Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Posts Tagged ‘chasing clients’

“BBB pulls ad after flak from attorney groups”

The Denver and Colorado bar associations have succeeded in getting the local Better Business Bureau to yank from the airwaves a 15-second ad premised on the notion that there might actually be some attorneys out there who exploit their clients. “You inherited a fortune … You hired a lawyer … Now it’s his fortune,” the announcer says in the ad. Declaring the ad offensive, the bar associations demanded a hearing before the BBB’s own unfair-advertising panel. Jean Herman, president and chief executive of the Denver/Boulder BBB, agreed to pull the ad, saying, “I don’t agree with them … but I don’t want to go around ticking people off”. Ad spots warning about bad plumbers, mortgage lenders and limousine drivers will continue as usual in the BBB’s “Check With Us First” campaign. Interestingly, Greg Martin, deputy executive director of both bar groups, said the groups would not agree to a suggestion that the offending line be amended from “You hired a lawyer” to “You hired the wrong lawyer.” “Obviously, our goal was not to have that ad on TV anymore,” Martin said. (John Accola, Rocky Mountain News, Mar. 13). David Giacalone (Mar. 16) has an excellent analysis. Of course, it remains perfectly normal and acceptable for lawyers’ own ads to promote the idea that other people’s professions and businesses are injurious and not always aboveboard.

Be sure to check out the last few sentences of the Rocky Mountain News article, in which Martin, the bar official, blasts the whole idea of applying to lawyers the BBB approach of documenting a record of complaints so that consumers can see for themselves which operators have numerous unresolved grievances outstanding. Martin says the BBB lacks any “special knowledge about attorneys” and says the profession is already highly regulated by its own (with emphasis, as we might add, on its own) disciplinary committees. Now suppose that some other profession or industry — medicine, say — were to assert that its mysteries are so esoteric, and its success in self-regulation so complete, that lay observers should not presume even to compare notes with each other on their bad experiences with it. Hard to imagine, these days, isn’t it?

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: ,

“Attack dog attorney”

Curmudgeonly Clerk, traveling along on a South Texas highway, sees a billboard for a law firm emblazoned with the words “Abogado Perro” –“Dog Lawyer” in Spanish — along with a picture of a snarling Doberman Pinscher. Doesn’t sound as if it was meant to solicit dog-bite cases, either. One of his commenters says a Dallas lawyer has a shark on the top of his building. (Jan. 5)

Filed under: ,

Trying too few cases = legal malpractice?

Two legal malpractice lawsuits against the Madison County, Ill. firm of Goldenberg, Miller, Heller and Antognoli claim that the firm settled injury cases for too small a sum and in particular allege that it lacked credibility among defense counsel because it too seldom took cases to trial. Although the Goldenberg firm was one of two major plaintiff’s firms handling asbestos claims in Madison County, for example, one rival lawyer contends that it had not taken an asbestos case to trial in ten years. (Paul Hampel, “Madison County law firm is sued again”, St. Louis Post Dispatch, Nov. 29, via Lori Patel, Law.com). The article is noteworthy for the way it sheds light on longtime feuds among plaintiff’s lawyers in the notorious county (see Dec. 3 and many others).

The case also draws comment (Dec.3) from David Giacalone, who we are delighted to say has resumed limited posting at his website. Giacalone has further information about the tale (see Jun. 17-18, 2002) of Rochester, N.Y. attorney Jim (“The Hammer”) Shapiro, who advertised that “I want to get YOU the biggest, fattest cash award I can, as fast as I can, from as many defendants as I can find. Just call me! Day or night, I’ll talk to you free.” but who later admitted in a deposition that he lived in Florida and had never tried a case. See Jeff Williams, “Lawyer ads get loud”, PrairieLaw, undated.

Filed under: , , , ,

Update: “Lawyers’ Ads Seeking Clients in Ferry Crash”

As we predicted in an Oct. 18 entry, suits are being filed at a rapid pace over the October Staten Island ferry crash. Some suits feature victims who have suffered very real and very tragic injuries — but are seeking payouts as high as $500 million. Others are seeking millions or hundreds of millions of dollars for “emotional trauma” or “losing sleep”. And television and newspaper advertisements abound as lawyers solicit clients–including one tv ad showing “a ghostly image of a ferry washed over by a tidal wave of green dollar signs”. Best two paragraphs from today’s New York Times–wait for the punchline:

Lloyd Joseph fractured his back when the ferry crashed and was still being treated last night for various injuries at a Staten Island hospital. Mr. Joseph and his lawyer, Sanford Rubenstein, during a conference call interview, lamented the fact that some of the lawsuits stemming from the accident seemed frivolous.

“It’s ridiculous,” said Mr. Rubenstein, who did not advertise for ferry-crash clients. “Obviously, the public might have a problem taking seriously a claim that is serious when others that are not that serious are filed for huge amounts.” Mr. Joseph and his wife, Jocelyn, are seeking $105 million in their lawsuit.

(Susan Saulny, New York Times, Nov. 4). (via Bashman)

Filed under: ,

Oxycontin: a Rush for clients

A law firm in notorious Madison County, Ill. (more) may succeed in capitalizing on the publicity accorded to news of talk show host Rush Limbaugh’s prescription pill addiction. The Simmons Law Firm of East Alton “is waging a national media campaign in search of potential plaintiffs who allegedly have become addicted to the painkiller, OxyContin, the same drug [Limbaugh] is accused of obtaining illegally.” (Sanford Schmidt, “Law firm seeks users of OxyContin”, Alton (Ill.) Telegraph, Oct. 13). For our coverage of trial lawyers’ campaign against drugmaker Purdue Pharma, see Apr. 10, 2002 and links from there. On the Limbaugh affair’s implications for federal narcotics policy, see Robyn Blumner, “Limbaugh scandal puts Oxycontin on trial”, St. Petersburg Times, Oct. 19 (formatting problems); Jacob Sullum, “Drug rush”, Reason, Oct. 17.

Filed under: ,

Oh, that medical privacy

Police have arrested 42-year-old Juvenal Caballero Guerrero, formerly a patient-care assistant at Houston’s Memorial Hermann Hospital, on charges of “selling about 12 pages of patient information for $500 to a representative of Industrial Safety Consultants, a company that advertises ‘investigations regarding accidents and injuries’ from its Houston offices. According to court documents, investigators were told the company has sold stolen patient records to personal-injury lawyers. … Prosecutors said the arrests won’t stop with Guerrero…’There are lots of other people involved,'” Harris County prosecutor Lester Blizzard told the Houston Chronicle, including employees of other health institutions. Lawyers might also face charges if they can be proved to have directly solicited business from accident victims. (“Former Houston hospital worker arrested”, AP/Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Aug. 28; “Hospital Employee Charged With Theft, Sale of Patient Information”, BNA Health Law Reporter, undated Sept.; Annie Blanco, “Hospital worker arrested for medical record theft”, News 24 Houston, Aug. 28)(via SickOfLawsuits.org)

Filed under: , , ,

After the church settles, fees

“The $85 million settlement in the Boston clergy sex abuse scandal will set a record not only as the most expensive abuse settlement in the history of the Catholic Church, but also as the largest payday for lawyers who sued on behalf of abuse victims: an estimated $30 million in legal fees, lawyers said.” (Ralph Ranelli, Boston Globe, Sept. 11). Meanwhile, Forbes investigates the ties between abuse-survivor groups and the plaintiff’s lawyers that are often their chief financial supporters. For example, the biggest national claimant group, Survivors Network Abused by Priests, which played a pivotal role in getting the California legislature to reopen old statutes of limitations so as to permit the filing of decades-old claims, lists a Stockton, Calif. plaintiff’s lawyer with a large abuse-client roster as its biggest contributor. But not all survivors’ groups feel comfortable taking money from that source: “I would hate to be seen as a lead generator for plaintiff lawyers,” says Paul Baier, founder of the Boston group Survivors First, which refuses such donations. And attorney Mitchell Garabedian, prominent for his work on the plaintiff’s side in the Boston case, declines to donate money to the victim groups “because he believes the practice violates legal ethics guidelines. ‘It’s sort of a solicitation,’ he says.” (Daniel Lyons, “Paid to Picket”, Forbes, Sept. 15)(& welcome EthicalEsq? readers).

Filed under: , ,

Boom in ads to sue

Lawyer advertising on TV seems to be losing its stigma: “According to data provided by the Television Bureau of Advertising, a television industry trade group, lawyers spent $311.3 million on television commercials in 2002, a 75 percent increase from the $177.2 million spent in 1999.” The boom is led by mass tort advertising, notably ads urging persons who have consumed recently recalled drugs to consider filing suit. The result, charges Chicago lawyer Philip Beck, who represents the drug firm Bayer, is to allow “lawyers to be able to sign up huge volumes of claims even though they know the vast majority of them don’t have any merit”. (Alexei Oreskovic, “Regularly Scheduled Programming”, The Recorder, Sept. 3).

Filed under: ,