First WTC bombing: terrorists 32% to blame, building owners 68%

Twelve years after the event, a jury finds someone to blame for the Islamist van-bomb attack that killed six, injured nearly 1,000, and caused costly business dislocation (Sept. 21, 2005, Dec. 5, 2004, Oct. 12-14, 2001). The culprit? The Port Authority, an agency whose losses are likely to be ultimately borne by New York and New Jersey taxpayers, motorists and air travelers:

The jury voted unanimously that the Port Authority [then-owner of the WTC] was negligent. It found the authority 68 percent at fault for the bombing, while the terrorists who carried it out were 32 percent at fault.

Mr. [David J.] Dean, the plaintiffs’ lawyer, said that because the jury apportioned more than half the blame to the Port Authority, the agency will have to pay 100 percent of any damages for pain and suffering, the so-called non-economic damages, that might be awarded.

Regardless of how the blame was shared, the Port Authority would have to pay 100 percent of any economic damages, like lost business, he said.

Separate legal proceedings will be used to determine actual payouts; “Lawyers for the plaintiffs said they were seeking a total of as much as $1.8 billion.” And this from Mr. Dean: “The case was never about blaming the terrorists.” Well, of course it wasn’t, from his point of view, was it? (Anemona Hartocollis, “Port Authority Found Negligent in 1993 Bombing”, New York Times, Oct. 27).

So there you have it. “What is robbing a bank compared with founding a bank?” wrote Bertolt Brecht, and now we learn that being the target of a terrorist act carries with it more than twice as much responsibility for the resulting damage as actually planting and detonating the bomb. The jury’s (and plaintiff’s lawyer’s) rationale was that security experts had warned that the use of car bombs was on the rise, and yet the PA did not take the (massively disruptive to its tenants) step of closing its enormous underground garage to the public. Inevitably, the lawyers portrayed the earlier advice as a “smoking gun”, a strategem I describe in Chapter 6 of The Litigation Explosion:

Among the favorite smoking-gun generators are memo debates or unheeded suggestions within an organization. The sought-after memo will advise the hotel to dismantle the diving board, the brokerage to go easy on the risky investment, the magazine to kill the hard-hitting investigative story, the hospital to close down the vaccination program that has attracted malpractice suits. (They knew it was wrong to go ahead!) New York City injury king Harry Lipsig’s law firm got a $1.8 million settlement for forty-six-year-old postal worker Freddie Brown, mugged and badly hurt in a housing project lobby, after they found a security specialist whose recommendations to upgrade security at the project had gone unheeded. “We couldn’t lose,” jubilated lawyer Thomas Stickel. “With that witness, we had the city by the throat.” Actually, it would be a wonder if the files of a city as intensively governed as New York did not contain unheeded recommendations by the bushelful on countless subjects.

The logic of lawyers’ search for “smoking guns” is that an organization faces one of three unattractive choices: put itself at risk for verdicts like this; implement any and all recommendations it gets from security experts, no matter that many of them will be costly and intrusive (like, say, stadium patdowns for football fans) and will guard against dangers that never would have materialized; or alternatively, arrange its affairs so that fewer safety recommendations enter its files in the first place, either by asking its experts to commit fewer ideas to paper, or just by not employing them. The New York Sun quotes me today in its coverage of the story: David Lombino, “Port Authority Is Held Liable in Bombing That Killed Six in 1993 Attack on WTC”, New York Sun, Oct. 27. More:Ann Althouse and commenters discuss the verdict, while Michael Krauss at Point of Law hopes it will be thrown out on grounds of lack of proximate cause.

Apple sued over iPod nano scratches

Class-action lawyers including Seattle’s Hagens Berman (Feb. 16, Mar. 6 and Mar. 29, 2004; Nov. 24, 2003; Sept. 9-10, 2002, etc.) sued Apple last week in the name of buyers of the popular iPod, claiming the nano screen on the device tends to scratch easily and become unreadable. They are seeking remedies including a refund of moneys paid “plus a share of the company’s profits on the music player’s sales”. (“Nano Owners Sue Apple”, Red Herring, Oct. 20; Ina Fried, “Suit filed over Nano scratches”, CNet, Oct. 21).

Globetrotting Hausfeld

Lawsuit impresario Michael Hausfeld, whose doings often figure in these pages, is on “a crusade to export America’s legal system around the world,” per one recent U.S. magazine profile. He claims to share case ideas regularly with a network of lawyers in countries around the world, according to a profile in the U.K. publication The Lawyer (Jon Robins, “Michael Hausfield [sic] brings class actions to the UK”, Oct. 24)(via Schaeffer). More on Hausfeld: Jan. 11, Apr. 13, Jul. 25, 2004; May 24, 2001; Mar. 2 and Aug. 13-14, 2000.

Deep pocket files: Yong Huang v. Chicago PD

On January 2, 2003, thieves stole a wallet at the Redfish restaurant and jumped into a getaway Dodge Intrepid driven by Lakesha Smith. Police started to pursue, and were called off the chase; one sergeant disregarded the order, and continued pursuit, though never faster than 30 mph. Five minutes later, the Intrepid ran a red light, hit an SUV, and then richocheted into a pedestrian, 25-year-old Qing Chang. Smith and another passenger have been charged with murder; a hearing is pending December 12.

But meanwhile, a civil jury has already determined that Smith and her passenger were only 25% responsible—which makes Chicago taxpayers entirely responsible for a $17.5 million award. Chicago has changed its chase procedures, though, of course, citizens killed by criminals who aren’t caught will have no cause of action against Chicago or the trial lawyers who forced Chicago into adopting a policy that makes lawsuit prevention more important than crime prevention. And it’s not clear what good changing the policy does if Chicago can still be held liable if a police officer disobeys orders to stop a chase. (Frank Main, “City slapped with $17.5 mil. judgment”, Chicago Sun-Times, Oct. 25; NBC5, “City To Appeal $17.5 Million Police Chase Crash Verdict”, Oct. 25; Ben Bradley, “Charges filed in wake of local chase”, ABC7 Chicago, Jan. 5, 2003). See also: Mar. 29, Mar. 15 and links therein.

California’s Proposition 79

As CoyoteBlog (Oct. 18) notes, this ballot initiative on drug prices contains a sneaky, little-discussed provision that will empower trial lawyers to file bounty-hunting suits against pharmaceutical companies if the companies charge prices “that lead to any unjust and unreasonable profit”, with a minimum $100,000 plus fees guaranteed to plaintiffs if a jury agrees that they have proved this (very hazily defined) offense. California has already earned the title of “Shakedown State” because of its bounty-hunting provisions on chemicals, disabled rights, consumer, education and labor law. And the San Diego Union-Tribune editorially criticizes Consumers Union for backing the benighted measure.

UC Berkeley sued over evolution website

“The University of California at Berkeley is being sued for running a website for school teachers called Understanding Evolution. Anti-evolutionists claim that the site breaches the American constitution on the separation of church and state because it links to religious organisations which believe faith can be reconciled with Darwin’s theory of evolution”. (Donald MacLeod, “Intelligent design opponents [sic] invoke US constitution”, EducationGuardian (U.K.), Oct. 18; Katie McCulloch, “Citing Religious Web Site, Parent Sues UC Berkeley”, Daily Californian, Oct. 14). More: CalStuff, Tim Sandefur, Ed Brayton, Not Your Father’s America.

Hurricane-chasing, cont’d

New Orleans criminal defense attorney Joseph Larre’s 300 clients were evacuated and now sit in lockups across the South, some as far away as Jacksonville, Fla. Many of his case records were destroyed by floodwater, and the city’s criminal courts have not reopened. So Larre, 47, drove around the city last week in his champagne-colored Ford Explorer and nailed signs to telephone poles announcing, in big red letters, “KATRINA CLASS ACTION LAWSUIT.”

By Friday, he had received 300 phone calls. At least two other lawyers, he said, have put up similar signs.

Larre said he hasn’t decided whom to sue for what. But he says he has heard from homeowners who fear that insurance companies will scrimp on settlements, as well as irate residents looking to haul New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and even the Red Cross into court.

As he considered potential defendants, Larre said, “I definitely like the oil companies and their insurance companies.”…

“You really hit the jackpot if you nail the Army Corps of Engineers,” he mused, standing in a mud-caked intersection in his shorts, T-shirt and running shoes.

(Douglas Birch, “Lawyers drawn to storm cases”, Baltimore Sun, Oct. 10).