Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Archive for April, 2008

“Judge Fines Medtronic $10 Million Over Trial Tactics”

Another strong reaction from the bench to scorched-earth practices in litigation:

A Massachusetts U.S. District Court judge fined Medtronic Sofamor Danek Inc. and related companies $10 million for the behavior of its trial lawyers at Dewey & LeBoeuf while fighting a patent case brought by DePuy Spine Inc.

Senior District Judge Edward F. Harrington also ordered Medtronic Sofamor, which makes spinal implant devices, to pay some of the plaintiffs’ attorney fees. …

“The defendants prolonged the proceedings unnecessarily (thus unduly imposing upon the jury’s time), they sought to mislead both the jury and the Court, and they flouted the governing claim construction as set forth by the Federal Circuit,” Harrington wrote.

(Sheri Qualters, National Law Journal, Feb. 28).

Filed under: ,

Six-year-old fanny-swatter

Mark Steyn on the youngster charged with sexual harassment in suburban Washington, D.C.:

Randy Castro is in the first grade. But, at the ripe old age of 6, he’s been declared a sex offender by Potomac View Elementary School. He’s guilty of sexual harassment, and the incident report will remain on his record for the rest of his school days – and maybe beyond.

Maybe it’ll be one of those things that just keeps turning up on background checks forever and ever: Perhaps 34-year-old Randy Castro will apply for a job, and at his prospective employer’s computer up will pop his sexual-harasser status yet again. Or maybe he’ll be able to keep it hushed up until he’s 57 and runs for governor of Virginia, and suddenly his political career self-detonates when the sordid details of his Spitzeresque sexual pathologies are revealed.

(“Attack of the preschool perverts”, syndicated/Orange County Register, Apr. 12; Brigid Schulte, “For Little Children, Grown-Up Labels As Sexual Harassers”, Washington Post, Apr. 3). A contrary view (letter to the editor from Cynthia Terrell of Takoma Park, Md., WaPo, Apr. 5): “The Post showed appalling insensitivity to the inappropriate nature of Randy Castro’s act. …our culture remains largely indifferent to privacy and harassment issues involving gender.”

Filed under: , , , ,

Kerviel to sue SocGen for unfair dismissal

Employment litigation Hall of Fame? “Jérôme Kerviel, the rogue trader accused of losing his bank €5 billion (£3.9 billion) in one of the financial world’s biggest scandals, has hit upon a new money-making scheme — he is to sue his former employer [Société Générale of Paris] for unfair dismissal.” (Adam Sage, “Jerome Kerviel to sue SocGen over sacking”, Times Online (U.K.), Apr. 3).

Filed under:

Update: “Lawyer Sanctioned for Suing Over Adversary’s Deposition Questions”

Updating our Jul. 25, 2007 post:

A plaintiffs lawyer who alleged in court that his adversary’s questions at a deposition caused his client emotional distress has been sanctioned for filing a frivolous suit.

New Jersey Superior Court Judge Alfonse Cifelli entered an order March 26, assessing $2,500 in sanctions against Bruce Nagel, of Roseland, N.J.’s Nagel Rice. He must also pay his adversary’s legal fees of $11,630.

However, Cifelli stayed both payments until the Appellate Division rules on a pending appeal of his ruling last October that dismissed Nagel’s suit.

Cifelli, who sits in Newark, had found Nagel failed to state a claim, holding the litigation privilege allowed the adversary, Judith Wahrenberger, to pursue questions she considered relevant without fear of being sued and that the questions were not “extreme or outrageous.”

Nagel says he has received much encouragement from fellow plaintiff’s lawyers for his action; however, any suspension of the usual litigation privilege in favor of personal liability for attorneys would have been very much a double-edged sword, since the asking of emotionally distressing questions during depositions is not exactly a rarity on either side. (Maria Vogel-Short, New Jersey Law Journal, Apr. 9)(link fixed now).

Filed under: , ,

Update: paid too much for their house

Following up on Jan. 22’s story from California: “It took a jury less than two hours Thursday afternoon to unanimously clear a real estate agent accused of failing in his duties to a couple he helped buy a tony Carlsbad home.” Marty and Vernon Ummel claimed that ReMax agent Mike Little had not kept them from overpaying for the house they bought with his help. (North County Times, San Diego Union-Tribune, Voice of San Diego).

Filed under:

April 11 roundup

  • Plenty of reaction to our Tuesday post questioning the NYT school-bullying story, including reader comments and discussion at other blogs; one lawprof passes along a response by the Wolfe family to the Northwest Arkansas Times’s reporting [updated post]
  • Geoffrey Fieger, of jury-swaying fame, says holding his forthcoming criminal trial in Detroit would be unfair because juries there hate his guts [Detroit News]
  • Another Borat suit down as Judge Preska says movie may be vulgar but has social value, and thus falls into “newsworthiness” exception to NY law barring commercial use of persons’ images [ABA Journal]
  • Employer found mostly responsible for accident that occurred after its functionaries overrode a safety device, but a heavy-equipment dealer also named as defendant will have to pay more than 90 percent of resulting $14.6 million award [Bloomington, Ill. Pantagraph]
  • New Mexico Human Rights Commission fines photographer $6600 for refusing a job photographing same-sex commitment ceremony [Volokh, Bader]
  • “Virginia reaches settlement with families of VA Tech shooting victims” [Jurist]
  • Roger Parloff on downfall of Dickie Scruggs [Fortune]
  • Judge in Spain fined heavily and disbarred for letting innocent man spend more than a year in jail [AP/IHT, Guardian]
  • Hard to know whether all those emergency airplane groundings actually improved safety, they might even have impaired it [Murray/NRO “Corner”, WSJ edit]
  • “Freedom of speech is an American concept, so I don’t give it any value” — tracking down the context of that now-celebrated quote from a Canadian Human Rights Commission investigator [Volokh]
  • Who was it that said that lawyers “need to be held accountable for frivolous lawsuits that help drive up the cost of malpractice insurance”? Hint: initials are J.E. [three years ago on Overlawyered]

Filed under: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Kathleen Seidel blogger-subpoena furor

After much discussion in the blogosphere this story would seem more than ready to cross over into mainstream-press coverage; here’s a local columnist who says he left three messages with attorney Clifford Shoemaker but got no response (Dave Brooks, “What a Web of actional links we can weave”, Nashua Telegraph, Apr. 9)(via Liz Ditz/I Speak of Dreams’ ongoing list monitoring coverage).

Update 5:30 p.m.: Here’s James Taranto at WSJ Best of the Web, giving just the shove the story may need:

It might behoove the ACLU, or some organization devoted to civil liberties, to devote some resources to figuring out how to defend speech that is inconvenient to plaintiffs lawyers.

Filed under: , , , ,

“Kansas Firm Airs Candid Wal-Mart Videos”

A new business model for struggling photographers? Or an old one? “Wal-Mart’s internal meetings are on display in three decades worth of videos made by a Kansas production company scrambling to stay in business after Wal-Mart stopped using the firm. Wal-Mart Stores Inc. dropped longtime contractor Flagler Productions in 2006. In response to losing its biggest customer, the small company has opened its archive, for a fee, to researchers who include plaintiffs’ lawyers and union critics seeking clips of unguarded moments at the world’s largest retailer.” (Marcus Kabel, AP/GulfLive, Apr. 9; WSJ, Kansas City Star, ABCNews.com).

Will litigation kill academic tenure?

As universities grow apprehensive of lawsuits filed by junior faculty hired for tenure-track positions but then passed over for tenure, they are accelerating the trend toward classifying more junior positions as non-tenure-track — hastening, perhaps, the eventual demise of the tenure system entirely. (Robert Weissberg, Minding the Campus, Apr. 10). P.S. Our post has prompted a discussion at Workplace Prof Blog.

Filed under: ,