Red Sox fan: Yankee fans beat me up

And it’s the fault of Yankees management and a stadium security firm, as well as the two men who actually knocked him around, says Charles Hillios of Chicopee, Mass., of the Aug. 29, 2007 incident at Yankee Stadium. (“Red Sox fan from Chicopee takes legal swing at New York Yankees”, Springfield, Mass. Republican, Aug. 6 via TortsProf weekly roundup).

P.S. In comments, Curt Cutting calls our attention to a lawsuit arising from another fracas between fans of the two teams, this one in Carlsbad, Calif. In that one a jury awarded $25,000 to the Yankees fan “for injuring his hand when he punched” the Red Sox fan.

“The Use of Litigation Screenings in Mass Torts: A Formula for Fraud?”

Lester Brickman has a new must-read paper on an under-reported problem:

Lawyers obtain the “mass” for some mass tort litigations by conducting screenings to sign-up potential litigants en masse. These “litigation screenings” have no intended medical benefit. Screenings are mostly held in motels, shopping center parking lots, local union offices and lawyers’ offices. There, an occupational history is taken by persons with no medical training, a doctor may do a cursory physical exam, and medical technicians administer tests, including X-rays, pulmonary function tests, echocardiograms and blood tests. The sole purpose of screenings is to generate “medical” evidence of the existence of an injury to be attributed to exposure to or ingestion of defendants’ products. Usually a handful of doctors (“litigation doctors”) provide the vast majority of the thousands and tens of thousands of medical reports prepared for that litigation.

By my count, approximately 1,500,000 potential litigants have been screened in the asbestos, silica, fen-phen (diet drugs), silicone breast implant, and welding fume litigations. Litigation doctors found that approximately 1,000,000 of those screened had the requisite condition that could qualify for compensation, such as asbestosis, silicosis, moderate mitral or mild aortic value regurgitation or a neurological disorder. I further estimate that lawyers have spent at least $500 million and as much as $1 billion to conduct these litigation screenings, paying litigation doctors and screening companies well in excess of $250 million, and obtaining contingency fees well in excess of $13 billion.

On the basis of the evidence I review in this article, I conclude that approximately 900,000 of the 1,000,000 claims generated were based on “diagnoses” of the type that U.S. District Court Judge Janis Jack, in the silica MDL, found were “manufactured for money.”

Despite the considerable evidence I review that most of the “medical” evidence produced by litigation screenings is at least specious, I find that there is no effective mechanism in the civil justice system for reliably detecting or deterring this claim generation process. Indeed, I demonstrate how the civil justice system erects significant impediments to even exposing the specious claim generation methods used in litigation screenings. Furthermore, I present evidence that bankruptcy courts adjudicating asbestos related bankruptcies have effectively legitimized the use of these litigation screenings. I also present evidence that the criminal justice system has conferred immunity on the litigation doctors and the lawyers that hire them, granting them a special dispensation to advance specious claims.

Finally, I discuss various strategies that need to be adopted to counter this assault on the integrity of the civil justice system.

Coordinating the Edwards story

Thursday’s New York Times investigates Fred Baron’s role (Serge F. Kovaleski and Mike McIntyre, “Lawyers’ Ties Hint at Extent of Hiding Edwards’s Affair”, Aug. 14; AP/L.A. Times; commentary at Deceiver, Jeralyn Merritt/TalkLeft, Greg Pollowitz/NRO Media Blog, DBKP; earlier). And more from DBKP here and here. P.S. And I didn’t realize until reading USA Today’s profile that scandal figure Andrew Young has served not only as a loyal Edwards foot soldier, but also as a lobbyist for the North Carolina trial lawyers’ association.

Suit: Untimely cremation should net us $3.5M

Or, so says a family’s suit against a funeral home and crematorium.  It never ceases to crack me up how some people can take a modest, legitimate claim and blow it up into a claim for financial independence.

53-year-old Pamela Grant died unattended, was autopsied and later cremated despite a fax by the funeral home to the crematorium instructing it to hold off.  You see, the family says they wanted to view the body before cremation and place mementos with it.  They were deprived of that chance and filed suit against the funeral home for $3M and the crematorium for $450K.

Now, there’s certainly a legitimate complaint here but I see little to justify the sky-high demand.  Naturally, the plaintiffs’ attorney is high-minded saying “his clients sued because they wanted to send a message to the businesses that their behavior was unacceptable.”  Translation: it’s not about the money.

The jury got it right, awarding $48K from the crematorium to the Grant children and nothing from the funeral home.  That’s a far cry from the $3.5M demand and right in line with what the crematorium’s defense counsel suggested to the jury.  (“Missed goodbye to cost crematory, not Oregon City funeral home”, OregonLive.com, Aug. 15).

I’ve finished my week as guest blogger and will pass the torch back to Walter Olson.  Walter, thank you again for the opportunity here on Overlawyered.

Ungoogle me, please

Seattle attorney Shakespear Feyissa was accused of attempted sexual assault while attending Seattle Pacific University in 1998.  He was never charged with a crime and naturally, not convicted.  But since the allegations were covered in the school paper’s online edition they are cached in Google and easily uncovered for anyone who searches his name.

SPU agreed to remove the story from the school paper but when administrators approached the student editors they said no way.  Chris Durr, editor of The Falcon Newspaper said:

We explained to them, if they wanted to start down a path of removing historical archives and pulling it from the public sphere, what they’re doing is censorship.  We basically said, sorry, we have principles in journalism that don’t allow us to put stuff in the memory hole and pretend it never happened.

(“Seattle attorney finds that the Internet won’t let go of his past”, Seattle Times, Aug. 15).

“No matter how psychotic, that voice is still worthy of being heard.”

Thus Helen Bailey, an attorney with the government-funded Disability Rights Center in Augusta, Maine. But things didn’t work out so well in the case of violent schizophrenic William Bruce, who was released from Riverview Psychiatric Center in Augusta against the recommendations of his doctors but after urgings from patient advocates. Two months later he murdered his mother. The young Bruce, now penitent, is not really on board any more with the corps of public interest lawyers that had swung into action on his behalf:

“They helped me immensely with getting out of the hospital, so I was very happy,” he said. He later added, “The advocates didn’t protect me from myself, unfortunately.” …

While William believes patients deserve some protection, he said he understands his father’s fight to strengthen commitment and treatment laws. That fight took another turn last month, when Ms. Bailey and another attorney filed a lawsuit that could undermine portions of a law Joe [the father] supported. The suit, filed in U.S. District Court in Maine, is directed at the law which makes it easier for hospitals to compel patients to take medication.

“There are times when people should be committed,” William said. “Institutions can really help. Medicine can help.”

“None of this would have happened if I had been medicated.”

(Elizabeth Bernstein and Nathan Koppel, “A Death in the Family”, Wall Street Journal, Aug. 16). The Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, whose heated response to the article is presumably expected any day now, can be found here.

More: A group called Treatment Advocacy Center is gathering horror stories about “experiences with federally funded Protection & Advocacy attorneys”.

“Richard Kreimer scores another payday”

New Jersey’s most famous homeless litigant has reached an “amicable settlement” with the Seattle Cafe and Grill at Hoboken Terminal, the Hoboken Now blog reported in April (via). “Kreimer said an employee falsely accused him of stealing an apple and had cops frisk him to keep him from coming to the shop. ‘I was dirty and disheveled. … It was homeless profiling,’ he said”. Kreimer’s many lawsuits have apparently been a mixed blessing for him: per the Hoboken blog, he’s made so much in settlements that he’s lost his Medicaid eligibility. Some of Kreimer’s earlier exploits are here.

Claim: School is Responsible for Son’s Cross-Dressing

This is the silliest claim I’ve seen in a long while.  The shooting victim’s family filed a claim against the school their son attended because it allegedly failed to enforce the dress code.  The “feminine-dressing” boy was thusly singled out for abuse.  (“Family of shooting victim files claim against Huenume School District”, VenturaCountyStar, Aug. 14).

Update: I revised the title for accuracy.