Aides to candidates Clinton and Obama feverishly work an AAJ/ATLA trial lawyers’ conclave down Puerto Rico way, sensing that the money behind the flagging John Edwards candidacy may be “looking for a new candidate to get behind”. It’s “a testament to the crucial role played by the legal profession in Democratic fundraising. Trial lawyers have proved to be the financial mainstay for Edwards’s two presidential bids, as well as for the Democratic Party in general.” Quotes longtime Overlawyered favorites Fred Baron, Thomas Girardi and Robert Montgomery (Matthew Mosk, “Top Candidates’ Teams Look to the Lawyers”, Washington Post, Jan. 28).
Mustang club calendars
Initial reports had it that the car company’s lawyers were objecting to fans’ putting out a calendar adorned with pictures they’d taken themselves of their beloved Mustangs. Later, the company said it was fine with the fans’ publishing the photos and calendars so long as they didn’t use the Ford logo. (AdRants, Jan. 14; Culture Garage, Jan. 11).
“Court Says You Can Copyright A Cease-And-Desist Letter”
We and many others criticized a law firm in October for taking the position that its cease and desist letters, also known as nastygrams, were copyrighted and thus could not be posted intact on the web by its targets. However, if a press release from that law firm is correct, a federal court in Idaho has just indeed taken the position that cease and desist letters may be covered by copyright law. Such a ruling, if upheld, would make it more difficult for the targets of bullying tactics by lawyers to rally online support for their cause. (TechDirt, Jan. 25; Slashdot, Jan. 26; Dozier Internet Law press release, PRWeb, Jan. 24).
More: “if a press release from the law firm is correct” turns out to be a big if: according to Ron Coleman at Likelihood of Confusion, as well as our own commenters, the Idaho federal court ruling falls far short of establishing any such proposition about these letters’ being copyrightable. See also: Victoria Pynchon, IP ADR blog, TechDirt later post, Paul Alan Levy @ CL&P. And yet more: Marc Randazza, Eugene Volokh.
Why are so many politicians lawyers?
Tyler Cowen wonders, and his readers chime in with many of the obvious theories, as well as some not so obvious (Marginal Revolution and Volokh).
“Driver Who Killed Teen Sues for Damage”
Spain: “A speeding motorist who killed a teenage cyclist is suing the boy’s parents over damage to his luxury car, the government says.” (AP/WINS, Jan. 25).
Judith Regan settles…
Edwards to be AG in Obama administration?
So suggests Robert Novak, which, if true, puts to question any claims Obama has for being a different kind of Democrat. One wonders how long the prosecutions of Mel Weiss, Dickie Scruggs, or the Kentucky fen-phen lawyers would last. Of course, one recalls, the Clinton administration wasn’t any better when it buried a prosecution of Fred Baron in the Baron & Budd script memo scandal. Baron, who was the head of the ATLA trial-lawyer lobbying organization, is now Edwards’s finance chair, though the media has yet to note this hypocrisy by the supposedly anti-lobbyist Edwards.
Redwoods vs. solar panels
Richard Treanor and Carolynn Bissett face criminal charges for not cutting redwoods that have grown to block a neighbor’s panels. (Paul Rogers, “Sunnyvale homeowners told to cut redwoods that block solar panels”, San Jose Mercury News, Jan. 24)(h/t: Karen Myers).
More: Kevin at Truck and Barter thinks the local statute, which includes elements of first-in-time first-in-right, does a relatively good job at drawing bright-line rules to protect the competing legitimate interests of the property owners. For arguably relevant history, check out the old English doctrine of “ancient lights“.
Big teaching-hospital cuts after Oregon high court ruling
But they told us the malpractice crisis was just a myth dept. (Associated Press):
Oregon Health & Science University plans to cut at least 200 jobs and raise tuition by at least 10 percent to free the money needed for higher insurance costs following an Oregon Supreme Court ruling.
The December ruling cleared the way for the family of a brain-damaged child to pursue malpractice damages from the university. It effectively eliminated a liability cap of $200,000 designed to protect state agencies from major damage awards.
The cutbacks, expected to be announced Friday, were first reported by The Oregonian newspaper. Besides trimming jobs and hiking tuition, OHSU expects to restructure or close clinical, research and education programs, and scale back construction on Portland’s South Waterfront.
OHSU said the court ruling will add $30 million a year in insurance and administrative expenses. Though that’s only 2 percent of OHSU’s annual operating budget of about $1.5 billion, it amounts to more than 60 percent of its annual support from the state’s general fund. …
OHSU is Portland’s largest private employer with about 12,000 staff.
More: Victoria Taft (cross-posted from Point of Law).
“IBM responds to overtime lawsuits with 15% salary cuts”
The fastest-growing area of employment litigation in recent years has been wage-and-hour class actions, perhaps the biggest subset of which are lawsuits charging that white-collar employees have been misclassified as exempt from hourly wage and overtime calculations. Like many big employers, IBM has been hit with such suits from lawyers seeking to represent thousands of its employees. Information Week:
The good news for those workers is that IBM now plans to grant them so-called “non-exempt” status so they can collect overtime pay. The bad news: IBM will cut their base salaries by 15% to make up the difference, InformationWeek has learned.
The plan has been greeted with howls of protest from affected workers.
The payroll restructuring goes into effect Feb. 16 and applies to about 8,000 IBM employees classified as technical services and IT specialists, according to internal IBM documents reviewed by InformationWeek and sources at the computer maker.
The plan calls for a “15% base salary adjustment down across all units with eligibility for overtime,” the documents state. The move is a direct response to the employee lawsuits — at least one of which has apparently been settled.
“To avoid protracted litigation in an area of law widely seen as ambiguous, IBM chose to settle the case — and to conduct a detailed review of the jobs in question,” the documents state.
The giant tech company also intends to lobby for modernization of New Deal era wage-and-hour laws which might allow it to restore the previous compensation methods. Good luck with that — even if it can show that most of the workers involved would themselves favor salaried rather than hourly status, the political clout of unions and trial lawyers has stymied efforts at legislative reform in the past. (Paul McDougall, Information Week/EETimes.com, Jan. 23).