Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Archive for August, 2010

ADA at a South Carolina courthouse

Fixing the restrooms and other design problems is going to cost Oconee County $2 million, of which it will have recovered about half by suing a now-defunct architect. One big problem, per Spartanburg’s WSPA, is that “ADA requires toilets to measure 18 inches from the center of the bowl to the wall” and some of the courthouse toilets were mistakenly built at 19 inches instead.

“If they were mounted in the floor like the one at your house, you could just put in an offset flange and slide it over one inch to be in compliance,” says [county facilities director] Julian. “But since it’s mounted into the wall, all of the plumbing runs up through the wall.”

Which means the entire wall will have to be torn out and all of the plumbing shifted over — one inch.

More on courthouses and accessibility here.

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August 2 roundup

  • “Why Do Employers Use FICO Scores?” Maybe one reason is that government places off limits so many of the other ways they might evaluate job applicants [McArdle, Coyote]
  • Michael Fumento on $671 million verdict against nursing home in California [Forbes]
  • Ted Frank is looking for a pro bono economics expert [CCAF]
  • Lester Brickman, “Anatomy of an Aggregate Settlement: The Triumph of Temptation Over Ethics” [Phillips Petroleum explosion; SSRN via Legal Ethics Forum]
  • Ice cream trucks return to Niskayuna, N.Y. 34 years after a panic-occasioned ban [Free-Range Kids, Mangu-Ward]
  • Galloping trend toward “whistleblower” enactments: this time lawmakers are rushing one on oil workers [Smith/ShopFloor, more, earlier]
  • Class action lawsuit filed against Trident Xtra Care gum, marketed as good for one’s teeth [Hoffman/ConcurOp; compare Russell Jackson on Wrigley’s settlement of a class action over Eclipse chewing gum]
  • EEOC officials urge employers to ban foul language and swearing in workplace [seven years ago at Overlawyered]

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Left assails Fifth Circuit judges based on clients they repped decades ago

Hello? Guantanamo? It’s not as if you’d expect any sort of consistent policy on these matters from the imaginatively named Alliance for Justice. But it’s still strange that they’d open the door to future attacks on their own favored judicial nominees based on clients they represented long before reaching the bench. [Joel Cohen and Katherine Helm/Law.com, NLJ] More: John Steele at Legal Ethics Forum takes a different view, and I comment.

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