep into the trial Ford did not learn that one of the jurors, Crystal City city manager Diana Palacios, was the girlfriend of Jesse Gamez, one of the lawyers on the team of plaintiff’s attorneys headed by Houston’s Mikal Watts. Ford also presented evidence that Palacios, incredibly, had actually solicited two of the crash victims for her boyfriend to represent. Nonetheless, Judge Amado Abascal refused to declare a mistrial, instead dismissing Palacios from the jury and issuing a supposedly curative instruction to the remaining jurors. David Bernstein, Tom Kirkendall and John Steele comment. (John MacCormack, “Juror’s relationship with lawyer stalls Ford trial”, San Antonio Express-News, Feb. 23). (Addendum: one of John Steele’s readers has drawn his attention to this 1997 Texas Supreme Court opinion which co-stars the very same Mr. Gamez and Ms. Palacios in a Norplant case — very curious stuff.)

The other issues raised by the verdict, however, deserve attention as well. The accident was caused by the speeding of the vehicle’s driver, and none of the four occupants was wearing a seat belt; all were ejected. Attorney Watts (Apr. 12-14, 2002) advanced the theory that the injuries were Ford’s fault because it should have used laminated instead of conventional glass in the side windows as a sort of substitute restraint system. (John MacCormack, “Zavala jurors hit Ford for $28 million”, San Antonio Express-News, Mar. 2). Notes the Detroit News:

Ford said laminated glass wouldn’t have kept the women from being ejected and was hardly ever used in side windows when the vehicle was made.

“At that time, 99.9 percent of all vehicles made by all manufacturers, through the 2000 model year, had the kind of tempered glass used in this vehicle,” Vokes said. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration doesn’t require laminated glass in side windows, she said.

(“Explorer suit costs Ford $31 million”, Detroit News, Mar. 3) AutoBlog has a short write-up with a good comments section; note in particular comment #22, on one possible safety advantage of not using laminated glass on cars’ sides. More: Mar. 22, May 13, May 16, May 29.

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Office “love contracts”

Continue on the upswing, reports the NLJ. The use of such contracts is “not a majority rule yet, but it’s increasing,” according to April Boyer of Kirkpatrick & Lockhart Nicholson Graham’s Miami office, while Stephen Tedesco, a partner in the San Francisco office of Littler Mendelson, says he’s “completed hundreds of the contracts for his clients over the past few years”. (Lindsay Fortado, “Workplace ‘Love Contracts’ on the Rise”, National Law Journal, Mar. 3). See Dec. 3-5 and Dec. 31, 1999, May 3, 2000, and Dec. 10, 2001, among other entries on our harassment-law page.

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Welcome New York Times readers

Legal correspondent Adam Liptak quotes me in a Sunday Week in Review piece on the prospect that lawyers, restrained from asking for unlimited non-economic damages, will instead seek and obtain higher economic damages from juries. I should make clear for the record, by the way, that despite my quoted remark expressing one reason to be skeptical that such limits can be readily gotten around, I haven’t yet seen Columbia law prof Catherine Sharkey’s forthcoming paper, and intend to keep an open mind about it. (Adam Liptak, “Go Ahead. Test a Lawyer’s Ingenuity. Try to Limit Damages”, New York Times, Mar. 6).

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Update: Mississippi “60 Minutes” suit

More than two years ago (see Dec. 16-17, 2002), following a CBS “60 Minutes” installment exposing “jackpot justice” in Jefferson County, Mississippi, two former jurors struck back with an intimidating lawsuit against the network and two local interviewees. Now Ted reports at Point of Law (Mar. 4) that the Fifth Circuit has affirmed the suit’s dismissal by a federal district court; that court “assumed jurisdiction after it found that state defendants had been fraudulently joined in an attempt to defeat federal jurisdiction”.

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