Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Posts Tagged ‘about the site’

Welcome New York Times readers

Ted has already mentioned today’s front-pager on Milberg Weiss campaign donations, which is kind enough to quote me. I was particularly glad that reporter Mike McIntire took note of some of Milberg’s connections on Capitol Hill, which tend to get less attention than its Presidential campaign donations:

Beyond campaign contributions, Milberg Weiss became deeply ingrained in the financial firmament of the Democratic Party in other ways. Members of the firm gave $500,000 toward construction of a new Democratic National Committee headquarters, and some became partners in a private investment venture with several prominent Democrats. They included former Senator Robert G. Torricelli of New Jersey, who is a fund-raiser for Mrs. Clinton, and Leonard Barrack, a Philadelphia trial lawyer who was once the national fund-raising chairman for the Democratic Party.

Along the way, as Milberg Weiss’s brass-knuckles legal strategy made it a target for Republicans advocating limits on class action suits, it usually could count on Democrats in Washington to protect its interests. After federal prosecutors indicted the firm in May 2006, four Democratic congressmen issued a joint statement, posted on Milberg Weiss’s Web site, accusing the Bush administration of persecuting lawyers who take on big businesses.

The statement, signed by Representatives Gary L. Ackerman, Carolyn McCarthy and Charles B. Rangel, all of New York, and Robert Wexler of Florida, contained several passages that appear to be lifted directly from a “class action press kit” distributed by a national trial lawyers group. All but Mr. Wexler have received campaign contributions from Milberg Weiss partners.

(Mike McIntire, “Accused Law Firm Continues Giving To Democrats”, New York Times, Oct. 18).

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“Competing for Clients, and Paying by the Click”

Adam Liptak at the Times looks at the heavy lawyer-ad presence on Google sponsored links (“Oakland personal injury lawyer” costs $58.03), and quotes both Ted and me. “Instead of competing on price,” Ted says of plaintiffs’ lawyers, “they compete on Google.” And I point out that the family in search of information on, say, cerebral palsy, will run into plenty of medically tendentious material posted by lawyers as part of their client-intake efforts. (New York Times, Oct. 15).

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Intern for the AEI Legal Center for the Public Interest

Are you an Overlawyered reader and a student in the greater Washington DC area? Do you have any interest in interning for the new AEI Legal Center for the Public Interest? We’re looking for someone to put in 15-20 hours a week on administrative matters, but working at AEI (one of Washingtonian magazine’s fifty-five great places to work in DC) also gives one the opportunity to attend amazing public-policy conferences and do some writing as well if one is inclined.

Apply through the AEI website.

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Annual Supreme Court Briefing

The annual Supreme Court Briefing of the AEI Legal Center for the Public Interest will take place 9 am Friday at AEI; registration is free. Speakers include frequent Supreme Court advocates Maureen Mahoney and Andrew Pincus, as well as AEI’s Michael Greve and myself. Michael Greve’s most recent Federalism Outlook looks at the most recent term, as does a recent Liability Outlook I wrote.

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An Overlawyered “favicon”

Reader Tom M. writes:

You should put a favicon.ico file in your root directory so when people bookmark Overlawyered they’ll see the icon next to their bookmark (or tab if they open the site in a tab).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Favicon

If you do that I’ll be able to remove the text description from the link to your site, and my favorites toolbar will achieve unity of style. Thanks in advance 🙂

Okay, graphics-savvy or web-savvy readers: anyone want to devise and send us such an icon?

More: Many thanks to Jim of the Scripted Failures blog for devising the gavel icon.

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Blind item

Which nonprofit has put out a newsletter whose contents consist of more than a half-dozen news vignettes, all recently covered on Overlawyered, but provides no clue to readers that the stories might have been found via this site? And has done this more than once?

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Did we mention the Overlawyered.com Facebook Group?

(Bumping September 6 post. Still only 113 members. Which means (1) without some more recruiting, we’re not going to hit the charity goal; and (2) the rest of you are missing the discussion Walter and I had over the Democrats and tort reform, plus the bonus links Walter and I are providing.)

I’ll be forthright: the Overlawyered.com Facebook Group was created as an experiment to see whether there were other media by which Overlawyered could deliver its content. (And it did have the side effect of getting Walter Olson to join Facebook.) And we’re providing extra content there that isn’t on the blog, plus the opportunity of open threads that our Movable Type blogging software doesn’t provide.

Perhaps our readers are too mature for Facebook. (The #1 “related group” for the Overlawyered group isn’t something libertarian or law-related, but “Unlike 99.99% of the Facebook population, I was born in the 70s”—and Walter and I are too old even for that group.) And we’re not asking you to join Facebook if you’re not already a member. But, if we do have readers on Facebook, we’d like to see you in our group: your membership passively helps promote the site and spread the word in the increasingly crowded legal blog market. The larger our readership, the easier it is for Walter and I to self-justify spending time blogging instead of writing for conventional mainstream publications. Everyone wins!

The question is whether Facebook is a good vehicle to accomplish this goal. With so few members in our Facebook group, I’m skeptical: it’s not worth the effort to create extra content for a few dozen extra readers, and the group would become dormant. So I’m going to try another experiment. I’m setting a goal of getting 1000 members into our Facebook group by September 30. If we reach that membership goal, I promise to donate up to $2000 to a sympatico tax-deductible charity chosen by a thread or poll in the Facebook group—$1000 for the thousandth member, $1 more for every additional member (up to 2000) we have at 11:59 pm Eastern on September 30. What say you, the loyal Overlawyered readership? If you’re a Facebook member, come join our group, and tell your friends about us.

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