Texas deadline suit-filing, cont’d

After we passed along a recent report that Beaumont, Texas lawyers had filed 59 lawsuits the day before the state’s new “loser-pays” package of litigation reforms was to take effect, Texas attorney Brooks Schuelke responded on Twitter as follows (re-formatted and edited for clarity), saying that the issue wasn’t the loser-pays provision, but a separate “responsible third party” provision that set a malpractice trap for lawyers that delayed: “The responsible third party provisions allowed a defendant to name a party, and then plaintiff could join them even if the statute of limitations had expired. The law was changed to remove the ability to sue regardless of the statute of limitations. But defendant can’t name a party not disclosed in discovery. The amendment means we have to file suit long before the statute of limitations expires to send discovery asking defendant to name who it might name. So many cases nearing the statute of limitations had to be filed before the effective date of the change or else they could be victim to the amendment.”

Wisconsin considers curbing “one-way” attorney fees

American legislatures since the 1970s have widely employed “one-way” fee provisions — under which courts award fees to prevailing plaintiffs, but not to prevailing defendants — as a way of encouraging plaintiffs and their lawyers to bring a maximum of legal action; especially when the fee shifts are generously calculated, such provisions also put strong pressure on defendants to settle potentially defensible cases rather than take the risk of a big fee award that may exceed the sums in controversy. Now Wisconsin lawmakers are thinking of making the playing field a bit more level by reining in one-way awards, especially those that exceed the underlying dispute; another way of approaching the issue, of course, would be to make the shifts two-way. [Rick Esenberg]

November 4 roundup

  • “Kentucky antidiscrimination law doesn’t bar discrimination based on litigiousness” [Volokh]
  • “Lawyer sues to stop fireworks show; now wants $756K in fees from taxpayers” [CJAC, San Diego]
  • Leahy bill reauthorizing VAWA (Violence Against Women Act) includes language codifying OCR assault on campus due process [Bader, Daily Caller, Inside Higher Ed, FIRE, earlier here, here]
  • “One-Ninth the Freedom Kids Used To Have” [Free-Range Kids] “WARNING: Baby in pram! Anything could happen!” [same]
  • New Zealand considers criminalizing breaches of fiduciary duty [Prof. Bainbridge]
  • From libertarian Steve Chapman, a favorable rating for Rahm Emanuel as Chicago mayor [Chicago Tribune]
  • Did California privacy legislation just regulate bloggers? [Eric Goldman, Paul Alan Levy]

By reader acclaim: Divorced man sues wedding photographer

“Although the marriage did not last, plaintiff’s fury over the quality of the photos and video continued on.” The photographer defendant thinks the demand for $48,000 to re-stage the wedding is a bit much, especially given that the former bride has thought to have returned to her native Latvia. [New York Times; Above the Law (groom’s father is partner in big law firm)]