While trial lawyers attempt to abolish every-day businesspeople’s right to arbitrate, they continue to use arbitration with their own clients. The Texas Supreme Court, in a December 14 opinion, recently defended John O’Quinn’s right to arbitrate with his clients; the Wolfgang Demino blog has details. (Other clients have had more success against O’Quinn in arbitration.) Note that the Arbitration Fairness Act, the trial bar’s effort to deprive consumers of the choice of predispute arbitration clauses, doesn’t apply to attorney-client relationships. Earlier.
Archive for February, 2008
Savannah sugar refinery blast
Lots of reports of lawyers chasing potential business after the explosion [Fulton County Daily Report; Elefant]
Long Island school-district attorneys
Looks like some have found ways to game the state’s employment rules:
Five Long Island school districts falsely reported to the state that a part-time private attorney was a full-time employee in each district, enabling him to earn a public pension of nearly $62,000 and health benefits for life.
At the same time, the districts paid his law firm more than $2.5 million in fees, records show.
The attorney, Lawrence W. Reich, was listed as full time by five different school districts at once – Baldwin, Copiague, East Meadow, Bellmore-Merrick High School and Harborfields, according to records supplied by the New York State comptroller’s office. In 2000, for example, he was credited with working 1,271 days in one year. The year before, he was credited with working 1,286 days….
Under Internal Revenue Service rules, a person cannot be paid both as an independent contractor and employee for the same job.
“Clearly, it’s an attempt to manipulate the system so that a person can receive Cadillac fringe benefits that a person in the private sector would otherwise not be entitled to,” said Paul Sabatino, a municipal lawyer who is also former Suffolk chief deputy county executive. …
“I followed essentially a practice that was very common among my colleagues in the industry,” [Reich] said.
(Sandra Peddie, “Five districts falsely reported lawyer job status”, Newsday, Feb. 15).
When Clinton and Obama agreed
Before they officially became presidential candidates, the Illinois and New York senators co-authored an article in the May 25, 2006 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, entitled “Making Patient Safety the Centerpiece of Medical Liability Reform.” (See: http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/354/21/2205)
They sympathized with physicians over escalating insurance costs and condemned the current tort system for creating an “intimidating liability environment.” Still, Clinton and Obama said, it’s more important to focus on how to improve patient safety than “areas of intense disagreement,” such as caps on financial awards to patients.
They introduced legislation, which died in committee in 2006, to provide money and assistance to physicians, hospitals, insurers, and health care systems to start programs for disclosure of medical errors and compensation to patients. The bill would have created an office of patient safety and health care quality to establish a database to track incidents of malpractice and fund research into guidelines to prevent future injuries.
“Physicians would be given certain protections from liability … in order to promote a safe environment for disclosure. … This legislation would provide doctors and patients with an opportunity to find solutions outside the courtroom. In return, [hospitals, insurers, and others] would be required to use savings achieved by reducing legal defense costs to reduce liability insurance premiums and to foster patient-safety initiatives.”
(Mark Crane, MedPageToday, Jan. 7). More: see Ted’s December post at PoL.
“Nor have I stolen a dog…”
Litigation between celebrities is different, or is it? (“Nic Cage Sues Kathleen Turner for Claiming He Stole a Chihuahua”, USMagazine.com, Feb. 12).
High cost of health privacy laws, cont’d
More HIPAA madness? On Wednesday, in a crime that cast a chill through the mental health community, a Manhattan therapist was brutally slaughtered in her office by a man whose actions seemed consistent with those of a current or former patient with a grudge. The assailant escaped on foot, and although his image had been captured on surveillance tape, police were nowhere near beginning to know where to start looking for him: “Because of privacy laws, police hadn’t been able to access patient records as of late yesterday, sources said.” (New York Post, Feb. 14)(via Bader). On medical privacy laws and the Virginia Tech rampage of Seung Hui Cho, see Jun. 16, 2007.
More: Commenter Supremacy Claus says not to blame HIPAA, which has an exemption for police reports.
Friday morning sequel: This morning’s New York Post sticks with the original story and fleshes out the HIPAA role somewhat:
The hunt for the savage beast who butchered an Upper East Side therapist has hit a roadblock – because detectives can’t access her patients’ medical records under federal privacy laws, The Post has learned.
Police believe the meat-cleaver-wielding psycho who killed Kathryn Faughey on Tuesday night inside her office on East 79th Street could be the doctor’s patient – and need access to her records to identify him.
But police sources said because of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, signed by President Bill Clinton in 1996, investigators are having a hard time gaining access to those records.
“A case like this gets complicated because of medical privacy protections,” a source close to the investigation told The Post yesterday.
The federal law states that doctors, hospitals and health-insurance companies must protect the privacy of patients – even in a murder investigation – and that only through the use of subpoenas can authorities hope to obtain such information.
Police sources said investigators have applied for a subpoena, but have yet to receive it. Even if the subpoena is issued, patients can sue to keep their records private. …
[D]etectives have tried to get around the law by tracking down patients through sign-in sheets at the building’s front desk and through surveillance cameras in the lobby, sources said.
(Murray Weiss, Jamie Schram and Clemente Lisi, “Vexed by ‘Slay File’ Madness”, New York Post, Feb. 15). My Times (U.K.) article on the problems posed by health privacy laws is here.
Great moments in legal services promotion
As a Valentine’s Day promotion, Charleston, W.V. radio station WKLC-FM is offering a drawing for a free divorce. “Charleston attorney Rusty Webb will handle the actual filing” and says winners should not expect anything complicated in the line of contested proceedings. (Charleston Gazette, USA Today).
The war on arbitration: Jamie Leigh Jones, Tracy Barker, & “Halliburton” V
A commenter complains about our most recent post, and I respond:
February 14 roundup
- Examiner newspaper begins series on how Milberg Weiss used nonprofit foundation to project its clout among judges, academics, influentials [Institute for Law & Economic Policy, three-parter]
- Judge Canute, or just reporter’s awkward wording? Australian jurist with great eyeglasses bans screening of TV drama in state of Victoria; “Under the order, all internet material relating to the series is also banned.” [Herald Sun] (More explanation on the court order: The Australian).
- Times Square’s Naked Cowboy sues over M & M candy ad playing off his image [NY Post]
- Bite mark testimony makes another chapter in catalogue of dubious prosecutorial forensics [Folo’s NMC on two Mississippi Innocence Project cases]
- Update: Pennsylvania court upholds disputed fees in Kia-brake class action [Legal Intelligencer; earlier]
- Best not take McCain too literally when he says he’d demand that judicial nominees have a proven record on Constitutional interpretation [Beldar]
- Expert witness coaching …. by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals? [Nordberg; earlier]
- For some reason many Boston residents feel menaced by city’s plan for police to go door to door asking “voluntary,” “friendly” permission to search premises for guns [Globe]
- Lots and lots of publications print Mohammed cartoon in solidarity with
Danish cartoonist and assassination-plot target Kurt Westergaard [CNN; Malkin] - Calgary Muslim leader withdraws official complaint against Ezra Levant over his publication of Mohammed cartoons [National Post; earlier]
- Steyn, relatedly: critics dragging my book before Canadian tribunals wish not to “start a debate”, but to cut one off [National Post]
Scruggs: I’m the real victim here
The beleaguered tort tycoon is now seeking to have the federal indictment dismissed on grounds of “outrageous government misconduct”. Roger Parloff at Fortune Legal Pad explains how Scruggs’s attorneys are evoking the atmospherics of an entrapment defense without actually going quite so far as to assert that defense, which would mean (among other things) opening the door for prosecutors to introduce evidence of other similar but uncharged bad acts by Scruggs (Feb. 12). See also White Collar Crime Prof and NMC at Folo. And the Scruggs camp’s motions to suppress wiretap evidence has resulted in the release of a slew of transcripts of taped conversations among the principals, often sliced and excerpted in nonobvious ways, highlights of which appear at Folo here (“you need it pretty soon?”), here (Tim Balducci: “you always gotta have a slush fund” and “This ain’t my first rodeo with Scruggs”), here (P.L. Blake told by Patterson of “pretty good problem that I had solved”; see also Yall) and here (appearing to omit Balducci’s famous “bodies buried” line). For those sorting out Balducci’s colorful figures of speech relating to food, by the way, his reference to “bushels of sweet potatoes” that he needs to get “where I can get em . . . uh . . . over to him” is explained at the WSJ law blog here, while his expressed wish to “lay the corn on the ground” for Judge Lackey is here at Folo. More: Alan Lange, YallPolitics.