Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Mobile lawyer van on “ER”

Readers may remember our item last May 18 about the mobile law office van spotted parked outside the emergency room at Brooklyn’s Maimonides Medical Center. Now Dr. Steven Davidson, whose EMedConcepts blog ran the original photos of the van, reports as follows (Jan. 19):

ER: Season 11, Episode 177861, 1/20/2005

[ . . . ]

A personal injury lawyer sets up a mobile office outside the ER, infuriating Lewis as he tries to turn dissatisfied patients into clients.

[ . . . ]

It turns out that the post on the Mobile Lawyer who showed up at our hospital and ER last spring caught some notice in the blogosphere. Overlawyered picked up the post and I had thousands of hits in a few days. A colleague referred another contact and somehow the story reached the writing staff at the ER production company to appear in the fictionalized version on tomorrow’s show [i.e. yesterday’s — W.O.]. Imagine that.

(via SymTym).

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$105 million against stadium beer vendor

Servers at Giants Stadium in northern New Jersey sold beer to a highly intoxicated patron, so a jury has ordered Aramark, the beer concessionaire, to pay $30 million in compensatory and $75 million in punitive damages to pay for the later acts of the drunkard, who after leaving the game drove off into a catastrophic accident. (Ana M. Alaya, “Jury adds $75 million penalty for beer seller”, Newark Star-Ledger, Jan. 20; David Voreacos, “Aramark loses big in lawsuit”, Bloomberg/Philadelphia Inquirer, Jan. 20). The plaintiff’s lawyer in the case (see Oct. 10, 2003) had asked for damages against the National Football League and the Giants as well, but according to KipEsquire (Jan. 20) those claims were dismissed, or else the award might have been really big. Correction: the jury’s compensatory verdict was split $30 million against Aramark and $30 million against the drunk driver; we originally reported that the entire award was against Aramark, but have fixed the references above.

More: New Jersey Law Journal, Jan. 21, reports that the NFL and Giants paid an undisclosed settlement to be let out of the case, though they also prevailed on a summary judgment motion; and it turns out that Daniel Lanzaro of Cresskill, N.J., the drunk driver, drank at a club with friends after leaving the stadium but before getting into the crash. Yet more: AP adds that “The NFL forbids beer sales after the third quarter, and the Giants close beer concessions at the start of the third quarter. The stadium also mandates that fans can buy only two beers at a time, but the Vernis’ lawyers contend that Lanzaro sidestepped that rule by giving the vendor a $10 tip and was allowed to buy six beers.” And according to the New York Post, “Giants Stadium officials intend to aggressively monitor tailgating and drinking” (emphasis added) in the aftermath of the verdict. Update: Feb. 2.

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Summer homework? He’ll sue

In suburban Milwaukee, 17-year-old Peer Larson wants to be in teacher Aaron Bieniek’s honors pre-calculus class, but isn’t happy about the homework assignments Mr. Bieniek required students to do over the summer. So he and his father are suing Mr. Bieniek, various school officials, and the Whitnall School District, saying summer homework assignments shouldn’t be allowed. (Jamaal Abdul-Alim, “Homework during summer vacation prompts lawsuit”, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, Jan. 19). Update Mar. 15: judge dismisses suit.

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Cop wins $1.6 M after videotaped beating

Sued if you do dept.: “A former Inglewood police officer who was fired for punching a black teenager and slamming him against a patrol car was awarded $1.6 million Tuesday by the jury in a discrimination lawsuit he and his partner brought against the city. … A bystander videotaped [Jeremy] Morse in July 2002 punching handcuffed Donovan Jackson in the head and slamming him onto a patrol car in Inglewood, just south of Los Angeles.” National publicity followed, as did protests in the heavily minority city, and the city eventually fired Officer Morse and disciplined other officers. On Tuesday a Los Angeles jury agreed with Morse’s suit contending that he would not have been lost his job had he been black. It also awarded $810,000 to another white officer, Bijan Darvish, who is still with the Inglewood department but was suspended for ten days in connection with the incident. (Chris T. Nguyen, AP/Wired News, Jan. 18).

The 2002 incident had led to the filing of criminal charges against both Morse and Darvish; juries deadlocked in two trials of felony charges against Morse, and acquitted Darvish on a charge of filing false police reports. Prosecutors eventually dropped charges against Morse. City mayor Roosevelt Dorn called this week’s verdicts outrageous, questioning why a 10-day employee suspension would be considered to be worth $800,000. (“Taped Punch Costly to City”, Los Angeles Times, Jan. 19; Matt Krasnowski, “Inglewood police officers get $2.4 million jury award”, Copley/Torrance Daily Breeze, Jan. 20).

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Business jets

“The stock market is not eager to fund this capital-intensive, risk-burdened, lawyer-strafed industry. … 40 years of lawsuits and heavy-handed regulation have made the bizjet industry hyperconservative.” (Rich Karlgaard, “Digital Rules: Cheap Jet Update”, Forbes, Jan. 10).

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Stuart Taylor, Jr. vs. Stephanie Mencimer

Over the past year journalist Stephanie Mencimer, a frequent contributor to such publications as Mother Jones and the Washington Monthly, has written a series of articles intended to rebut what she calls “The Myth of the Frivolous Lawsuit”. In the course of these articles, Mencimer assails a wide range of writers, publications and institutions that have taken a visible public role criticizing excessive litigation, myself and this site included. Her research often seems to consist of little but the uncritical recycling of allegations circulated by the Litigation Lobby, some of them fifteen or twenty years old and many of them both baldly inaccurate and nastily ad hominem in tone.

I don’t make it a practice to respond to Mencimer’s writings, but the distinguished legal journalist Stuart Taylor, Jr., who writes an influential column for National Journal and contributes to Newsweek, was outraged by her attacks on his work in an article she wrote for the October Washington Monthly and took the time to craft a lengthy, devastating point-by-point rebuttal. He sent it on December 16 to the editors of the Washington Monthly including editor-in-chief Paul Glastris.

Remarkably, in the month since then, the Washington Monthly editors have neither posted the letter for their readers’ benefit nor made any attempt to rebut it. Now Taylor has generously consented to let me post his letter here. Readers can draw their own conclusions about how much of Mencimer’s credibility is left standing after his thorough dissection — and about what it means for the Washington Monthly’s reputation that it seems intent on stonewalling on her behalf. Update Feb. 16: Washington Monthly and Mencimer reply.

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