- Everyone’s got an opinion on Dr. Flea’s trial-blogging fiasco [Beldar, Childs, Adler @ Volokh (lively comments including Ted), Turkewitz (who also provides huge link roundups here and here), KevinMD]
- Sidebar: some other doctor-bloggers have shut down or curtailed posting lately amid pressures from disapproving employers and patient-privacy legal worries [KevinMD first, second posts; Distractible Mind, Blogaholic]
- Amusement park unwisely allows “extremely large” woman to occupy two seats on the roller coaster, and everyone lands with a thump in court [Morris County, N.J. Daily Record via Childs]
- Prosecutors all over are trying to live down the “Duke effect” [NLJ]; how to prevent the next such debacle [Cernovich]
- Bad for their image: trial lawyers’ AAJ (formerly ATLA) files ethics complaint against Judge Roy Pearson Jr., of $65 million lost-pants-suit infamy [Legal Times]
- More suits assert rights to “virtual property” in Second Life, World of Warcraft online simulations [Parloff]
- Plea deals and immunity in the Conrad Black affair [Steyn, OC Register]
- Another round in case of local blog sent nastygram for allegedly defaming the city of Pomona, Calif. [Foothill Cities; earlier]
- “There once was a guy named Lerach…” — Milberg prosecution has reached the limerick stage [WSJ Law Blog comments]
- Government of India plans to fight Americans’ claims of intellectual property over yoga postures [Times Online; earlier here and here]
- After car-deer collision, lawyer goes after local residents who allegedly made accident more likely by feeding the creatures [seven years ago on Overlawyered]
Archive for June, 2007
Roundup – June 4
Is it, or isn’t it?
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It is: “Hopefully this means a better life,” says the energy company employee who won a $40 million judgment (almost half of it punitives) against Qwest Communications after the telephone pole he was working on collapsed and injured him. He was lucky; had he worked for the phone company, he likely would have been barred from suing by worker’s comp laws.
“I could hear my heart pounding, pulsing faster and faster, and I tried keeping calm, but when they started reading the verdict I was in a state of shock,” he said. “It’s justice.”
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It isn’t: “The lawsuit wasn’t about money, he said.” That’s New Hampshire resident Joseph Hewett, the rejected applicant for The Apprentice who settled his age discrimination lawsuit against Donald Trump and the producers of the show.
“This was never about a disgruntled applicant trying to get back at (Trump’s) organization, it just gave me an opportunity to advocate on behalf of a protected class,” he said. “This was about the fact that I believe an entire class was aggrieved.”
His evidence that age was what kept him off the show was a slam dunk; after all, he “claimed he was qualified for the show because he graduated magna cum laude from college and because of his ‘many years of experience maintaining large commercial properties.'”
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Well, maybe it is: Human rights advocacy groups have been (mis)using the Alien Tort Claims Act for years to litigate foreign events in American courts, but those advocacy groups were motivated primarily by ideology. Now class action law firms, sensing an opportunity, are getting in on the action. Overlawyered repeat offender Motley Rice (many links) is suing officials of the United Arab Emirates on behalf of boys from South Asia and Africa who claim to have been kidnapped and enslaved as camel jockeys in the UAE; the case has no connection whatsoever to the U.S.
The human rights movement isn’t thrilled because they figure that these lawyers are really in it for the money and not the cause; conservative tort reformers aren’t thrilled because they see it as just another example of entrepreneurial lawyering by trial lawyers.
John M. Eubanks, a lawyer with Motley Rice who represents the former jockeys, disputed both points.
“We’re trying to right wrongs that have been committed,” Mr. Eubanks said. “It’s not about money. It’s about exacting some form of justice.”
Uh, yeah:
Pressed, Mr. Eubanks conceded that the case was at least partly about money. “There is a contingency fee,” he said. “These cases do cost a lot of money. We don’t get paid unless we collect.”
Offer refunds, get sued anyway: XM Radio
If you see Birmingham, Alabama lawyer Darrell L. Cartwright walking down the street, you might want to see if you can find some spare change in your pockets to give to him. He obviously must be hard up for money, because how else to explain the lawsuit he filed a couple of weeks ago?
On Monday, May 21, 2007, XM Satellite Radio suffered a satellite problem that caused partial or total service outages for parts of two days, lasting about 24 hours total. By late Tuesday, the problem was resolved, and XM announced that it would offer a two-day credit, worth about 87¢ — yes, 87¢ — to any customer who requested it. Problem solved. Everything right with the world, no?
No. You’ve forgotten about poor Mr. Cartwright. On Wednesday, May 23 — the day after XM promised a refund to all its customers — Mr. Cartwright found two neighbors of his who had subscribed to XM radio, slapped their names on a lawsuit, called it a class action suit, and demanded damages sustained by all its customers, in an unspecified amount of at least $5 million. (Via the Consumerist, which helpfully posted a copy of the complaint, which from the looks of things, took about 7 1/2 minutes of time to draft, typos and all: PDF.)
Now, you may wonder what benefit consumers get from this litigation, but to be fair, the lawsuit also demanded that the court issue an injunction to prohibit XM from suffering from technical problems in the future.
Sadly, it apparently isn’t sanctionable conduct, as the James Frey case we’ve discussed (Jun. 2, May 21, and earlier links therein) illustrates, for trial lawyers to file lawsuits demanding refunds that companies have already offered to their customers.
Thank the lawyers: Tonya Bell at Unifest
We didn’t note it at the time, but in December, Valentina Chambers won $945 thousand in her suit against DC police from a Washington DC jury. You see, a scofflaw was leading police on a car chase, and hit Chambers’ car, injuring her, and, like trial lawyers want, the deep pocket was liable for not simply letting the criminal get away—though at least not liable for the $100 million Chambers sought. (Henri Cauvin, “D.C. Ordered to Pay in Police Chase”, Washington Post, Dec. 14). Such liability concerns cause DC to have the strictest police chase policy in the country, something we’ve noted has expensive consequences for the non-criminal element of the city.
Tonya Bell, who some say is a temporary worker for Marion Barry, was driving in Southeast D.C. Saturday night, apparently after a full day of smoking crack. She rear-ended a police car at 7:15 pm, and drove away instead of stopping: sure enough, DC police followed the trial-lawyer-driven policy and broke off the chase. Bell rewarded the officers’ diligence by laughingly driving her Volvo through a crowd of people at a street-fair a half hour later, injuring at least forty, before police threw a couple of motorbikes under her vehicle to stop it. Thank the lawyers for yet another wonderful contribution to public safety, though we won’t see any class actions against the trial bar for this one. (Robert E. Pierre, Sue Anne Pressley Montes and Yolanda Woodlee, “Driver Used Crack Before Festival Crash, D.C. Police Say”, Washington Post, Jun. 4).
Don’t
More things that it’s really inadvisable to do if you’re a lawyer:
- Tell a judge to her face in open court that you consider her “a few French fries short of a Happy Meal” (William Smith of McDermott Will & Emery LLP, facing possible exclusion from the right to practice in the bankruptcy court in question; Crain’s Chicago Business);
- Show up in a hospital room to recruit as client a heavily medicated crash victim, then discourage him from going after the other driver’s personal assets in the case, without mentioning that the other driver is your own wife’s grandfather (Jeffrey Hark of Cherry Hill, N.J., referred for a state-bar ethical investigation although a legal-malpractice claim against him failed for lack of a showing of damages; NJLJ);
- As part of a $59 million settlement of Benlate fungicide-damage cases, accept a secret $6 million side payment from defendant duPont in exchange for (among other services) agreeing to file no more cases (Roland R. St. Louis Jr. and Francisco R. Rodriguez of Miami, disbarred and given a two-year suspension respectively; NLJ, Elefant).
U.K.: Recliner training?
Resting the wrong way in the U.K. Midlands:
…the men and women of the Greater Manchester fire service have been told they can only rest in prescribed reclining chairs – and only after they have been trained to use them.
Now, however, three experienced firemen are facing disciplinary action over “involvement in the use of unauthorised rest facilities”. …
Many fire stations have already been transformed by health and safety rules with the disappearance of the traditional fireman’s pole, deemed too dangerous to use.
(James Tozer, “Firemen feel the heat from health and safety for sleeping on the floor”, Daily Mail, Jun. 1).
“No warning…. just a lawsuit”
“Last month, we were hit with two new patent troll cases. With each, there was no warning, no offer to license – just a lawsuit.” Sun Microsystems general counsel Mike Dillon doesn’t hold back (May 14).
“Anatomy of a Mass Tort”
Experienced defense counsel Beck and Herrmann have a must-read post summarizing the lifecycle of a mass tort., touching on many of the themes Walter and I have covered in the past: the at-best parasitic irrelevance of the plaintiffs’ bar to the safety of the product (at worst, trial lawyers are counterproductive); the feeding frenzy of peripheral litigation and ambulance-chasing to sign up clients; the irrelevancies of game-show style trials to the ultimate issues of the case, much less public safety.
Beck and Herrmann’s model could certainly use some expansion; if anything, they understate the absurdity of the status quo. There’s no mention of the peripheral “consumer-fraud” class actions on behalf of the customers who have suffered no injury; the expense and harassment of discovery; the jockeying of the plaintiffs’ bar to plant misleading stories in the press to taint the jury; the efforts to use taxpayer resources of various trial-lawyer-friendly state attorney generals to harass the defendant; the lobbying by the plaintiffs’ bar to force the defendant to settle before plaintiffs have to test their complaints’ theories in the judicial system; the mass fraud by trial lawyers that almost invariably accompanies the mass tort.
15 Minutes of Fame + Lawyers = Bankruptcy
For a brief period in 2004, Jessica Cutler was the hottest story in Washington. Cutler was the Senate aide who blogged at Washingtonienne about her sexual experiences with various Beltway insiders. After being exposed (pun intended), Cutler parlayed her notoriety into a six-figure book deal and Playboy photo shoot.
Unfortunately for Cutler, she had provided enough details in her blog for people to deduce the identity of some of her sexual partners. One of those, Robert Steinbuch, decided to sue her for $20 million for public disclosure of private facts (i.e., “invasion of privacy”) — thereby becoming only one of many recent examples of someone complaining about publicity… by filing a lawsuit that publicizes the acts he allegedly wants to keep secret.
In any case, Cutler began running into problems with her lawyers — namely, that they wanted her to pay them, and she had a different idea. We covered this in June 2006 (and see the Wonkette link in the comments). Now Cutler has filed for bankruptcy. Of course, we don’t know where all of her money went, but we know a good chunk of it went to her attorneys. Good luck collecting that $20 million, Mr. Steinbuch.
(As for collecting, Steinbuch had added some deep pockets to one of his lawsuits against Cutler — Hyperion Press (which published Cutler’s book), Disney (which owns Hyperion), HBO (which purchased the television rights to her story), and Time Warner (which owns HBO) — but that lawsuit, which Steinbuch filed in Arkansas, was dismissed in February on the grounds that it didn’t belong in Arkansas. Steinbuch has appealed, but his chances of success appear low, and his claims against HBO, Time Warner, and Disney are completely meritless anyway.)
“Should they disbar TuberculEsq?”
David Giacalone has some thoughts on now-notorious Atlanta personal injury lawyer Andrew J. Speaker, who doesn’t seem to have lived up very well to the Lakoff-prescribed billing of “public protection attorney” (Jun. 1). But see: Elizabeth Whelan, in the New York Post, thinks the pillorying of Speaker’s decision to fly home has been overdone (“Free Andrew! Hysteria and the TB Case”, Jun. 2). Updates: Jul. 8 (some passengers sue Speaker), Dec. 2 (no one flying with him caught TB).