Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

QFC mad cow class action

In other grocery lawsuit news: you may remember back in December that a single Canadian cow was found to have mad cow disease, and as a safety precaution, tens of thousands of pounds of beef were voluntarily recalled in addition to the 10,510 pounds the USDA ordered recalled. Well, it seems that a Seattle-area woman, Jill Crowson, is bringing a class action against supermarket chain QFC. Says the suit, it wasn’t enough for QFC to merely pull the meat from its shelves, post signs, and make public announcements; even though coverage of the lone mad cow dominated headlines for a week, QFC should also have taken the individual step of contacting customers who purchased beef to warn them–and presumably have managed to accomplish this instantaneously on Christmas Eve, since QFC learned about the beef on December 24 and Ms. Crowson ate it on December 25.

Now, it’s exceedingly unlikely that Ms. Crowson or her family has suffered any injury from her Christmas-day tacos. First, it’s unlikely that Ms. Crowson had any meat from the infected cow; second, it’s extremely unlikely (and there is no evidence) that one will contract variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease from the muscle meat of a cow (the real danger is the relatively unpopular brain and spinal cord); third, even those who do eat infected brain and spinal tissue are unlikely to contract vCJD, which has stricken 150 people out of the millions exposed worldwide. Ms. Crowson probably suffered more risk driving to and from the grocery store or her lawyer’s office. Nevertheless, she wishes damages for the ”stress and fear” of vCJD–though if such longshot risks cause her such anxiety, one would think she would do more due diligence in life. (Lewis Kamb, “QFC says it acted appropriately in beef recall”, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Mar. 6; “Seattle family sues grocery chain over mad cow claim”, AP, Mar. 6; Kyung M. Song, “Clyde Hill woman sues QFC over suspect meat”, Seattle Times, Mar. 6; complaint; QFC statement).

Read On…

Filed under: , , , ,

Grocery worker wins ADA case

37-year-old grocery worker David Warnes took a donut from an Entenmann’s box, ate half of it, and returned the other half to the box on the shelf. The Giant Eagle supermarket fired him — and bought itself a lawsuit. Mr. Warnes has Down Syndrome and, his mother explains, “impulsively” ate the doughnut without understanding the consequences of his actions. Somehow, this case got to a jury, which ruled in Mr. Warnes’s favor; the supermarket reached a settlement rather than risk punitive damages. “The lawsuit sought damages for lost wages, reimbursement for the difficulty Warnes would have in finding another job, emotional distress, embarrassment and humiliation.” “Warnes’ attorney, Timothy O’Brien, said his client was ‘very happy’ with the jury’s decision.” “‘He was pleased,’ said his mother, Carol. ‘[But] he doesn’t really comprehend the legal system.'” That makes two of us, at least in this case. (Torsten Ove, “Giant Eagle reaches settlement with former employee”, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Mar. 6; Robert Baird, “Grocery worker wins lawsuit”, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Mar. 5).

Read On…

Filed under: , , ,

$12.5 M verdict in pickup crash suit

On October 9, 1999, a construction zone on Interstate 70 near Warrenton, Missouri, was slick after a hard rain. An eastbound tractor-trailer hydroplaned, hit the median, and flipped over, blocking the westbound lanes. John and Shirley Mathes, driving a Ford pickup pulling a camper trailer with propane tanks, slammed into the 30-ton trailer at 60 miles per hour, and were then sandwiched by another pickup truck driving 50 miles per hour. The Matheses and their grandson died in the crash, though it was a matter of dispute whether they survived the initial impacts; medical examiners on both sides of the case found no evidence that they had.

The deep pocket in the case was Ford, and a Jackson County jury decided that, in a case where three vehicles were traveling too fast, and all three leaked fuel and ignited, it was Ford that should be legally responsible for $12.5 million in damages because the pickup truck’s fuel tank — which met a crash test three times more severe than the federal safety standard — was “defective” for not remaining intact in such a dramatic collision. (Dan Margolies, Kansas City Star, “Ford told to pay $12.5 million”, Mar. 5; AP, Mar. 4).

Disclaimer: I represent Ford in different litigation.

Filed under: , ,

Harassment: has a bubble burst?

Naomi Wolf publishes an article seemingly destined to score a “surefire, indignant bang of contemporary succ?s de scandale” about being the subject of an alleged pass from Prof. Harold Bloom twenty years ago. The expected reactions, however, are not forthcoming. “I keep a close watch on my cultural windmills, and I can tell you categorically that a few years ago, this story would have had them spinning furiously, unanimously, in favor of Wolf.” But a cultural moment seems to have passed, and with it the old inquisitorial spirit once automatically triggered by harassment charges. “Wolf appears now like a helpless vendor trying to peddle a Semper Augustus tulip bulb in Rotterdam circa 1769.” (Celia Farber, New York Press, vol. 17, iss. 9)(via The Minor Fall, the Major Lift).

Filed under:

Hillsdale College “Imprimis”

I’m happy to announce that my speech last month at Hillsdale College in Michigan has been reprinted as the March issue of the college publication “Imprimis”, which reaches a very large (1 million+) readership. (Walter Olson, “The Threat from Lawyers is No Joke”, current issue, will rotate off top page — when that happens, search archive for March 2004)(or permalink printable version)

Filed under: ,

Karma ran over his dogma, cont’d

More petard-hoisting: “A champion of Berkeley rent control was ordered last week to pay his former tenants more than $100,000 in restitution by the very rent board he campaigned to create. By a unanimous vote, the Berkeley Rent Stabilization Board found that Michael Berkowitz, a paid aide to Councilmember Maudelle Shirek, had willfully misrepresented his residency status at his 2820 Derby St. property to skirt rent control. Berkowitz also works in a second position as chief of information services and neighborhood planning for the City of San Francisco.” (Matthew Artz, “Rent Board Orders Council Aide To Repay Overcharged Tenants”, Berkeley Daily Planet, Feb. 27)(via Myria who had it from Classical Values). And this just in: Republican Joe Thompson, the minority whip of the New Mexico House of Representatives, “was charged with drunken driving, hours after attending a bill-signing ceremony to highlight the state’s newest effort to crack down on DWI offenders.” (“Lawmaker arrested for drunken driving after attending anti-DWI ceremony”, AP/San Francisco Chronicle, Mar. 4)

Filed under:

Chasing clients in the U.K.

“One of the most relentlessly aired advertisements on daytime television this summer is for a contingency law firm touting for business. The advert shows a woman spontaneously falling off her office chair. It seems she will never walk again, until a kindly lawyer reminds her there is no such thing as a simple accident, and hands her a cheque for ?4,000.” (Stephen Robinson, “No one is safe from health and safety regulators”, Daily Telegraph, Aug. 13, 2003)

Filed under: ,

Oh, working for them

Two years ago we noted that the Environmental Working Group, a frequent source of anti-business stories in the press, seemed to be rather deeply involved with the litigation biz (see May 23, 2001). The group more recently has come in for sharp criticism from the conservative Capital Research Center (Bonner R. Cohen, “The Environmental Working Group: Peddlers of Fear”, Jan.) (PDF)(mentions this site) and from the American Tort Reform Association (also mentions this site).

Looking over EWG’s website recently, we noticed a page dated Nov. 17 of last year on the MTBE liability controversy (on which, see Nov. 25). It seems EWG took out big ads in Roll Call and The Hill calling for oil companies to be held liable for underwater spread of the gasoline additive (sample ad in PDF format, linked from Nov. 17 page). On EWG’s own webpage (see bottom of left column) appears the following notice: “Advertisements paid for by Association of Trial Lawyers of America (ATLA)”. Curiously, that reader advisory didn’t appear in the sample ad itself. Wasn’t there room to fit it in?

And today EWG released a report that echoes the major assertions of the plaintiff’s trial bar on the topic of asbestos, and adds some controversial claims of its own, including a claim that deaths from asbestos-related disease are on the rise. The report doesn’t have much to say about perjury mills or about the domination of the asbestos docket by unimpaired claimants. It turns out (as you learn if you reach this page) that the new report “would not have been possible without the financial, intellectual and material support of the Association of Trial Lawyers of America (ATLA)”, and in particular a “grant in the amount of $176,000 from ATLA to the EWG Action Fund.” You might almost think there’s a pattern here.

Filed under: , , ,