- Remember those class actions against tech manufacturers for allegedly misstating the capacity of hard drives? Another one just settled, with buyers in for coupons and discounts, lawyers for $1.78 million [The Register, Cho v. Seagate Technologies settlement website]
- Watch what you say about lawyers, cont’d: Erie, Pa. paper thus far has fended off libel suit by Pittsburgh attorney over coverage of his run-ins with authorities over client treatment [Post-Gazette via Ambrogi]
- New at Point of Law: suicide risk of anticonvulsants?; Ohio AG Dann rebuked on foreclosure activism; simultaneous asbestosis and silicosis happens all the time at some law firms; Bush nominates an ATLA/AAJ member to a federal judgeship; and much more.
- Has a prominent investor with close ties to President Bush set up shop as an East Texas patent troll? [Troll Tracker, The Recorder]
- Embattled Tom Lakin and Lakin Law Firm, once high on the Madison County heap, fight to overturn $3.7 million legal-malpractice judgment [MC Record]
- Brent Coon suing former colleagues at Beaumont’s Provost Umphrey over division of billions in tobacco-fee booty [Texas Lawyer]
- UK judge criticizes “barking mad” human rights rules after prisoner refuses to leave his “comfy” jail cell to attend hearing [Times Online, Telegraph]
- “Six years after Enron, executives face greater risks—but investors are no safer.” [Gelinas/City Journal]
- United Farm Workers union threatens to sue over unflattering coverage [two years ago on Overlawyered]
Archive for February, 2008
America’s Health Care at Risk, April 16-17, Orlando
I’m scheduled to speak about medical malpractice reform at the America’s Health Care at Risk conference in Orlando, Florida, April 16-17. More details when they become available.
Lerach: “Everybody was paying plaintiffs”
“A prominent class-action lawyer facing sentencing today for secretly paying plaintiffs to file securities lawsuits, William Lerach, is suggesting that the under-the-table practice was widespread and was not isolated to the firm he helped run for decades, Milberg Weiss. … Despite the highly publicized travails of what was once America’s leading class-action law firm, there has been little public discussion of whether other firms may have emulated the secret payment scheme Lerach and other Milberg lawyers devised.” Notwithstanding a request by Lerach’s lawyers that the letters from his friends and supporters asking clemency be sealed from public inspection, most of the letters have become public, revealing the identities of such entirely unsurprising Lerach backers as Ralph Nader (who in this one particular case did not favor prison for white-collar criminality) and Ben Stein, known to readers of these pages (though apparently not to many readers of his New York Times column) as an expert witness hired repeatedly by Lerach to help portray sued companies’ conduct in the harshest possible light. (Josh Gerstein, “Lerach Says Payoffs Were Widespread”, New York Sun, Feb. 11). Another letter writer: Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) And the list of letter-writers (PDF) includes “two redacted names in between Gordon Churchill and Charles Cohen”, leading to speculation that one or both surnames might be “Clinton”. It seems unlikely, though, that either prominent ex-White House resident would have risked the sort of negative publicity involved even as a gesture to acknowledge Lerach’s past favors. (CalLaw “Legal Pad”, Feb. 8)(corrected shortly after posting to reflect release of most letters by stipulation of parties, not judicial order). Update 4 p.m. EST: sentence is 24 months.
Update: 5th Circuit overturns Louisiana fuel-gauge fee division
Last week the “5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals voided a 2007 lower court order parceling out $6.8 million in fees to plaintiffs attorneys in a lawsuit over tainted Shell gasoline.” The case had come under intense criticism, as we noted last year, “after the lawyers in charge prevailed on a federal judge to conceal the allocation of fees from public scrutiny, including scrutiny by members of the client class as well as dissident lawyers”. The ruling marks a victory for Loyola lawprof Dane Ciolino, who assisted objectors and helped rally public attention to the problems with the settlement. (Susan Finch, “Decision allocating legal fees tossed”, Nola.com (New Orleans Times-Picayune), Feb. 8).
Flu shots in supermarkets
The mayor of Boston is against ’em: “allowing retailers to make money off of sick people is wrong.” (David Gratzer, “Health care innovation, and its enemies”, Examiner.com, Feb. 7). More views: Gene Pinkham, “Is the flu on your shopping list?”, Malden (Mass.) Observer, Jan. 18 (sick people might start visiting supermarkets and we can’t have that); Paul Howard (Manhattan Institute), “Competition won’t ail you”, Boston Herald, Feb. 9. More: Bainbridge.
Advice for bloggers
On how to stay out of court (Jeff Jarvis, BuzzMachine, Feb. 1).
“Suing the Smoker Next Door”
Galila Huff, who says she regrets her chain-smoking habit, has been hauled to court and asked to pay punitive damages: “Her neighbors, Jonathan Selbin, a class-action lawyer who has honed his skills suing major corporations, and his wife, Jenny Selbin, also a lawyer, are irate over the cigarette smoke that they say seeps from Ms. Huff’s apartment into the common hallway of their building, the elegant Beaux-Arts Ansonia, on Broadway between 73rd and 74th Streets.” (Anemona Hartocollis, New York Times, Feb. 9). More: Bainbridge.
How is the Class Action Fairness Act working?
The Washington Legal Foundation announces a new paper by Brian Anderson and Mel Schwing: “Two leading class action defense
attorneys utilize a federal court judge’s recent rejection of a settlement as a case study of how CAFA can deter defendants’ ability to ‘buy peace’ through settlements” in cases where the claim is so meritless that it is only worth a small amount of money for the defendant to settle:
While CAFA surely benefited class action defendants more than plaintiffs by transferring more cases to federal courts that offer more fairness and predictability in the adjudication of class actions, it is not a “free-pass” for targets of class action lawsuits.
The quid pro quo of giving class action defendants greater access to federal courts is that CAFA expects defendants to vigorously litigate, not settle via coupon settlements, frivolous class actions. The message of Figueroa is that class action defendants in federal court who try to escape all litigation risk by proposing low-value coupon benefits in exchange for global releases of claims (especially where competing lawyers and attorneys’ general are involved in the controversy) will have a difficult time persuading the federal courts to approve such settlements.
Figueroa was the first time in the three-year history of CAFA that state attorneys general used their CAFA right to intervene in a settlement hearing. Last year, I also took a look at CAFA.
Did redlining accusations lead to the subprime mortgage mess?
Stan Liebowitz writes in the New York Post:
Perhaps the greatest scandal of the mortgage crisis is that it is a direct result of an intentional loosening of underwriting standards – done in the name of ending discrimination, despite warnings that it could lead to wide-scale defaults. …
In an earlier newspaper story extolling the virtues of relaxed underwriting standards, Countrywide’s chief executive bragged that, to approve minority applications that would otherwise be rejected “lenders have had to stretch the rules a bit.” He’s not bragging now.
I’m not sure I entirely agree, but it’s an element we should be considering as we look at the new complaints of “racial discrimination” through excessive sub-prime loans.
“Overlawyeredlanche”
Dr. RW is glad about all the extra visitors, as is Greg May at Cal Blog of Appeal.