Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

The Richard Mraz case: $55M in Los Angeles Dodge Dakota trial

In April 2004, 38 year-old Richard Mraz got out of his employer’s 1992 Dodge Dakota while it was still running. He didn’t set the parking brake, and the vehicle started moving when it shifted itself from park into reverse. Mraz tried to jump into the moving vehicle, and suffered fatal head injuries for his trouble.

Chrysler admitted the vehicle had a defect that caused the automatic transmission to shift from park to reverse in rare circumstances. Thing is, they admitted it when they sent twelve separate recall notices to the Dakota owner, Mraz’s employer, who ignored them all. But, Mraz’s lawyers said, Chrysler spent time in internal discussions deciding whether to recall the vehicle before actually doing so, so they should be punished, pointing to an internal memo debating the question as a “smoking gun.”

A Los Angeles County jury agreed, finding $5.2 million in compensatory damages for the longshoreman’s death, and attributed 75% to DaimlerChrysler (10% for Mraz’s multiple safety errors, and 15% for his employers’ ignoring the recall notices), and issuing $50 million in punitive damages, all to Chrysler. Most press accounts failed to mention the recall notices or Mraz’s negligence, just regurgitating the plaintiff’s lawyer’s account. (David Shepardson, “DCX loses suit in Dodge owner’s death”, Detroit News, Mar. 8). More on California auto product liability cases.

Interestingly, at least one law firm has already purchased the Google search term “Richard Mraz.”

Read On…

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Obama finally pays his traffic tickets

Because it’s not as if traffic law counts as real law, right? (Howie Carr, “Hillary circling as Obama searches for parking space”, Boston Herald, Mar. 8).

P.S. in response to comments: I think it’s a cultural fact worth recording that the editor of the Harvard Law Review felt no obligation at the time to settle up on a stack of unpaid parking tickets. It’s not wholly unrelated to the phenomenon of attorney general nominees’ not having bothered to tell the IRS about their household employees, or of U.S. Supreme Court justices’ meeting for regular poker nights reputedly in noncompliance with local law: namely, it suggests that sonorous Law Day maxims about the need for each of us to respect the law in its full majesty have surprisingly little traction even in (especially in?) elite law circles. That’s a fact worth knowing, if true.

That Obama is running for president now is the least interesting bit of the story (and indeed is only of significance in that it provided the impetus for him to pay up). Far from being received as an unforgivable blot on his character, I suspect the story will (like his smoking habit) serve to humanize the senator for many voters, perhaps especially among those who, like many readers of this site, have a somewhat rebellious attitude toward law to begin with.

P.P.S. There have apparently been some malfunctions with comments on this entry — if you entered a comment and it didn’t show up within a reasonable time, you might want to email and let us know.

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March 8 roundup

  • Why the tort reform movement is really a civil justice reform movement. [Point of Law; University of Dayton Law Review]

  • What to do about private securities class actions. [Wallison @ AEI]

  • Law firm sued when witness trips, dies, in courtroom accident. [Lattman]

  • Nifong responds to criticism of his handling of Duke Lacrosse case; KC Johnson not impressed.

  • Big corporations have bogus consumer fraud lawsuits, too: NutraSweet maker sues Splenda maker over “Made from sugar so it tastes like sugar.” [Legal Intelligencer]

  • The effect of a malpractice suit on a physician. [Levy via Kevin MD]

  • “Are our institutions or is our sense of justice stronger because of [the Libby] prosecution?” [Fred Thompson; WaPo oped; also many posts by Frum]

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Warning: “Contains nuts”

Apropos of Walter’s post about silly warning labels, such as “contains nuts” on a can of nuts, I figure we ought to slap the same warning label on the state legislature here in New Jersey.

For instance, the New Jersey Law Journal reports that a state Senate committee unanimously approved a bill this week that would require warning labels on… internet dating sites. The bill first requires that the site inform members “in bold, capital letters in at least 12-point type” whether or not it has conducted a criminal background check on its members. And if it does conduct criminal background checks, it then has to disclose that there’s no real point to conducting criminal background checks:

[The service] shall state that criminal background screenings are not foolproof; that they may give members a false sense of security; that they are not a perfect safety solution; that criminals may circumvent even the most sophisticated search technology; that not all criminal records are public in all states and not all databases are up to date; that only publicly available convictions are included in the screening; and that screenings do not cover other types of convictions or arrests or any convictions from foreign countries.

(How many people do you think are going to read through that verbal thicket of disclaimers?) But wait, that’s not all. The Senate had some extra free time, so it piled on the list of warning labels required:

Read On…

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“You got your lawsuit in my peanut butter.” “You got your peanut butter in my lawsuit.”

On February 14, 2007, the Food & Drug Administration issued a recall for certain brands of peanut butter manufactured by ConAgra. On March 1, 2007, the FDA announced it had identified the salmonella at the manufacturing plant. Enter the lawyers.

On Wednesday, a Louisville, Kentucky man who claimed he got sick after eating the peanut butter, filed suit against ConAgra. (The story featured a disclaimer I don’t believe I’ve seen elsewhere in news coverage of litigation: “Claims made in filing a lawsuit give only one side of the case.”) I certainly didn’t think that this was the first suit filed against ConAgra, but I naively thought it was one of the first. Ha! (In my defense, I wasn’t blogging at Overlawyered at the time, and I hadn’t eaten the peanut butter, so I didn’t have any particular personal or professional reason to notice the announcements of the lawsuits.)

The first suits — at least three of them — appear to have been filed on February 16, 2007, just two days after the FDA’s announcement. Each of those three involved individual plaintiffs; in case you were wondering, the first (of many) class action lawsuits seems to have waited until February 20, 2007. The huge four-day gap between the filing of the individual suits and the class-action suits is explained by the three-day Presidents Day holiday; Feb. 20 was actually the next business day.

Is there some sort of trial lawyer contest like the old Name That Tune game show? “I can file that suit in 72 hours.” “I can file that suit in 48 hours.” “Okay, file that suit!” There’s certainly no legal reason the suits need to be filed that fast; there was no approaching statute of limitations, for instance.

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“Wrongful birth” in Boston

We’ve covered a number of cases over the years in which parents sue physicians and others over the “wrongful birth” of perfectly healthy children, demanding, as part of the claimed damages, the cost of raising the youngsters to adulthood: May 9, 2000 (Phoenix), Jun. 8, 2000 (Revere, Mass., outside Boston), Apr. 9, 2006 (Scotland), and Nov. 1, 2006 (Germany). Many such cases arise from failed sterilizations or other efforts at birth control, but a new suit by Jennifer Raper of Boston against Planned Parenthood and two doctors claims that an abortion went awry. “The [Massachusetts] high court ruled in 1990 that parents can sue physicians for child-rearing expenses, but limited those claims to cases in which children require extraordinary expenses because of medical problems, medical malpractice lawyer Andrew C. Meyer Jr. said. Raper’s suit has no mentions of medical problems involving her now 2-year-old daughter.” (“Boston woman sues for child-rearing costs after failed abortion”, AP/Boston Globe, Mar. 7; Jonathan Saltzman, “Suit seeks compensation for botched abortion”, Boston Globe, Mar. 7). More: “One day Jennifer Raper’s daughter will punch her mother’s name into Google and discover that she was the result of ‘a failed abortion.'” (Taranto)

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“Scruggs offered immunity in bribery trial”

Lands on his feet every time, it seems: “The U.S. Justice Department has offered immunity from prosecution to attorney Richard ‘Dickie’ Scruggs in exchange for his testimony in a judicial bribery trial involving his former colleague, Paul Minor.” (Biloxi Sun-Herald, Mar. 7). We’ve extensively followed the trial and now retrial of Minor, a prominent Mississippi attorney, and several judges.

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Cocktail napkin not to be used for navigation

I’ve got a short piece in The American, the recently launched American Enterprise Institute magazine, about the problem of overzealous warning labels, taking as my point of departure Bob Dorigo Jones’s new book Remove Child Before Folding. Alert readers will notice that the piece is based on my Times Online column of a few weeks ago, adapted with about three paragraphs’ worth of new and added material, mostly on how liability law helps worsen the problem. (Walter Olson, “Warning: This Column Might Give You Something to Think About”, The American, Mar. 6).

For more coverage of Remove Child Before Folding, see Jan. 6, Jan. 26, etc. Reason magazine editor Nick Gillespie, incidentally, reviewed the book in the New York Post here.

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How much is that doggie in the window?

So, a Long Island school provides John Cave Jr., a hearing-impaired ninth grader, with a sign-language interpreter and student note taker for each of his classes and a daily, one-on-one lesson with a hearing instructor. Cave’s teachers are also given radio transmitters that amplify their voices. And he gets extra time to take exams. All to make sure that his partial deafness (he has 69%-70% hearing, thanks to cochlear implants) do not negatively affect his education. The school’s reward for this accommodating behavior?

A $150 million (!) lawsuit. (Relax. Cave is only claiming to be damaged to the tune of $50 million. The $100 million balance is for punitive damages.)

Why? Because the school drew the line at allowing Cave to bring his “service dog” (Simba, in case you were wondering) to school. Although the suit alleges that Simba assists Cave by alerting him to “cars, fire alarms, and bell rings” (Incidentally, I am not an expert on cochlear implants, but wouldn’t 60% hearing be sufficient for really loud sounds such as fire alarms?), the student’s primary complaint does not seem to be that he cannot hear these things at school. Rather, he complains that spending the school day away from Simba impairs their bonding and Simba’s effectiveness.

Fortunately for taxpayers, the federal judge handling the case declined last week to grant an injunction ordering the school to admit Simba, on the grounds that “John Jr. is well served by the East Meadow School District” and also on the grounds that the family seemed more interested in suing than resolving the situation:

But Spatt in his decision faulted the teen’s parents for rebuffing offers to attend a district hearing on the matter and ultimately failing to “exhaust” all the administrative processes of local and state educational agencies.

“Instead, they proceeded with this lawsuit,” Spatt said, noting that Nancy Cave invited a news crew to show up with her and her son on Jan. 4 as they tried unsuccessfully to get a principal to let Simba inside the building with his owner.

The family, of course, plans to appeal. (Newsday; Daily News)

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$2.50 for a dozen; $3,000,000 for a half dozen

In 2003, a lesbian couple from New Jersey paid about $3,000 to Repro Lab, a Manhattan sperm and embryo bank, to store six embryos created from eggs taken from one of the women. When the couple approached the bank last year in order to retrieve the embryos, so they could be implanted into the other woman, the bank told them it had lost the embryos.

The couple’s demand for compensation for this clear breach of contract, for “pain, injury, mental anguish and emotional distress”? $3,000,000. Plus punitive damages. (New York Post; AP)

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