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).

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]

“Lawyer’s Conviction Affirmed for Fen-Phen Settlement Fraud”

Mississippi:

The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Monday upheld the conviction of Vicksburg lawyer Robert Arledge, convicted of bilking the drug company Wyeth of more than $6.7 million over the diet drug Fen-Phen….

U.S. District Judge David Bramlette sentenced Arledge to six years in prison for knowingly allowing clients to make claims of about $250,000 each for health complications although they had no legitimate reason.

Seems it was a clergy scandal as well as a lawyer scandal:

Regina Reed Green of Fayette, who pleaded guilty to tax evasion involving false Fen-Phen claims, testified Arledge knew about the scheme to defraud the drug company. She said he told her every resident of 9,740-population Jefferson County would get $1 million.

“The evidence showed that when Green became concerned that she might be caught fabricating the prescriptions and expressed a desire to stop her illegal activity, she contacted (the Rev. Gregory) Warren,” the appeals court wrote. “Warren tried to convince Green to continue fabricating the prescriptions, but Green was not assuaged.”

Green testified Arledge persuaded her to continue: “And he said … I wasn’t going to get in any trouble because like (Warren) said, they were going to box all those files up, put them away, and never be seen again.”

Earlier coverage here, here, and here (via).

Kids’ empty shelves: CPSIA continued

Raggedy Andy pillow fight

Much of the alarm over the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA), the federal law enacted last year in response to panics over Chinese toys with lead paint and the phthalates found in plastic, has focused on the effect it will have on toys and related kids’ products, driving many of them from the market because it is too costly for handcrafters and small-run manufacturers to pay for the testing of every lot. (One protest site is entitled National Bankruptcy Day, after Feb. 10, the day the law is set to go into effect.) But the law is much wider in application than that. It also applies to a sweeping array of children’s goods including clothing, bedding, Scouting patches, and countless other fabric and textile goods for kids’ use; paper goods, school supplies, homeschooling kits, as well as library books and audiobooks, board games, baseball cards, and the like; outdoor gear, bikes, backpacks, telescopes and sporting equipment; home furnishings when marketed for use in kids’ rooms; and much more.

Endangered Whimsy is “a gallery of handmade products endangered by the CPSIA”. Just Add Charm has a CPSIA Awareness Series with other examples of products that could soon be withdrawn. There’s at least one Flickr group, too.

And that just scratches the surface. A familiar high point of many ethnic and heritage festivals is the children’s dance or ceremonial troupe in traditional costume. Yet handcrafted kids’ clothing, especially if intricate and including numerous components (beads, pendants, lace inserts, etc.) is likely to be highly expensive to test in compliance with the law. The same applies to the moccasins, buckskins, and dance gear that are cherished traditions for many Native American kids at powwows.

Some of the local press has been paying attention in recent days and the issue is beginning to reach the national press as well. The Wall Street Journal editorializes today. That attention has come only after weeks of mounting outrage at the grass-roots level, which as John Tozzi at Business Week has noted, has offered an emblematic example of the role of the new social media in giving voice to public concerns: besides alarm-raising at hundreds of blogs and forums (including Etsy and eBay), there’s been a torrent of Twitter discussion, a Ning group, YouTube, and nine Facebook groups so far. Even six month old babies are upset, or so their relatives say.

The initial reaction of many small businesspeople was to ask for as slight a modification in the law as they could, but it has become apparent that the law’s unreasonableness is across-the-board and systematic. Rick Woldenberg explains why a maze of exemptions and proliferation of categories would itself prove highly onerous, perhaps unworkable, for small businesses. Sarah at Just Add Charm writes, “it seems to me that a repeal of the CPSIA may be a better solution than trying to amend it to make it workable”. More on that idea here. I agree. Congress must repeal this bad law.

Hooters wouldn’t hire him as waiter

And so Nicolai Grushevski of Corpus Christi, Texas is off to court with a class action suit against restaurant chain Hooters of America, known for its buxom serving staff (complaint, PDF, courtesy CourthouseNews.com). Legal pressure on the winks-and-wings purveyor to hire male waitstaff is nothing new: see this post and this one on the long crusade to that effect by the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

“Humiliation” suit over Korean broadcasts

Patrick @ Popehat (otherwise known to our readers as SSFC) takes a look at a sequel to the mad-cow affair. To quote Steven Mikulan at L.A. Weekly:

Spearheaded by about 50 of their fellow countrymen from the Los Angeles area, 1,020 Korean Americans have filed a $735 million lawsuit against Seoul TV broadcast company MBC. The suit claims that, by sounding a new alarm about mad cow disease and U.S. beef, which has been banned in South Korea since 2003, MBC caused the Korean Americans to be “humiliated . . . and subjected them to mockery in the United States.” A spokesman for the plaintiffs claims that MBC implied that anyone eating American beef would contract the disease, and that Koreans living in the U.S. were held in low regard as consumers of the beef.

More coverage: Korea Times, Brian in Jeollanam-do.

January 13 roundup

  • IP turf-staking: charity tries to trademark the phrase “Congenital Diaphragmatic Hernia Awareness” [Likelihood of Confusion]
  • Bad excuses dept.: Ohio 17-year-old killed his mom but lawyers “insisted youth and video game addiction made him less responsible,” a theory judge wasn’t buying [AP/WBBM]
  • Lawsuit over Yelp review (chiropractor vs. disgruntled ex-client) settled [CNet; earlier]
  • “Can U.S. Laws Protect Online Speech from Foreign Libel Suits?” [Neuberger/PBS]
  • Coverage of Philadelphia’s Fumo scandal trial, “law firms [and some big ones] used in an alleged blackmail scheme” [Lowe, AmLaw Daily, earlier]
  • “Another wrongful-paternity case from hell” (wrong guy, but default judgment) [Balko, Reason]
  • Never trust content from “ProPublica” [Kopel @ Volokh on environmental effects of oil hydraulic fracturing, response from ProPublica, Kopel’s riposte; their attack on Goldman Sachs in California and New Jersey; Carter Wood at NAM “ShopFloor”]
  • Few places have emulated San Francisco and Santa Cruz ban on discrimination based on appearance, i.e., against less attractive folks [WorkplaceProf]