Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Archive for January, 2009

Forbes.com: Down with the CPSIA!

I’ve got a new opinion piece up at Forbes.com on one of the worst pieces of legislation I’ve seen in many a year, the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act, and the need to repeal it before it capsizes tens of thousands of small businesses:

Hailed almost universally on its passage last year–it passed the Senate 89 to three and the House by 424 to one, with Ron Paul the lone dissenter–CPSIA is now shaping up as a calamity for businesses and an epic failure of regulation, threatening to wipe out tens of thousands of small makers of children’s items from coast to coast, and taking a particular toll on the handcrafted and creative, the small-production-run and sideline at-home business, not to mention struggling retailers. How could this have happened?

(cross-posted from Point of Law). For our earlier coverage, follow our CPSIA tag.

P.S. The piece as first posted included a Vermont publication’s quote attributed to David Arkush of Public Citizen; that organization almost immediately wrote in to point out that Arkush has disavowed the quote in question, so I substituted a different one. The conversation at Greco Woodcrafting tracing the matter is well worth a close look.

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“Judge Slashes Attorney Fees in GM Stock Settlement”

Hey, we took a risk suing the ailing auto giant on behalf of its investors, say the entrepreneurial lawyers. The company might have gone bust while our suit was pending, and then where would our payday have come from? But a judge cut the fees from a requested $60 million to a mere $45 million. “That adds up to a rate of $1,825 per hour, said U.S. District Judge Gerald Rosen for the Eastern District of Michigan,” notes AP. At least they’re not overpaid executives.

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Minutes after the Flight 1549 crash….

A Twitter user found this “AttorneyOne” promotion site for “Hudson Plane Crash”, which Patrick @ Popehat (aka SSFC) mentions funnily. On closer examination, however, one finds that this site was not thrown up in response to USAir #1549’s dramatic landing in the Hudson River. Its URL contains the words “Summit” and “Ohio”, meaning that it was aimed at plane crashes connected with this community in northeastern Ohio. Indeed, it was a website prearranged just to be sitting there should a plane crash take place connected with the town of Hudson, Ohio. A bit of URL-tinkering confirms that one can generate a similar AttorneyOne page hawking attorneys’ services for a hypothetical plane crash in Chillicothe, Ohio. So don’t compare this sort of thing to online ambulance chasing. It’s more like camping out online and waiting for the accident to come to you.

Hope that clears things up.

P.S. Considerably more on the topic from Eric Turkewitz here and here (congratulations, Jonathan C. Reiter) and from Robert Ambrogi. And while I originally credited this Twitter user with stumbling across the find, it appears it was first found by Greg Lambert of Three Geeks and a Law Blog and passed on from there.

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Jim Sokolove, Stanford, and the “Roadmap to Justice”

TV’s biggest lawyer-advertiser is Boston’s James Sokolove, whose ad budget of $20 million/year makes him a widely recognized figure (and much parodized on YouTube). He’s reportedly offered $1,500 apiece for mesothelioma leads, seen his name in an episode of “The Sopranos”, and even advertised for patent plaintiffs. Turns out he hasn’t seen the inside of a courtroom in nearly thirty years, instead farming out his callers to others. [Boston mag via Ambrogi] “The message behind his ads, he says, is simple: Injured? Free money.”

Now his Sokolove Charitable Fund is giving him a shot at new respectability with help from no less august an institution than Stanford Law School (thank you, Prof. Deborah Rhode), It’s bankrolling something called the Roadmap to Justice Project, which will push the much-criticized-in-this-space “Civil Gideon” idea (a newly invented Constitutional entitlement to taxpayer coverage of lawyers’ fees in civil lawsuits).

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January 15 roundup

  • Judge Posner’s patience snaps in a class action: the case “is an example of the typical pathology of class action litigation, which is riven with conflicts of interest… The lawyers for the class could not concede the utter worthlessness of their claim because they wanted an award of attorneys’ fees.” Complete with a quotation from Leo Rosten about chutzpah [Mirfasihi v. Fleet Mortgage Corporation; NMC @ Folo, Courthouse News and again]
  • Erosion of mens rea prerequisite in criminal law should alarm all of us across left-right lines [Doug Berman on John Hasnas WLF paper]
  • “Federal drain law forces pool closings” [Boston Globe]
  • Gambling habit was no excuse for Woodbridge, Va. lawyer to forge clients’ signature on lawsuit settlements which he pocketed; Stephen Conrad drew a 11-year sentence after doing $4 million damage to clients. Also in Virginia, former Christiansburg attorney Gerard Marks pleaded guilty Nov. 13 to forgery [Va. Lawyers Weekly; earlier here, and, on Marks, first links here]
  • Plaintiff family in Anaheim, Calif. police-shooting lawsuit have an unusual demand: that statue of deceased victim be put up on Disneyland’s Main Street [Orange County Register]
  • Connecticut state lawyer who assumed bogus identity to send anonymous letter that got her boss fired, then claimed whistleblower protection, is let off with reprimand and nine hours of ethics training [Schwartz, earlier]
  • “Patent troll sues Oprah, Sony over online book viewing” [The Register; Illinois Computer Research, Scott Harris, etc.]
  • JetBlue incident at JFK: “240,000 dollars awarded to man forced to cover Arab T-shirt” [AFP/Yahoo, Raed Jarrar]

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