Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Mass. high court: use of cigarettes inherently unreasonable

On May 18 Massachusetts’s Supreme Judicial Court “rejected one of the tobacco industry’s most successful defenses in wrongful death lawsuits, ruling the companies cannot shield themselves from liability simply by claiming that smokers should know cigarettes are dangerous.” (Denise Lavoie, “Mass. High Court Rejects Tobacco Defense”, AP/Forbes, May 18). In particular, the court declared it to be “obvious… that cigarettes cannot be used safely and therefore that cigarette use is unreasonable” and ruled that accordingly “public policy demands” that liability be placed on cigarette manufacturers. (Childs, May 18). Jacob Sullum comments at Reason “Hit and Run” (May 22).

In other news, Sullum (May 17) also brings word (via tobacco control movement whistleblower Dr. Michael Siegel) of how “at least 68 anti-smoking groups” — the American Cancer Society most prominent among them — “are falsely claiming that a half-hour’s exposure to secondhand smoke can cause atherosclerosis and heart attacks.”

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“$1 Billion Legal Fee Eyed in Enron Suit”

That’s what Bill Lerach, late of Milberg Weiss, could bag as Enron settlements mount toward $10 bmillion. It seems Lerach has a sliding-scale contingency-fee arrangement with his lead plaintiff, the University of California, starting at 8 percent and going upward from there. And — this is the beauty part — it seems there’s a good chance courts will simply extend the percentage rates to apply to the many other investors in the plaintiff class, even though they never signed up to be Lerach clients or were given a chance to negotiate fees with him. No wonder class-action lawyers are so concerned to butter up the universities, pension funds, unions and other big institutional plaintiffs who serve as their stalking horses in these actions. The university, it seems, did not employ competitive bidding to invite participation by other potential counsel.

A critic of class action litigation, Lawrence Schonbrun, said he is suspicious of the university’s claims that it has vigilantly overseen the Enron case. A retired judge the university hired as a consultant on the case, J. Lawrence Irving, was paid more than $1.4 million by the state school, before being hired this month as a consultant by Lerach Coughlin. “This was not the ideal choice to monitor plaintiffs’ counsel,” Mr. Schonbrun said.

(Josh Gerstein, New York Sun, May 31).

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Dog bites man department: another worthless class action settlement

These are so frequent that it’s almost not worth noting, especially because the Class Action Fairness Act means that these are (one hopes) the last of a dying breed, but Consumerist finds another class action settlement with little merit. The attorneys—who include class actioner Joe Whatley, who has mysteriously avoided being mentioned in Overlawyered before now—are seeking $5.5 million in the Kansas state-court nationwide settlement. Some class members get a $5 invoice credit from Sprint, but only if they sign a new two-year contract.

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Open thread: design of this site

Should we put a search box in the upper right corner? Are trackbacks still of use to anyone? Is there some way to clean up the tangle of old archives resulting from our 2003 and 2005 switches to different archiving systems? Our fonts are optimized for Firefox; how can we make them look equally good in IE? Here’s the place to post any advice or observations on the site’s layout, design, graphics and internal structure — please save critiques of content for some other occasion.

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