Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Archive for 2007

Class action payouts: They know, but you can’t find out

When plaintiff attorneys were trying to get a Madison County judge to approve a settlement in a class-action lawsuit against the maker of Paxil, they touted that the company would have to pay up to $63.8 million.

How much did consumers actually get? The parties aren’t saying — and they’ll never have to.

According to the settlement, any money that didn’t get claimed by consumers goes back to GlaxoSmithKline, the maker of Paxil, which is used to treat depression. And the attorneys for both sides, as well as the company that was hired to handle consumers’ claims, are not required [to] give the court a report on how many people made claims or how much money was actually paid to them.

But one payout is certain: The plaintiff attorneys got $16.5 million.

So-called reversionary settlements, where unclaimed money goes back to the defendant, give companies a particular incentive to collaborate in crafting payout schemes that end up reaching few consumers. According to the article, settlements of that sort are especially common in the famous class-action jurisdiction of Madison County, Ill. (Brian Brueggemann, Belleville (Ill.) News-Democrat, Oct. 21).

Filed under: ,

Lawsuit demands drugstores hire bilingual interpreters

Immigrant advocacy groups are filing a complaint with the New York attorney general’s office naming 16 pharmacies in Brooklyn, Queens and Long Island, claiming “that federal civil rights law and state health regulations require pharmacies to provide linguistic help” to “people who speak little or no English”. “That assistance should include interpreters at pharmacies and written translations of medication instructions, the advocates say.” The advocacy groups are New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, the New York Immigration Coalition and Make the Road New York.

It seems a creative reinterpretation of “national origin discrimination” has been going on for some time:

Health advocates have increasingly used federal civil rights law to push hospitals, nursing homes and clinics to provide language services. Language barriers to health services constitute discrimination based on national origin, they argue, a violation of federal civil rights law, which applies to hospitals because they receive federal funds through Medicare and other programs.

The latest effort aims to expand similar requirements to pharmacies.

As of the year 2000, according to one report, 138 languages were known to be spoken in the borough of Queens alone. (Anne Barnard, “Non-English Speakers Charge Bias in Prescription Labeling”, New York Times, Oct. 31).

Filed under: , , ,

“Eye-popping” fee request in Tyco securities case

The plaintiff’s lawyers — which include Milberg Weiss as well as Grant & Eisenhofer and Schiffrin Barroway — are asking a court to approve $460 million in fees, plus about $29 million in expenses. They say they spent 488,000 hours on the litigation, and you’d better not express any skepticism about that figure unless you were in the room watching or something. (WSJ law blog, Nov. 1).

Filed under: ,

Social host alcohol liability

A discussion by Judge Posner at the Becker-Posner blog (via Childs) provokes this on-point comment from reader “Phil”:

Perhaps one of the reasons social-host liability hasn’t caught on yet is that the “duty” one is expected to perform is onerous.

Should one of my guests insist on driving home drunk, I have two choices: either take his keys by force, or call the police and have him caught.

In the first case, I could get badly hurt — and, if my friend is only slightly over the legal limit, the combined physical harms to me and my friend are probably much higher than to the sum of the expected harms to all drivers on the road.

In the second case, my friend will lose his license, and perhaps his freedom. The penalty for getting caught driving drunk is much higher than the harms resulting from the individual infraction, as a deterrent, required because of the fact that so few drunk drivers are caught. So this is not something I would do to a friend. A stranger, perhaps, but not a friend.

The fact is that social hosts faced with an intoxicated friend who insists on driving have no reasonable recourse.

Filed under:

Criticizes BidZirk on his blog, and survives

Eric Goldman calls the case of BidZirk v. Smith, filed by a South Carolina eBay reseller against the blogger who’d criticized its services, “a flagship example of how a pernicious and misguided plaintiff with a thin skin can ruin a blogger’s life.” Maybe “ruin” is no longer the operative term, since a federal court has just thrown out the case. Among the court’s determinations: calling a company’s founder a “yes man” is opinion and not actionable as defamation (Oct. 28 and, before that, Nov. 21, 2006; decision (PDF)). More: Ron Coleman fingers as a culprit the “American Rule” (no shifting of fees) under which “there is for all practical purposes no downside to suing someone on the most preposterous of grounds and losing — hence making the bringing of meritless litigation a part of every large company’s toolkit for silencing criticism and destroying smaller competitors.”

Filed under: , , , ,

The case for the telecom immunity bill

“Dragging phone companies through protracted litigation [over complying with NSA requests for surveillance help] would not only be unfair, but it would deter other companies and private citizens from responding in terrorist emergencies whenever there may be uncertainty or legal risk. … Without [the companies’ voluntary cooperation], our intelligence efforts will be gravely damaged. Whether the government has acted properly is a different question from whether a private person has acted properly in responding to the government’s call for help. … For hundreds of years our legal system has operated under the premise that, in a public emergency, we want private citizens to respond to the government’s call for help unless the citizen knows for sure that the government is acting illegally. If Congress does not act now, it would be basically saying that private citizens should only help when they are absolutely certain that all the government’s actions are legal.” (Benjamin Civiletti, Dick Thornburgh and William Webster, WSJ/OpinionJournal.com, Oct. 31). More here (fifth item) and here.

P.S. Commenters argue in response that the telecoms are sophisticated and had plenty of time to consult counsel, and point out that Qwest did in fact turn the government down. More: Bader, CEI (with arguments from Sen. Rockefeller).

Stick figure shooting stick figure with water gun

If the Cape May, N.J. school district was really going to punish a 7-year-old just for making a drawing of such a thing, with no actual water gun in sight, shouldn’t maybe the punishment have been to make him draw a stick figure of a little boy getting an overly-harsh suspension? (Zincavage, Oct. 21; Charles Sykes, “I Have Zero Tolerance for Zero Tolerance Policies”, American Thinker, Oct. 30).

Filed under: , ,