Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Health Affairs letter on Marc Rodwin Massachusetts Medical Malpractice Study

You may remember Professor Rodwin and I debating his paper on Point of Law; that debate has spilled over onto the pages of the November/December issue of Health Affairs, which published a short letter from me criticizing the Rodwin study and a muddying response from the authors:

Marc Rodwin and colleagues’ highly publicized conclusion that Massachusetts does not have a malpractice insurance crisis (May/Jun 08) is not supported by the data in their paper.

First, the sole finding supporting the conclusion, that malpractice insurance rates declined 1 percent from 1990 to 2005, is an artifact of the Simpson Paradox. Rates for low-risk doctors increased 14 percent; rates for high-risk doctors increased 45 percent. The mean decreased entirely because the mix of doctors changed, and the percentage of insured doctors with expensive high-risk policies declined substantially…

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Microblog 2008-01-04

  • Must stores let in “social support” goats? Hot ADA issue we’ve often covered makes it into NYTimes mag [Rebecca Skloot] And Time mag tackles scandal of ADA-suit mass filing for $$, long familiar to our readers [Alison Stateman]

  • Can you guess mechanism by which snow globes turned out to cause fire hazard? (Then check link.) [K.C. Business Journal]

  • “Do Not Track” legislation could torpedo online-advertising models [ReadWriteWeb h/t @lilyhill]

  • What if plea-bargaining defendants could give D.A.s eBay-style feedback? [Greenfield]

  • UK cabinet minister wants govt to regulate Net with aim of child safety, Brit blogger says – hell, no! [Perry de Havilland, Samizdata]

  • As lawyer-driven mummeries go, which is worse, coffee machine overwarning or medical “informed consent”? [Happy Hospitalist]

  • Bogus memoirs nowadays spawn real lawsuits, as we remember from James Frey case [Elefant]

  • Is health care prohibition in our future? [KevinMD]

  • Massachusetts child support guidelines said to be highly onerous for dads already and getting worse [Bader, CEI]

  • Kid gloves from some local media for Connecticut Sen. Chris Dodd & his magic mortgages [Christopher Fountain and again]

  • Had Robertson v. Princeton donor-intent suit gone to trial, lawyers might have billed $120 million hourly fees. How’d the number get that high? [Kennerly, Litigation & Trial and again]

  • A reminder: these microblog posts are based on a selection of my contributions to Twitter, which you can “follow” here.

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Site maintenance

I expect to be doing a little upgrading to the site in coming days, so don’t be surprised if it becomes unavailable for short periods (or even longer periods, if something goes wrong).

Update late Saturday evening: looks like the upgrade to WordPress 2.7 has been successful, with only about half an hour of downtime. If you notice problems in the way the site runs, by all means let me know.

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Co-workers sue Mega Millions lottery winners

I don’t know how many times I’ve seen generic versions of this story, but this is the latest, filed by four Piqua, Ohio, workers who want a $41 million share of the $207 million lottery payout. “The four said they were out of the office and unavailable to contribute to the office pool for the Dec. 12 drawing” but allege an oral agreement that winnings would be shared whether workers happened to be around to contribute or not. (Nancy Bowman, “Piqua lottery winners sued by co-workers”. Dayton Daily News, Dec. 23).

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Football-keeping neighbor sues parents

Ohio: “The 88-year-old Blue Ash woman arrested after refusing to give a 13-year-old neighborhood boy his football back after it landed in her yard has sued the youth’s parents, alleging emotional distress. The lawsuit by attorney H. Louis Sirkin on behalf of Edna Jester contends that Paul and Kelly Tanis “and their minor children ‘regularly and without permission’ enter Jester’s yard to retrieve footballs and other play items that have been ‘carelessly tossed’ onto her property, the suit adds. …The Blue Ash city solicitor and city prosecutor later dropped the misdemeanor theft charge filed against Jester after she refused a police officer’s order to return the Tanis boy’s football.” (Barry M. Horstman, “Football keeper files lawsuit”, Cincinnati Enquirer, Jan. 3).

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New at Point of Law

Lots of good reading at my other law site:

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Toyless Yule, cont’d

About two weeks ago SSFN posted an item on the threat to independent toymakers of a new law passed by Congress in response to the lead-paint-on-Chinese-toys panic. A day or two later the Washington Post covered the issue and the story has been spreading to other media. Maybe the next Congress, though not exactly business-friendly in many other ways, will act before any general wipeout of the economy’s handcrafted-toy sector.

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Guestblogger thanks; best-blog contests

Many thanks to SSFC for his reader-applauded (and marathon-length) stint guest blogging while I finished a deadline over the holidays. Be sure to check out his blogging at Social Services for Feral Children, where he’s written a nice post on his experience here. I have a feeling we’ll be seeing him back in this space before too long. ABA Journal blawg contest

On a different note, today is the last day of voting in the ABA Journal’s annual best law blog contest, so it’s the last occasion for us to pester you on it. We’ve run up a very decent vote but two other sites put on a big effort to win the “Niche” category this year and we’ll probably lose to one of them (unless Michelle Malkin tells her readers to vote for us or something). Whether or not we win, a strong showing brings visibility to this site, so thanks again for voting. And I’m happy to learn that Overlawyered has now made it to the finalist list for the first time at a second and quite well-known blog award competition. That one hasn’t started yet, so I’ll wait on giving it a proper announcement until Monday when voting begins, but you can see a preview here.

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