Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

“Grandparents sue over jailhouse baby”

Knoxville, Ga.: “The grandparents of a child conceived while her parents were both in the Crawford County Jail want the county to help them support the baby. LaTonya Finney and boyfriend, Adrian Howard, were jailed in 2002 to await trial on robbery charges. While they remained behind bars, Finney became pregnant.” Finney’s parents now say that because their daughter was impregnated while in prison, “Crawford County Sheriff Kerry Dunaway shares some of the responsibility — and the cost — while the tot’s parents are both serving prison terms.” The couple say the sheriff granted them a conjugal visit, but he says the man picked a lock and gained access to the women’s portion of the prison to see his girlfriend.

“‘I just think it’s a very, very bizarre social conscience these people have that their daughter conceives a child and they think the sheriff is responsible,’ said county attorney David Mincey Jr. The sheriff said he wasn’t even aware of Finney’s pregnancy until Howard filed suit demanding to be released from prison to care for Adrianna. That case is still pending.” (AP/CNN, Aug. 2).

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Stella Liebeck and McDonald’s coffee revisited II

More discussion of the McDonald’s coffee case, the blogosphere discussion of it, and why it’s relevant today on our sister blog, Point of Law (Aug. 4).

One additional point merits discussion: “PG” of Blog de Novo (Aug. 3) makes the oft-heard argument that it was alright for Stella Liebeck to sue McDonald’s for millions because she first tried to settle for her medical expenses. I recently had an experience that shows why this thinking is fallacious.

Read On…

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A tomb with a ($150M) view (of the Major Deegan)

Real estate tycoon Leona Helmsley is suing Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx for $150 million in compensation, including $100 million for “severe anguish and emotional distress”, because she says her late husband Harry’s family mausoleum has lost the views, serenity and solitude it once had. “Mrs. Helmsley’s complaint, first reported Monday in The New York Post, is that the ‘perpetual beauty’ and ‘peaceful solitude’ of the spot have been destroyed by the latest of many community mausoleums to be built at Woodlawn. But the view Mrs. Helmsley describes as forever lost is bleak: the access ramps to the Major Deegan Expressway, a traffic light at Jerome Avenue and 233rd Street, and locked gates where the cemetery’s grand entrance once was.” Woodlawn’s president says he has been unable to find any precedent for a lawsuit complaining of loss of views from a mausoleum. (Jane Gross, “Tomb Trouble: Nimby Strikes at Woodlawn”, New York Times, Jul. 29; “NY property tycoon sues cemetery”, BBC News, Jul. 27).

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The helping professions

North Carolina: “Raleigh lawyer Larkin Kirkman was paid more last year for representing poor people in court — more than $137,000 — than I. Beverly Lake earned as chief justice of the N.C. Supreme Court. … [Kirkman] represents juveniles, parents accused of abusing or neglecting their children and defendants charged with low-level felonies and misdemeanors.”

“Senior Resident Superior Court Judge Donald W. Stephens questioned whether some lawyers are being honest about the hours they spend defending those cases. ‘Many of us were shocked to find that some of the highest-paid lawyers on this list participated in no jury trials during that payment period and represented very few indigent defendants charged with serious felonies,’ Stephens said.” However, Kirkman said that some of the money paid him in 2003 was for 2002 work and that his previous years’ earnings from the county had been lower, at $87,750 for 2002 and $76,648 for 2001. (Andrea Weigl, “Lawyer fees criticized in Wake”, Raleigh News & Observer, Jul. 16).

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Stella Liebeck and McDonald’s coffee revisited

A sad example of how the Democratic party has become the political wing of the plaintiffs’ bar is a recent post in the Daily Kos defending John Edwards by lionizing the result in the infamous McDonald’s coffee case, where a jury awarded Stella Liebeck $2.9 million for spilling a 49-cent coffee on herself. (Daily Kos, Aug. 1). Professor Bainbridge refutes (Aug. 1), with reference to our Dec. 10 entry. Blogger “Curmudgeonly Clerk” (Aug. 2) continues to insist that hot coffee is unreasonably dangerous, which sidesteps the question why our legislatures continue to permit it to be sold. Strangely, the Clerk is aware of and cites McMahon v. Bunn-O-Matic, a Seventh Circuit case that should’ve ended the coffee debates once and for all, but doesn’t reconcile that decision with his defense of the Liebeck case.

Meanwhile, Maxine Villegas’s sister spilled McDonald’s coffee on her, and she’s hired Liebeck’s lawyer to sue McDonald’s. (Matt Fleischer-Black, “One Lump or Two?”, American Lawyer, Jun. 4.) Though scheduled to go to trial last month, there hasn’t been additional press coverage.

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Buys $29 truck, complains of not feeling safe

Bryan Banquells bought a 1985 Nissan King Cab from the El Cajon Ford dealership for $29 — that’s right, $29. But the dealership soon thereafter learned, and notified Banquells, that the vehicle was legally in “salvaged” status and should not have been sold without a disclosure to that effect. It offered to buy the truck back but Banquells, who has retained attorney Hal Rosner, doesn’t like that idea; he “refuses to drive the car and feels the dealership should provide him with a new one”. Reader Steve Headley comments: “Guy buys $29 truck, truck is bad, now wants brand new truck. Yeah…. that makes sense to me.” Banquells says he does not feel safe taking his small children around in his $29 truck now that he knows it was salvaged. (“Dealer, Customer Face Off Over Salvaged Car”, NBCSanDiego.com, Jul. 26). P.S.: reader Chuck Shepherd interprets the quoted material from the article as signifying only that Banquells wants a “new” truck in the sense of “replacement used”, rather than in the sense of “brand-new”.

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Calif. scales back sue-your-boss law

Ending a standoff, Democrats and Gov. Schwarzenegger have agreed to scale back but not eliminate the already-notorious SB 796 or Labor Code Private Attorneys General Act, signed by recalled Gov. Gray Davis as a favor to trial lawyers during his waning days, which allows all and sundry to sue over labor code violations whether or not any worker was injured by the violation or complained. The compromise will eliminate most suits over non-posting of signs and will give employers a grace period to respond to allegations of a violation before exposing them to suit. (Dale Kasler, “Labor law was budget blocker”, Sacramento Bee, Jul. 29; Calif. Labor & Employment Law Blog, Jul. 29; Jul. 30). For our previous coverage, see Oct. 20, 2003.

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