- Encouraging kids’ adoption is a great thing to do, but there are right and wrong ways of going about it [U.K. Daily Mail]
- Defensive medical testing: “Every day I work as a doctor, I must choose between committing malpractice and committing insurance fraud.” [Dr. Paula Hartzell in Medical Economics]
- After serving 2+ years for consensual sex with fellow teen, Genarlow Wilson (Feb. 8, Mar. 6) may walk free, or maybe not [CNN; views of some Andrew Sullivan readers]
- “We need to eliminate nuisance lawsuits through ‘loser-pays’ provisions.” [candidate Giuliani @ NRO]
- Boston Herald (May 11, etc.) pays $3.4 million to local judge to settle libel verdict [Globe]
- Blind squirrel finds acorn dept.: American Prospect weblog promotes a good idea, abolishing peremptory challenges [Tapped; more]
- Disciplinary hearing begins against Duke DA Nifong [ABCNews.com]; you’d think lacrosse player’s out-of-town alibi might have raised a red flag [K. C. Johnson via Cernovich]
- Another flap, this time from Oklahoma, about a doc who vows to turn away malpractice-suit advocates as patients [Enid News & Eagle via KevinMD]
- No shock, Sherlock: mud-slinging, money-flinging found to be big problems in state high court races [AP]
- In that curious saga of Madison County, Ill.’s oft-suing Peach family (earlier posts here and here) Armettia Peach has settled her leaky-roof case against Granite City [M. C. Record]
- New York “plastic surgery addict” loses case claiming doctor should have counseled her against going under the knife so often [six years ago on Overlawyered]
Archive for June, 2007
Welcome TimesOnline readers
And thanks to the TimesOnline for naming us one of the top three business legal blogs worldwide as part of its list of the top fifty business blogs. Here’s a link to our coverage of UK issues, or read Walter’s posts about Walter Olson’s Times (UK) columns.
“Running Doctors Out Of The Emergency Room”
Reader J.B. points us to Tampa physician David Lubin writing in the Tampa Tribune June 11 on the Lucia med-mal verdict we discussed in May. The column is must-read:
Spoof of “The Hammer” TV ads
It seems those Jim (“The Hammer”) Shapiro TV ads (Feb. 6, Mar. 7, Apr. 9), in which the ethically-challenged former Rochester attorney rants in manic style as explosions and other violent footage roll in the background, have inspired parodies on YouTube. The one above, featuring “Jack (The Hammer) Shapiro”, is from Canada-based DevoImprov; a second parody of a more homemade texture can be found here.
ABA Journal on tobacco settlement
The piece’s subtitle: “How greed, hubris and high-stakes lobbying laid waste to the $246 billion tobacco settlement”. Without necessarily endorsing every point in the piece — this is the ABA Journal, after all — it’s still striking how what was once a lonely critique of the settlement has now been accepted as history’s verdict:
The only big winners in the litigation appear to be the tobacco companies, the state treasurers and the lawyers who represented both sides….
…$15 billion has been awarded to the private lawyers hired by the state attorneys general. That’s the largest attorney fee award in history. More than $100 million — Big Tobacco won’t say precisely how much — has been paid to the lawyers defending the companies.
“The tobacco litigation was a failure of historic proportions,” says Linda Eads, a law professor at Southern Methodist University’s Dedman School of Law in Dallas. “A complete and utter failure in every sense.”
(Mark Curriden, “Up in Smoke”, ABA Journal, March).
Roy Pearson trial update
Roy Pearson’s $55 million pants lawsuit has begun; the Washington Post’s Emil Steiner is liveblogging the trial. There is a series of about ten posts so far, starting with this 10:02 AM entry.
In case you were holding your breath waiting to find out: the case doesn’t sound as if it has gotten any less frivolous. (Apparently Pearson has found a few dry cleaning customers who were also dissastisfied with their service. Well, I’m sold. He also somehow managed to invoke Godwin’s Law.)
On gender, L.A. fire department can’t win for losing
Like pretty much every big-city fire department, the one in Los Angeles has come under intense legal pressure to hire more female applicants, and in doing so to water down or eliminate whatever former prerequisites for hiring (such as physical tests calling for a show of upper-body strength) show “disparate impact” against women. And having been whipped up one side of the street on those grounds, it now gets whipped down the other side for having apparently responded in the most direct and practical way to the first set of legal pressures:
In the latest bizarre court case involving the Los Angeles Fire Department, a jury has awarded $3.75 million to a male fire captain who said he was retaliated against for not making training exercises easier for women.
Fire Capt. Frank Lima alleged in his lawsuit against the city that he was told by superiors that he shouldn’t hold women to the same standards as men. The reason: The Fire Department was under pressure from City Hall to increase the number of women within its ranks.
Thursday’s judgment in the 2 1/2 -week case in Los Angeles County Superior Court was notable because it involved $2.96 million in noneconomic damages — in other words, money for pain and suffering.
In his lawsuit, Lima alleged that he suffered heart problems and stress after the department tried to punish him and subsequently denied him certain assignments.
(Steve Hymon, “L.A. fire captain awarded $3.75 million”, Los Angeles Times, Jul. 9). For more on the legal pressures on fire departments to relax performance standards that women have trouble meeting, see Jan. 18. For a related set of sued-if-you-do, sued-if-you-don’t dilemmas for fire departments, see Mar. 24, 2005 (reverse discrimination suits by whites after Chicago altered rules to encourage black applicants). Finally, we covered (Dec. 5, 2006 and earlier posts) the saga of the $2.7 million settlement that the LAFD paid to a firefighter subjected to a prank in which he was tricked into eating dog food.
Guitar tablature? Keep looking
Amateur players seeking the chords for commonly played songs are out of luck these days, since the music publishers had a fit of intellectual-property-itis and sent takedown letters to a compilation site. That’s just one of the entries in a compilation by mashable.com, “Death by Lawyer: Ten Cool Sites We Miss“, which also answers the question of why the wonderful Pandora internet radio service is available only to U.S.-based computers (via Katherine Mangu-Ward, Reason “Hit and Run”).
June 11 roundup
Updating earlier stories:
- The Judge Pearson consumer fraud suit starts today. It’s exceedingly silly, but ATLA’s attack on Judge Pearson is hypocritical: the only difference between this consumer fraud suit and the consumer fraud suits ATLA supports is that it’s an African-American pro se going against a shallow pocket instead of a well-funded bunch of millionaires going against a deep pocket. The Fisher blog @ WaPo notes a publicity-stunt settlement offer. [via TaxProf blog]
- Wesley Snipes playing the race card in his tax evasion prosecution would have more resonance if his white co-defendant weren’t still in jail while he’s out on bail. [Tax Prof; earlier, Nov. 22]
- “Party mom host set for Virginia jail term” for daring to ensure high school students didn’t drink and drive by providing a safe haven for underage drinking. Earlier: June 2005. [WaPo]
- Sorry, schadenfreude fans: Fred Baron settles with Baron & Budd. [Texas Lawyer; earlier Sep. 4]
- Blackmail-through-civil discovery lawyer Ted Roberts (Mar. 19 and links therein) seeks new trial. [Texas Lawyer]
- Second Circuit doesn’t quite yet decide Ehrenfeld v. Bin Mahfouz libel tourism suit (Oct. 2003). [Bashman roundup of links]
- NFL drops claims to trademarking “The Big Game” as a euphemism for the trademarked “Super Bowl” (Jan. 31) [Lattman]
- More on the Supreme Court’s “fake mental retardation to get out of the death penalty” decision, Atkins v. Virginia (Feb. 2005; Sep. 2003). [LA Times]
- What does Overlawyered favorite Rex deGeorge (Sep. 2004) have to do with The Apprentice? [Real Estalker]
Suing emailers for a living
If you’re going to try to make a regular income out of suing commercial emailers alleging violations of the anti-spam laws, you may wish to be careful about your methods. Last month a federal court “threw out anti-spammer and self-proclaimed serial litigator James S. Gordon’s lawsuit against e-mail marketer Virtumundo. … Just as significantly, the judge also ruled the defendants can recover attorney fees.” Judge John Coughenour of the Western District of Washington ruled that that headers and “from” lines on the emails in question were not unlawfully deceptive, as Gordon had argued; Gordon had sought more than $2.3 million in damages over tens of thousands of Virtumundo emails. (Ken Magill, “Judge Tosses Anti-Spam Suit Against Virtumundo”, DirectMag, May 15; Venkat Balasubramani, “Can-Spam put to the test”, News.com, May 22). According to Ken Magill of DirectMag:
Gordon opted in to receive the e-mails and failed to use the opt-out mechanisms supplied in the subsequent messages, according to court records.
Also, during the trial it came out that Gordon’s sole source of income is from commercial e-mail disputes and that he’s cutting his friends in on the gig….
Gordon has testified that in 2006 he received no income that was not the result of a settlement of a dispute. . …He also admitted that his “clients” — apparently people to whom he provides e-mail accounts — supply him with e-mails they deem are spam for him to use in his disputes and that they get an unspecified percentage of the settlements.
(“Man, Oh Man, What a Racket”, May 22).
Also last month, a different federal court (Central District of California) resolved another CAN-SPAM case in a manner favorable to the defendant, Vonage; the court ruled that the emails sent by Vonage were probably not illegal under California law and that in any case such law would be pre-empted by the federal spam statute. Representing the plaintiffs: Seattle class-action firm and frequent Overlawyered mentionee Hagens Berman. (“The Tide Continues: Court Shoots Down Spam Class Action”, SpamNotes, May 28). Earlier on CAN-SPAM and California anti-spam law here.