News from the most litigation-famed county in Mississippi (see May 7; May 4-6, 2001): “The FBI is investigating huge jury verdicts in Jefferson County and several of the trial lawyers who have been involved with them, according to sources close to the investigation.” Last year, when a local resident interviewed by CBS Minutes suggested that jurors profit “under the table” from some of the huge verdicts, Mississippi Trial Lawyers Association official David Baria called for a criminal investigation; now that he’s got one, however, he’s not so happy about it, calling the FBI probe “a concerted effort to demonize lawyers and judges” as well as politically motivated. (Jerry Mitchell, “Verdicts, lawyers under FBI scrutiny”, Jackson Clarion-Ledger, Jun. 22).
Blogging resumes Monday
Thanks to numerous readers who’ve written in with suggestions on the dark-font issue. See you Monday.
“Lawsuit faults hospital for overdose”
Amanda C. Hagan, 29, of Allentown, Pa., is suing Norristown State Hospital “for allowing a visitor to bring into the hospital the illegal drugs she used.” She also “is blaming the hospital and county for not noticing she was high and that her heroin or cocaine needle was broken and still stuck in her arm when she received an antidepressant. The overdose that followed should have been prevented, Hagan’s civil lawsuit states.” (Pamela Lehman, Allentown Morning Call, Jun. 25; “Ridiculous suit is a waste of time” (editorial), Jun. 27).
Judge jails former Texas AG Morales
“Former Texas Attorney General Dan Morales was ordered to remain in jail while awaiting trial on federal fraud charges after a judge determined today that he may have lied on two recent car loan applications and was a risk to commit financial crimes.” Morales, a key figure in the multistate tobacco litigation and long a familiar figure to readers of this site (see Jul. 15, 2002 and links from there; Jan. 10-12, 2003), was indicted in March (see Mar. 8-9) along with his friend Marc Murr and pleaded innocent to charges of having made improper efforts to gain hundreds of millions of dollars in fees for Murr from the state’s tobacco settlement. In the new development, Assistant U.S. Attorney Jim Blankinship presented U.S. District Judge Sam Sparks “with documents that he said showed Morales had purchased two used cars — a Mercedes and a Lexus — within days of filing a sworn affidavit with the court indicating that he had no income,” entitling him to representation by an appointed public defender. “According to Blankinship, Morales paid about $70,000 for the Mercedes and Lexus, both 2000 models. On loan applications to buy the cars, Morales listed his income as either $20,000 a month or $20,800 a month.” Judge Sparks remanded Morales into custody. (“Judge orders former attorney general to remain in jail”, AP/Houston Chronicle, Jun. 26; “Judge orders ex-AG Morales to remain jailed until October”, AP/Dallas Morning News, Jun. 26; David Pasztor, “Dan Morales jailed”, Austin American-Statesman, Jun. 25.)
Losing by winning in a cleanup suit
In December, the borough of Throop, Pa. settled a lawsuit against Gould Electronics Inc. over expenses related to contamination of the Marjol Battery industrial site. Gould agreed to pay $400,000. A big victory for the town? Well, it might have been, except that its lawyers had charged $800,000 to handle the case as well as other site-related work. (Jeremy R. Cooke, “Lawyer fees outweigh Marjol settlement”, Scranton Times Tribune, Jun. 24)
Class action objections: a mixed bag
St. Louis Post-Dispatch takes a close look at the activities of lawyers who specialize in filing objections to class action settlements. While some objections are substantive and genuinely aimed at protecting consumer interests, others appear geared toward extracting quick payoffs from settling parties, including lawyers eager to get a case over with and cash out the fees. Remarkably, class counsel sometimes get away with throwing a shroud of secrecy over their own agreements buying off objectors, so that class members are unable to learn who paid off whom for how much. So much for the much-touted cause of “sunshine in litigation”. (Trisha L. Howard, “More lawyers cash in on class-actions”, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Jun. 21.) Plus: David Giacalone discusses story (EthicalEsq., Jun. 27)
New format, cont’d
A reader writes: “Love the new format of Overlawyered.com. One request, though: I have trouble reading the light font. Would it be possible to set it darker, or as text to be defined by the user’s browser settings?” We don’t know the answer — would any technically knowledgeable reader care to suggest a fix?
Others wonder: where are the permalinks to individual items, what we used to call “Durable Links” in the old format? You’ll find them by clicking the time-of-day-posted link at the bottom of each post.
Private club liable for sexist speech
The New Hampshire Supreme Court has upheld the decision of the state Commission on Human Rights to assess $64,000 plus attorneys’ fees against the Franklin Lodge of Elks for committing sex discrimination against four applicants including “derogatory and anti-female comments” by club members during discussions over whether to admit the applicants. “Of course, when clubs are held legally liable for their members’ speech, they will naturally be forced to suppress such speech, to avoid this liability.” (Eugene Volokh, “Club Codes”, National Review Online, Jun. 25.)
Nursed wrong baby: and what are the damages?
In Raleigh, N.C., Robyn Jones says she was brought the wrong baby to breast-feed and proceeded to nurse it for 30 (her version) or 5 (the hospital’s version) minutes. And what, ma’am, are the damages? Well, her lawyer says that the resulting devastating emotional distress not only has poisoned Jones’s relationship with her husband but has led her to neglect her own baby: “Without a normal mother-daughter relationship, Jones’ now 2-year-old daughter has become developmentally disabled, the lawsuit said.” Now there’s damages for you! In addition, Jones’s lawyer says his client has suffered from fear of having picked up some sort of bug in her brief encounter with the other woman’s infant. A hospital spokeswoman says all such tests came out negative, but that just sounds to us as if the hospital is setting itself up for an invasion-of-privacy claim next. (“Woman sues hospital for bringing wrong baby for feeding”, AP/Charlotte Observer, Jun. 25).
Format change
As of 3:30 p.m. EST Tuesday, Overlawyered has a new format, based on the Movable Type blogging system. (Thanks to Dean Esmay and the MT people for helping.) In addition to saving us a great deal of time and effort compared with the primitive hand coding we’d been using (“baking [my] HTML on clay tablets”, as Glenn Reynolds puts it), the new system gives us much wider scope for such features as guest blogging and on-the-road blogging, pings and trackbacks, and so on. The site’s existing archives can still be reached (follow links in right column of front page), but the search and archive functions will operate separately for postings after June 20. And there will now be topical archives which collect all the new postings on a single subject into a single file, saving readers a lot of clicking around.
What happened to the left column with its long list of links? Much of it is inside now at a new General Links page. One consequence of the new format is that we’ll probably drop our self-imposed norm of posting only once a day, around midnight, in favor of blogging at all hours as the rest of the world does. And: Thanks not only to Instapundit but to other sites that have noted the switch with kind words: Ernie the Attorney, Legal Reader (formerly Weird of the News), and Scott Ferguson (who recalls our editing as “affably ruthless”, and concludes with an assertion that is falsified by this very linkback).