Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Archive for October, 2006

Round-up

Some quick links:

  • Michael Krauss reviews a Mississippi Court of Appeals decision on a bogus fender-bender claim. [Point of Law; Gilbert v. Ireland]
  • Yet another example of overbroad laws on sex offenders (see also Jul. 3, 2005). [Above the Law]
  • “As far as the law is concerned, those individuals whose pacemakers fail are the lucky ones.” [TortsProf Blog]
  • Emerson Electric sues NBC in St. Louis over a scene in an hourly drama where a cheerleader mangles her hand in a branded garbage disposal. [Hollywood Reporter, Esq.; Lattman; Defamer and Defamer update; St. Louis Post Dispatch]
  • A case that’s really not about the money: Man stiffs restaurant over $46 check, defends himself against misdemeanor charge with $500/lawyer. [St. Petersburg Times; Obscure Store]
  • Bill Childs catches yet another Justinian Lane misrepresentation. See also Sep. 26 and Sep. 17 (cf. related posts on Lane’s co-blogger Oct. 3 and Sep. 25), and we might just have to retire the category, since we can only hope to scratch the surface. Point of Law has the Gary Schwartz law review article discussed by Childs. [TortsProf Blog and ] Lane’s post also deliberately confuses non-economic damages caps with total damages caps: nothing stops someone with more than $250,000 in economic damages from recovering more than $250,000, even in a world with non-economic damages caps.
  • Update: Bill Childs in the comments-section to Lane:

    “Of course, all of this gets pretty far afield from what I originally wrote and that you’ve conceded, which is that you (unintentionally but sloppily) misrepresented the facts of the Pinto memo, failed to research its background beyond what was apparently represented to you, and still haven’t (last time I checked, at 9:10 p.m.) updated your site to reflect your error. Nor have you approved the trackback I sent to the site. You’ve posted comments to that very entry and another entry has gone up on the site, but readers still see the plainly inaccurate statement that the memo excerpt you show was Ford evaluating tort liability for rearendings, when in fact it was Ford evaluating a regulatory proposal for rollovers using numbers from NHTSA.

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Heads I win, tails don’t count files: Ohio HMO suit

The US Supreme Court denied certiorari on United HealthCare’s attempt to enforce an arbitration agreement in its contracts with doctors who filed an Ohio class action over reimbursements. The underlying class action is essentially identical to one that a federal court threw out as meritless in July, though this isn’t mentioned in the television coverage, much less that from Bizarro-Overlawyered. The Class Action Fairness Act effectively ends this sort of Russian-roulette game where plaintiffs get multiple chances to win a gigantic class action by filing in multiple jurisdictions, but does not apply to class actions (like this one) filed before 2004.

The AMA has supported these lawsuits, which is disappointing, to be sure; as I noted on Point of Law in July, “Next time the AMA complains about the costs of excessive meritless litigation, they can perhaps look in the mirror.”

The plaintiffs’ attorney is Overlawyered favorite Stanley Chesley: see Jul. 4, Mar. 6, Aug. 24, 2005, et cetera.

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Tenure for auto dealers

Worsening Detroit’s agonies: special laws at both state and federal levels expose automakers to lawsuits from dealerships that they try to cut loose as superfluous. Does GM want to reduce the number of Chevy dealerships in, say, Buffalo, to reflect its declining market share there or falling population? Then it’ll have to come up with millions to induce dealers to accept buyouts. The laws don’t inflict a comparable burden on automakers whose fortunes are on the upswing, such as Toyota and Honda. (Joann Muller, “Dealer Surplus”, Forbes, Oct. 16).

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Canada: deported Russian spy sues for readmittance

“A former Russian undercover agent who lived under a false name in Toronto and spied for the Russian government is suing Canada’s immigration department for refusing to allow her to return here as a landed immigrant.” Elena Miller, nee Yelena Olshanskaya, thinks Ottawa should let bygones be bygones about her spy past: “I have dealt with the Canadian government in a co-operative, respectful and low-key manner, despite inquiries from the Canadian media and offers for a book/film,” she said. (Marina Jimenez, “Russian spy sues Ottawa for being left out in cold”, Globe and Mail (Toronto), Oct. 4).

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New at Point of Law: foiling dishonest lawyers

Over at Point of Law, Boston attorney Peter Morin and I have collaborated on a new column about a simple way to discourage bad-apple lawyers from exploiting vulnerable clients.

…The simple fix is a rule that goes by the name “payee notification”. It would require insurance companies to notify a claimant when they forward a settlement check to claimant’s counsel. At a single stroke, the client is made aware of the timing and size of the settlement, taking away most of the leeway a dishonest lawyer has to withhold the client’s funds.

Several other states, including California, New York, and Connecticut, have already instituted payee-notification rules, and they have worked well. … So who would oppose it? Interesting that you should ask. …

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Web-accessibility suits, revived

In San Francisco, federal judge Marilyn Hall Patel has allowed a lawsuit by the National Federation of the Blind to go forward against the Target Corp., charging that the retailer’s website, Target.com, is insufficiently “accessible” to blind users. Websites are considered accessible to blind users when they (e.g.) include summaries or transcripts for audio/video elements and alt-text for images, while avoiding designs that require users to rely on graphic elements for navigation. Disabled-rights groups had suffered a serious setback a few years ago in their legal campaign to enforce web accessibility, when a court ruled that Southwest Airlines was not liable for the inaccessibility of its online ticket reservation system to some handicapped users. However, Judge Patel (regarded as relatively liberal by the standards of the federal bench) distinguished that case on the grounds that the Target website had more of a “nexus” to physical Target stores than did the airline’s ticketing site. (“Target can be sued if Web site inaccessible to blind, judge says”, AP/Houston Chronicle, Sept. 7; Bob Egelko, “Ruling on Web site access for blind”, San Francisco Chronicle, Sept. 8; Sheri Qualters, “Discrimination Case Opens Door to Internet ADA Claims”, National Law Journal/Law.com, Sept. 28; Slashdot thread). The ruling, in PDF format, is here (courtesy Howard Bashman, who also rounds up other links).

Longtime readers will recall that I’ve been much involved in the web-accessibility controversy over the years. Some links: my May 2000 column for Reason on the subject; various posts on this site, 1999-2002; my House testimony of Feb. 2000; Jan. 8, 2004. And this site’s earlier coverage of the Target case provoked one of the biggest comments discussions ever (Feb. 28, 2006).

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Sued over blog posts

USA Today has a survey of cases filed against bloggers and commenters. A religious broadcaster and publisher has sued over a description of its president as “a shark” who comes from a “family of nincompoops.” And an ad agency that produced a tourism campaign for the state of Maine filed, but soon dropped, a suit against a critic who ridiculed the ads as a waste of money. (Laura Parker, “Courts are asked to crack down on bloggers, websites”, Oct. 3). More: Sacha Pfeiffer, “In court, blogs can come back to dog the writers”, Boston Globe, Sept. 28.

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