I’m scheduled to be a guest this morning (Wed.) on the Steve Malzberg show on Atlanta’s WGST at 10:05 a.m. Eastern, 640 AM on the dial, to discuss the John Roberts nomination.
Archive for 2005
EU shelves “tan ban”
Ducking a heated controversy, the European Parliament has declined to rule on “whether workers such as bare-chested builders should be required by their employers to cover up to avoid excessive sun.” The issue will now be left up to national legislatures. “MEPs found themselves under siege from angry business groups and German building workers, who staged a shirtless protest.” (David Rennie, “MEPs run for cover in ‘tan ban’ dilemma”, Daily Telegraph, Sept. 8). “Socialists and Greens argued EU legislation was vital to cut skin cancer rates among outdoor workers, but the right denounced it as an example of the nanny state running amok and over-burdening business.” (Aine Gallagher, “Builders and barmaids avoid EU tan ban”, Reuters/Swissinfo.com, Sept. 7). More: Jim Leitzel at Vice Squad has the dirndl angle (Sept. 11).
Good news: grand jury doesn’t indict you
The Ron Thulin show
At 1:30 Central, 2:30 Eastern today I’m scheduled to be a guest on San Antonio’s Ron Thulin show, 1310 AM, discussing the John Roberts nomination.
Don’ts
More misconduct by lawyers which resulted in sanctions or other consequences, as reported on Law.com in August: Don’t seize on a typographical error made by your opponent as an excuse to ship documents to yourself and then argue that you complied with a subpoena (Glendale, Calif. lawyer Geoffrey Mousseau, hit with more than $12,000 in sanctions which were upheld on appeal)(Mike McKee, “Lawyer Sanctioned After Placing a Bad Bet on a Typo”, The Recorder, Aug. 24). Don’t keep filing lawsuits based on theories that the Third Circuit has previously rejected in your own cases (H. Francis deLone Jr. of Wayne, Pa., hit with federal Rule 11 sanctions arising from a civil rights suit he filed on behalf of a transit worker fired for testing positive for cocaine)(Shannon P. Duffy, “Lawyer Sanctioned — Again — for Losing Theory”, The Legal Intelligencer, Aug. 17). More don’ts: Aug. 3.
Youth football league needn’t re-weigh 11-year-old
Suburban Detroit:
A Macomb County judge refused Thursday to order a Sterling Heights flag football league to reweigh or reinstate an 11-year-old boy who was too heavy at his official weigh-in to play for the league.
Circuit Judge Deborah A. Servitto said that Kyle St. Peter of Sterling Heights would not suffer irreparable harm if he is not allowed to play with the Sterling Football Club, which begins its season Sunday….
The league requires 11- and 12-year-olds to weigh 150 pounds or less on the day they pick up their equipment.
Kyle weighed 164 pounds Aug. 2, the day he received his helmet and flags, but the league’s commissioner gave him two more weigh-ins. On the last one, Aug. 14, he weighed 151 pounds on the league’s scale — 2 pounds more than he weighed at home that morning.
(Nate Trela, “Boy loses fight to play football”, Detroit Free Press, Sept. 9)(hat tip: Insider Online).
The David Allen show
I’ll be a guest on the David Allen show, Jacksonville, Fla., this evening at 9 EDT to discuss John Roberts’ nomination.
Flood damage excluded? Pay anyway
Standard homeowners’ policies exclude coverage of flood damage unless it is purchased at a substantial additional premium, a fact well known to most property owners in high-risk areas. Mississippi lawyer Dickie Scruggs, a familiar figure to readers of this space, had the foresight to purchase flood insurance for his Pascagoula home, now partly destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. Now he wants the world’s insurers to pay billions for the properties they didn’t collect a premium for insuring, as well — perhaps scores of billions, if the principle is to extend to Louisiana. “Mr. Scruggs said he plans to urge Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood to try to override flood-exclusion clauses in homeowners’ policies in that state in the interest of public policy, a move that could force insurers to pay many billions more toward rebuilding costs.” (Theo Francis, John D. McKinnon and Peter Sanders, “Paying for Flood Damage Looms as Big Challenge”, WSJ, Sept. 8)(sub). An operative with the Mississippi Trial Lawyers Association says he hopes that “people on the Coast and their friends statewide ratchet up the political pressure” to make the insurers pay. (Anita Lee, “Claims Dispute”, Biloxi Sun-Herald, Sept. 9). Megan McArdle thinks it’s all a brilliant way to scare insurers away from offering even conventional coverage in the future (Sept. 8). See also Point of Law, Sept. 9. More: Martin Grace Sept. 8, Sept. 8 again, Sept. 13.
Married man posed as single
And so Tiffany Wang and Jing Huang, who fell for Dr. Khaled Zeitoun’s online sweet-talk, want cash damages for infliction of severe emotional distress. Their lawyers are suing in Manhattan Supreme Court. (Kerry Burke and Helen Peterson, “Doctor real strange love”, New York Daily News, Sept. 9).
“$16.3 million in lawyer fees OK”
Waving big fees through the gate:
A Denver District Court judge overseeing a $50 million class-action settlement from Qwest Communications shot down a shareholder group’s request to limit plaintiff attorney fees to $10 million.
Judge John Coughlin gave short shrift to arguments presented by the Association of U S West Retirees, which asked the court — at the very least — to delay settlement approval until attorneys submitted detailed documentation of their hours and expenses.
At a fairness hearing [Aug. 30], the judge ruled the class counsel, led by Los Angeles law firm Lerach Coughlin, was entitled to $15 million, or 30 percent of the settlement, plus an additional $1.3 million in out-of-pocket expenses….
[The retiree association] wanted proof of each firm’s time records and questioned several six-figure expenses, including $176,000 for meals, hotel and travel and $105,000 for photocopying.
“That’s 25 cents a page using your own office copy machine,” Denver attorney Curtis Kennedy, representing the retirees, said Tuesday after the hearing. “Don’t we at least get a discount for volume? Why not 5 cents a page?”
…[L]ast month, the association filed its objections over attorney fees, complaining that the more than $16.3 million Lerach had requested would leave just $33 million to be distributed among the thousands of plaintiff shareholders they represented….
[Kennedy] said the blanket $15 million contingency award represented 2.3 times what the plaintiff lawyers actually put into the case. Paralegal time alone would be compensated at the rate of more than $400 an hour.
“Times are changing,” he told the judge. “Shareholders are beginning to feel they need to step up and object…that these attorney fees are getting out of hand.”
How often will they feel it worth objecting if, as here, they get the back of the judge’s hand for their troubles? (John Accola, Rocky Mountain News, Aug. 31).