Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Reader inquiry on feeds

As mentioned, I know very little about RSS, Atom, feeds, etc. but just try to take the minimum steps needed to make sure readers can follow the site that way if they wish. This note from a reader in Australia is not the first to indicate that our software upgrade and site redesign of recent weeks may have caused some disruption:

I hope you’ll accept my apology in advance, but it just occurred to me today that I hadn’t had any feeds from you for quite some time now. I use Bloglines as my newsreader. I tried to resubscribe to Overlawyered using a different type of feed and that seemed successful, but when I looked at what had been supplied with the different type of feed, all of the material was from mid-March. Are you able to throw any light on this? Is there some problem with Bloglines and Overlawyered? Is there something I can do to restore the feeds? Thanks for any assistance.

Knowledgeable comments welcome.

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Plaintiff: my lawyers cut unfair side deal with Prudential

The law firm of Leeds Morelli & Brown has recently been embroiled in controversy over episodes in which it has settled batches of employment discrimination claims while contemporaneously entering agreements in which the defendants agree to hire it (the Leeds Morelli firm) for substantial sums. Now an African-American woman who was once a vice president at Prudential Insurance and then sued the company for racial bias as a Leeds Morelli client “is asking a federal judge to set aside an arbitration award, alleging her lawyers were given improper financial inducement to keep her claim and hundreds of others out of court. According to Linda Guyden, the company paid $5 million to the law firm representing her and 358 other employees, in return for which Prudential’s total exposure was capped at $10 million and the claims were kept secret just as the company was about to be taken public.” (Mary Pat Gallagher, “Bias Plaintiff Says Lawyer Sell-Out Warrants Vacating of Arbitration”, New Jersey Law Journal, Apr. 8). For a cognate controversy over Leeds Morelli’s settlement of employment claims with Nextel Corp., see Leigh Jones, “Columbia’s Simon Blasts Professors’ Role in Nextel Bias Case”, National Law Journal, Nov. 26; Bluestone, New York Attorney Malpractice Blog, Feb. 12, 2007.

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Pope Benedict’s visit

I have an op-ed in today’s National Review Online:

Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to the United States this week will be the first papal visit since the Roman Catholic Church abuse scandal broke in 2002. Archbishop Pietro Sambi, the Vatican’s top diplomat in the United States, expresses confidence that the pope will address the scandal while here. Trial lawyers, however, having been asking legislatures for years to address the problem in their own particular way: more lawsuits. That proposed solution, through undoing statutes of limitations and permitting new lawsuits over long-ago crimes, creates more problems than it solves, and hurts more than just the actors responsible for those crimes.

Reviver legislation is pending in six states, and has been proposed in many more.

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“I would rather spend fifty thousand dollars on defense than give you a dollar of unmerited settlement funds”

A cease and desist letter from Monster Cable to Blue Jeans Cable, alleging various sorts of infringement of Monster’s intellectual property, draws a ferocious response from Blue Jeans’ president Kurt Denke, formerly a practicing lawyer. “Let me begin by stating, without equivocation, that I have no interest whatsoever in infringing upon any intellectual property belonging to Monster Cable. Indeed, the less my customers think my products resemble Monster’s, in form or in function, the better … It may be that my inability to see the pragmatic value of settling frivolous claims is a deep character flaw, and I am sure a few of the insurance carriers for whom I have done work have seen it that way; but it is how I have done business for the last quarter-century and you are not going to change my mind.” And much more (Audioholics; Slashdot).

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Canada: McDonald’s to pay C$55K for firing non-handwashing employee

The British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal has ordered McDonald’s to pay $55,000 for failing to do enough to accommodate an employee whose disabling skin condition prevented her from complying with the restaurant’s hand-washing policy. Among other grounds for its decision, the tribunal cited the following:

There was no evidence of:

* the relationship between food contamination and hand-washing;…

(HRHeroBlogs/Northern Exposure, Apr. 15; Ezra Levant).

More: Commenter Bill Poser finds the decision “much more reasonable” than the reporting makes it sound and says, in particular, Northern Exposure cut off a relevant last word from its quote: “…hand-washing frequency“.

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The terrors of tag

From McLean, Va., one of D.C.’s most affluent suburbs: “Robyn Hooker, principal of Kent Gardens Elementary School, has told students they may no longer play tag during recess after determining that the game of chasing, dodging and yelling ‘You’re it!’ had gotten out of hand. Hooker explained to parents in a letter this month that tag had become a game ‘of intense aggression.’ … Many schools nationwide have whittled down playground activities in response to concerns about injuries, bullying or litigation.” (Michael Alison Chandler, “At McLean School, Playing Tag Turns Into Hot Potato”, Washington Post, Apr. 15; reaction via Technorati).

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“Pirates can claim UK asylum”

Not just a problem for Penzance: “The Royal Navy, once the scourge of brigands on the high seas, has been told by the Foreign Office not to detain pirates because doing so may breach their human rights. Warships patrolling pirate-infested waters, such as those off Somalia, have been warned that there is also a risk that captured pirates could claim asylum in Britain” on the grounds that if sent back to Somalia they could face cruel punishments such as beheading or hand-chopping. (Marie Woolf, Times Online, Apr. 13).

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Brooklyn: judge sues janitor (and city)

“A politically connected Brooklyn judge plans to file a $1 million lawsuit against the city after slipping on a just-mopped floor in his own courthouse, the Daily News has learned.” Civil judge Jack Battaglia, who broke his knee in the fall, is said to be suing not just New York City but the cleaning woman who mopped the floor. “Everyone is entitled to equal justice,” said Dick Dadey of Citizens Union, “but I hope he’s not using his intimate knowledge of the system to maximize his claim.” (Elizabeth Hays, “Judge suing city for $1M after fall on wet courthouse floor”, New York Daily News, Apr. 14).

More: Eric Turkewitz says the judge has only filed a Notice of Claim against the city, not yet a suit; when the time comes, he might not (or then again he might) name the janitor as a defendant. At Above the Law, a commenter offers a theory of why worker’s comp would not bar the judge’s claim. The same commenter asserts that Judge Battaglia is part of a special subgroup of judges whose work consists heavily of hearing claims against the City of New York, and a second, equally anonymous commenter maintains that the prospect of the judge’s having to recuse himself from such cases (now that he is a litigant) is good news for the city.