Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Peter Bronson on Stanley Chesley’s testimony

From the Cincinnati Enquirer columnist, a refreshingly acerbic account of the erstwhile Master of Disaster’s time on the stand in the Kentucky fen-phen trial, during which he compared himself to Tiger Woods in explaining why he should not be asked to stoop to taking an hourly fee:

Jurors have been anesthetized by six weeks of watching witnesses avoid the truth the way cats avoid a bath. …

…when [defense attorney O. Hale] Almand tried to make Chesley admit – yes or no – that he knew his own lawyer told prosecutors he would take the Fifth unless he got immunity, Chesley’s serial evasions made the courtroom squirm.

I counted at least nine tries. After the seventh, the judge twice ordered Chesley to answer yes or no.

He would not. He wheedled, ducked, swerved and danced. He blustered about attorney-client privilege, corrected the grammar of the question, and griped about how he has been mistreated by the press. …

If you’re hoping to hit a slip-and-fall lotto jackpot by suing Amalgamated Banana Peel Inc., Chesley is just the guy to take on herds of high-paid lawyers. But if you’re looking for a straight answer under oath, look somewhere else.

(“Tiger Woods of Torts”, Cincinnati Enquirer, Jun. 19).

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Thong shrapnel alleged in Victoria’s Secret suit

Macrida Patterson and her lawyer Jason Buccat say the lingerie store chain should pay for an incident in which a bit of rhinestone decoration flew off the slingshot-like undergarment as she was pulling it on, hitting her in the eye; the next morning she visited a hospital, though the only medical intervention the article mentions is that she took “some topical steroid”. They’ve been on the Today show, but Victoria’s Secret says it hasn’t been served with a suit or been given a chance to examine the item of saucy apparel, which Patterson had owned for a while and had worn and laundered previously. (Mike Celizic, “Eye-catching thong gives rise to lawsuit”, MSNBC, Jun. 19; “Dinged by a G-string?”, The Smoking Gun, Jun. 17).

P.S. Not to be confused with the exploding-bra claim against Victoria’s Secret this spring from South Carolina, the original coverage of which is still available on GoogleCache for the moment, though no longer online at the local paper.

P.P.S. Above the Law, I see, was here first.

Canada: court overturns parent’s grounding of 12-year-old

The father wouldn’t let her go on a school trip because he said she’d been acting up, including using a friend’s account to post inappropriate pictures on a dating site. “But [Quebec Superior Court] Justice Suzanne Tessier, who was presiding over the case, found the punishment too severe.” The mother, who is divorced from the father, was supporting the girl; the school’s policy was that both parents’ permission was required for such trips. According to a lawyer involved in the case, the father has legal custody but the girl has been living with her mother for the past month. (AFP/FoxNews.com, Globe and Mail, Eugene Volokh). Plus: Token Conservative suggests a new writ of “habeas bratus”.

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Barred for life from the banking business

So why not become a judge instead?

Fort Lauderdale attorney Bruce Rogow, who teaches legal ethics at Nova Southeastern University’s Shepard Broad Law Center, said [Ricardo] Corona’s campaign should not be penalized for something that happened 20 years ago.

“Being barred from the banking business doesn’t mean you can’t be a lawyer,” he said.

Corona, unlike his father and brother, never faced criminal charges following the collapse of a bank acquired with drug money, but the FDIC barred him permanently from involvement with regulated banks. Palm Beach County judicial-election consultant Andre Fladell looks at the bright side:

“The argument of performance is not a fair one. Everybody’s got an incredible past, and it doesn’t stop them from being a fair judge,” he said. “A person who’s been involved with the sleaze can recognize it better than someone who hasn’t.”

(Billy Shields, Miami Daily Business Review, Jun. 19).

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Chicken-catchers and chicken-pluckers, international securities edition

Plaintiffs firm Berman DeValerio sued attorneys Eran and Susan Boltz Rubenstein, former Coughlin Stoia attorneys, for breach of contract; in their counterclaim, the Rubensteins claim they were hired on a contingent fee basis to wrangle international clients to serve as plaintiffs in securities class actions. Lyle Roberts has the details, and the complaint and counterclaim. Alas, the case settled before details of this interesting arrangement came to light in discovery or other court filings, and it is perhaps too much to ask for questions to be asked in the nonexistent Congressional investigation of the practices of the securities class action bar.

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City streets not safe to drive 100-120 mph on

Amanda Laabs was a passenger in a Porsche Carrera that was being driven at somewhere between 100 and 120 mph in Victorville, Calif., suggesting that the occupants were in quite a hurry to get to their destination, an In-N-Out Burger. Her driver did manage to slow down to an impact speed of 72 mph at the intersection at which he collided with the Mitsubishi of innocent driver Dorothy Specter. Have you spotted the allegedly responsible party yet? Yes, the city of Victorville, for designing the road with “inadequate sight distance and lack of warning signs, devices and signals”, so that Specter couldn’t see the Porsche coming, all that aside from the light pole that was too easy to run into. After pages of tortuous analysis, made more tortuous by the division of authority over the road between the city of Victorville and the County of San Bernardino, an appeals court upheld a trial court’s disposal of the case on summary judgment, but also declined the city’s request for fees, saying the city had not shown that an attorney would have assessed the claim as objectively unreasonable. (Laabs v. City of Victorville, courtesy Law.com; Civil Justice Association of California press release).

Update: The following was received April 14, 2010 from a commenter identifying herself as Amanda Laabs: “…You commented and had to make your business. If you had read it correctly we were not on our way to In-n- Out, we were turned around going the opposite direction for your information. I lost both of my legs in that accident and a good friend who was sitting behind me. This is a horrible site that allows people to be rude and insensitive to the people and family who were really hurt.”

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“Trial Lawyers Inc.: Michigan on trial”

Few battlegrounds of legal reform have been harder-fought than that in the state of Michigan, where I grew up. On the plus side, the Wolverine State has seen three rounds of legislatively enacted litigation reform, along with the appointment by former Gov. John Engler of probably the most reform-minded state supreme court majority in the nation. On the minus side, trial lawyer interests have long been key players in state politics, often practicing a bare-knuckled brand of advocacy, and the career of colorful (and recently acquitted) Geoffrey Fieger of Southfield, arguably the Midwest’s most prominent trial attorney, is virtually a synonym for waywardness in the courtroom and out.

Now the Manhattan Institute’s Trial Lawyers Inc. series, under the able direction of Jim Copland, has published a new installment taking a look at the state’s tense legal politics. Trial lawyers are expected to work hard this year to knock off reformist Supreme Court Justice Clifford Taylor at the polls, and are also engaged in an all-out push to repeal the state’s one-of-a-kind law directing its courts in liability cases not to second-guess Food and Drug Administration determinations on pharmaceutical approval and marketing. To get up to speed on these issues and more, start here. (cross-posted from Point of Law).

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June 18 roundup

  • Are plaintiffs’ attorneys judge-shopping by filing and dismissing and refiling identical class-action complaints in the highly-publicized restaurant menu case against Applebee’s? [Cal Biz Lit]
  • You won’t be surprised that most of the nine worst business stories picked by BMI involve spoon-feeding by plaintiffs’ attorneys to a credulous press. [Business & Media Institute]
  • “There’s no justification whatsoever for the agency to take any kind of action,” said Julie Vallese, a spokeswoman for the Consumer Product Safety Commission. “The claims being made about the dangers of shower curtains are phantasmagorical. It’s ridiculous.” Yeah, but the lawsuits are bound to happen anyway. [NY Daily News]
  • Jack Thompson stays in the news when U.S. Marshals pay him a visit after a letter to a judge. [GamePolitics (h/t J.L.)]
  • “A City lawyer who is demanding £19 million in compensation for work-place bullying faked a nervous breakdown to secure a larger payout, an employment tribunal was told.” [London Times via ATL]
  • Did defensive medicine almost kill a patient when doctor worries more about potential lawsuit than whether nurse could save patient’s life? Heck if I know, but the underlying medicine is debated in the comments. [EM Physician blog]
  • Hair-stylist fined £4,000 for “hurt feelings” after refusing to hire a Muslim stylist who wouldn’t show her hair at work. [Daily Mail (h/t Slim); earlier on Overlawyered]
  • Disturbing turn in the Adam Reposa disciplinary hearing over his obscene gesture in court: state bar introduces satirical magazine as evidence because they “thought it was indicative of Reposa’s lack of respect for the law and the court system.” [Texas Lawyer/law.com] Mind you, this is the same Texas legal discipline system that refused to take action against Fred Baron and gave a slap on the wrist to the lawyers who tried to fake evidence in a product liability suit against Chrysler. As long as your priorities are straight.

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