The firm often sues insurance companies for amounts under $50, sometimes under $5. A manager with one defendant said the lawyers can use a $1 settlement to leverage a demand for thousands in legal fees payable by defendants. The firm, which has filed more than a thousand cases since last summer, acquires potential claims from medical clinics which bill the insurers over care dispensed after no-fault auto accidents; often the clinics have been paid for the bulk of the case, leaving a small unpaid sum. [Jane Musgrave, Palm Beach Post]
Archive for 2010
Talking-squirrel injury lawyer ad
With extra cheese:
Via Above the Law last month, which also found a decidedly strange reggae video singing the praises of a Los Angeles entertainment-law firm.
“California Court Rejects Santa Barbara Beach Club’s Attempts to Suppress Criticism”
Free speech wins one in a neighborhood dispute. [Eugene Volokh]
Woman finds “demonic” face on canned pear
And wants recompense from the fruit canner, in New Zealand. [Stuff.co.nz]
Food safety bill: big vs. small business
From the WSJ last month (Division of Labour) on the big federal food-safety bill sailing through Congress:
:…small farmers worry the measure’s fees and inspection requirements would be ruinously expensive and are pushing for exemptions.
“I know people who have been small farmers for 25 to 30 years who are looking to get out of the business because food safety is becoming so alarmist,” said Mary Alionis, whose eight-acre Whistling Duck Farm in Grants Pass, Ore., sells produce to farmers markets and restaurants.
Big food companies generally support the bill, judging the added expenses it would bring to be small compared with the potential financial damage of a vast product recall.
It’s a pattern we’ve seen before.
Connecticut: “Lawsuit Verdict May Shut MDC Reservoirs to Cyclists”
As lawsuits advance, recreation retreats: the Hartford-area Metropolitan District Commission “is now looking at shutting access to its popular reservoir trails to cyclists” following a $2.9 million jury award to a bicyclist who crashed into a gate. “The controversial verdict came after rulings that the MDC — a nonprofit municipal corporation — was not immune to lawsuits, in this case from a cyclist who wasn’t paying enough attention as she rode the well-marked trails.” [Rick Green, Hartford Courant; background from 1999]
Chasing the Toyota hobgoblin
The quest to do something about the imagined Toyota crisis may result in a federal mandate for all cars to include “brake-override” features that cut off power when the driver hits the brake. Writing in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Michael Fumento says many cars on the road do already have such a feature — but lawmakers don’t seem overly curious as to whether it’s made a difference.
Home fire sprinkler mandates
The government is playing more of a role these days in designing your next house. I’ve got some thoughts up at Cato at Liberty on the politics of it all.
Kagan nomination latest
- Sorry, guys, but being a law dean who treated conservative scholars with cordiality and fairness doesn’t mean you’ll either 1) be anything but a predictably liberal judge yourself, or 2) show any particular unusual persuasiveness with conservative colleagues on the bench. Jim Copland invites us to consider the example of Guido Calabresi;
- As part of their job duties, persons who hold the office of Solicitor General sometimes sign their name to arguments they’d reject out of hand if hearing the case as a judge. We’d better hope this is the case with Kagan’s defense of the federal law on depictions of animal cruelty, in which she advanced what Chief Justice Roberts rightly called the “startling and dangerous” position that the protections of the First Amendment should be subject to case-by-case cost-benefit balancing. Jacob Sullum explains.
- Mark Moller contributes some perspective worth considering on the military-recruitment issue. More: Roger Pilon.
- Not my view alone: “We are seeing what government by the faculty lounge looks like,” writes Michael Barone. More: David Wagner. “My experience with Prof. Kagan” accounts: Elie Mystal, Above the Law, and Sasha Volokh, Volokh Conspiracy.
- “Libertarians respond to the nomination” [Damon Root, Reason “Hit and Run”]. Views of Miguel Estrada and Stuart Taylor, Jr. [Moller, Cato] While in the Clinton administration, she took “pro-plaintiff” stances on liability reform [Mark Hofmann, Business Insurance quoting Victor Schwartz, via Ted at Point of Law] More from Jim Copland [City Journal] She helped beef up Harvard’s Berkman Center on intellectual property; does this mean she’s sympathetic to “fair use” concerns? [Cavanaugh, Reason “Hit and Run”]
Remove that criticism, our name is trademarked
A Cook County judge issues a remarkably sweeping temporary restraining order against an online forum over its contributors’ criticisms of a cold-calling financial services firm. The plaintiff’s luck changes when things reach federal court, however. [Levy, Consumer Law & Policy via Popehat]