- “Helmet maker not to blame in football player’s injury, jury finds” [L.A. Times]
- “New Corporate Survey Illustrates Burdens Of Document Preservation And Benefits Of Proposed [Rule 26 Discovery] Reform” [Mark Chenoweth/WLF, Timothy Pratt/Abnormal Use, NJLRA, earlier]
- Have divorce statistics been misreported? [Kay Hymowitz, Robert VerBruggen]
- “Intoxicated Man Loses Big at Casino, Wants His Money Back” [Abnormal Use]
- “SCOTUS Deferred to Executive Agencies. What Happened Next Will Infuriate You!” [Ilya Shapiro, Cato on Peri & Sons Farms v. Rivera]
- Overtime scheme: Obama doesn’t “worry about being held accountable for the unwelcome consequences” [Steve Chapman] Advice for small business on complying with salaried employee classification [Suzanne Lucas (“Evil HR Lady”) at Inc., earlier here and here]
- Religious liberty, discrimination law and how spurious rights drive out the real [Jacob Sullum] Timely: “Harvard Hosts Conference on Religious Accommodation in the Age of Civil Rights” [TaxProf]
Posts Tagged ‘discovery’
Judge flays California fire agency for lawsuit conduct
“In a blistering ruling against Cal Fire, a judge in Plumas County has found the agency guilty of ‘egregious and reprehensible conduct’ in its response to the 2007 Moonlight fire and ordered it to pay more than $30 million in penalties, legal fees and costs to Sierra Pacific Industries and others accused in a Cal Fire lawsuit of causing the fire. … Sierra Pacific, the largest private landowner in California, was blamed by state and federal officials for the blaze, with a key report finding it was started by a spark from the blade of a bulldozer belonging to a company working under contract for Sierra Pacific.” The company has contended that the cause determination was reached in haste and pursued with an eye to extracting legal proceeds for an agency-run settlement fund later found to be illegal. [Sacramento Bee; Robert Hilson, Association of Certified E-Discovery Specialists]
January 22 roundup
- Reminder: federal panel finally mulling reform of ultra-costly pretrial discovery, now’s the time to send comments [Kyl/WSJ, earlier]
- Michigan woman convicted of false rape claim had sent man to prison for 10 years in earlier case [ABA Journal]
- Strickland, key figure in disastrous CPSIA law and then chief at NHTSA, lands at BigLaw’s Venable [AutoNews, Detroit News]
- A religious accommodation too far? Devout student at secular university asks not to work with female classmates [York U., Ontario; CBC via @amyalkon, also related on Nova Scotia aikido class] Inviting shop clerks to set up “no booze/pork” check lines is a sensitivity too far [Andrew Stuttaford, Secular Right]
- “Top 2013 Jury Awards: Price-Fixing, Nursing Home Liability, Defamation” [Margaret Cronin Fisk, Bloomberg] Top legal ethics stories of 2013 [Legal Ethics Forum and followup on R v Farooqi & Ors]
- Liberate history-talk: “Another Battle Against Silly Tour-Guide Regulations” [Ilya Shapiro] Handing out $1,000 fines in Charleston, S.C. [Brian Doherty]
- “The line between Salon and Granma is getting awfully blurry” [@dandrezner; more about DoNotLink.com]
Finally! Serious movement for discovery reform
“Microsoft is legally obligated to store an average of 60 million pages of documents for every lawsuit brought against it, even though only 88 of those will end up being used in court.” [Jacob Kastrenakes, The Verge] The company is one of many that has announced its support for a change in the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, proposed in August by the Committee on Rules of Practice and Procedure, which would narrow the scope of obligatory discovery. The burden of discovery “deters companies from defending themselves against meritless suits and slows the process of dispute resolution,” writes Jon Palmer, Microsoft’s assistant general counsel. The proposal would also lay forth clearer standards on document retention so as to curb proliferating litigation over charges of spoliation.
The Washington Legal Foundation likes the proposals too, as does James Beck at Drug and Device Law. Not happy about it: the litigation lobby and some Senate Democrats friendly to their cause. The Judicial Conference is holding hearings that are likely to be more balanced. Comments with the Advisory Committee are due by February 15, 2014.
Procedure and administrative law roundup
- “Venue matters.” Enough to double value of med-mal case if filed in Baltimore city rather than suburbs? [Ron Miller] Mark Behrens and Cary Silverman on litigation tourism in Pennsylvania [TortsProf]
- “Maybe [depositions] are like what some people say about war — vast periods of boredom interrupted by brief moments of terror.” [Steve McConnell, Drug and Device Law, also see Max Kennerly]
- Centrality of procedure in American legal thinking dates back to Legal Realists and before [Paul McMahon, U.Penn. J. of Int’l Law/SSRN via Mass Tort Prof]
- Company sues to challenge CPSC’s dissemination of unproven allegations about it in new public database: should judicial proceeding keep its name confidential? [Fair Warning]
- Thesis of new Jerry Mashaw book: administrative state in U.S. long predated Progressive Era [Law and Liberty: Joseph Postell, Mike Rappaport] Relatedly, hallmark of administrative state said to be “prerogative,” i.e., power to make binding rules without new legislation [Michael Greve]
- Lorax standing humor: even the Ninth Circuit might not have been able to help [Howard Wasserman, Prawfs]
- “Formalism and Deference in Administrative Law” [panel at Federalist Society National Lawyers’ Convention with Philip Hamburger, Kristin Hickman, Thomas Merrill, and Jide Okechuku Nzelibe, moderated by Jennifer Walker Elrod]
House passes Goodlatte patent troll bill
The vote was 325 to 91, with Reps. John Conyers (D-Mich.) and Mel Watt (D-N.C.) leading the opposition. Timothy Lee discusses in the Washington Post. While I haven’t tried to get into the details, the general drift looks quite good to me. One major provision requires those filing suits to plead with some specificity what the infringement is; another provides for losing parties to compensate prevailing parties toward the cost of the litigation in more cases; yet another attempts to forestall expensive discovery in cases destined to fail on other grounds. Readers who recall my first book, The Litigation Explosion, will recall that I recommended procedural reform as the most promising way to address the incentives to overlitigiousness in our legal system and in particular identified lack of fee shifting, anything-goes pleadings, and wide-open discovery as among the system’s key deficits. So, yes, developments like this make me feel I was on the right track.
Equal time dept.: Richard Epstein takes a different view.
“Everyone’s so damn afraid of coming forward”
— against patent trolls. But Kevin O’Connor, CEO of a startup named FindTheBest, went ahead and did so [Joe Mullin, Ars Technica] Exploding and escalating-on-response demands, threats of criminal prosecution, demands for “sequestration” (removal from service) of his company’s computers to prevent evidence spoliation, and promises of burdensome discovery are all part of the story.
Procedure roundup
- How procedural improvements could help curb speculative and abusive lawsuits [Stuart Taylor, Jr., American Spectator, recommending Prof. Donald Elliott’s plan for judicial pre-screening of complaints; Richard Reinsch]
- Proposed revisions to Federal Rules of Civil Procedure would curtail depositions, interrogatories [ABA Journal, more; Wajert] Better use of incentives could reduce costs of discovery [Rebecca Womeldorf, WLF]
- “The ‘e’ in e-mail might as well stand for evidence” — Bloomberg’s Norm Pearlstine at Google Big Tent DC [@jeffjohnroberts]
- Contracting around litigation rules: “Why Is Privatized Procedure So Rare?” [Dave Hoffman]
- Walden v. Fiore: “Cert grant for civ pro buffs” [Ann Althouse; more on constitutional limits on personal jurisdiction from Stephen Sachs via Linda Mullenix, Jotwell via Will Baude]
- California, Wisconsin toughen up lax rules on expert witness admissibility [Bernstein, more] Florida moves to adopt Daubert gatekeeping standard [Maggie Tamburro, Bullseye, William Bissett/Lauren Soble]
- Lawyer disciplinary proceedings make good occasion for noticing that vague notice pleading can trample defendants’ due process interest, but will anyone apply the lesson beyond lawyers? [John Steele, Legal Ethics Forum]
“Race-based claims thrown out in Paula Deen lawsuit”
The deposition-extracted tidbits were enough to bring down Deen’s culinary empire, but that doesn’t mean they were actually relevant to anyone’s legal case against her: “U.S. District Court Judge William T. Moore Jr. ruled Monday that [Lisa] Jackson, who is white, has no standing to sue them [Deen and her brother] for race discrimination.” [USA Today]
What the US can learn from Canada’s approach to law
More coverage for the Frank Buckley-edited new book on overlegalization, The American Disease [Richard Reinsch/Library of Law and Liberty, Alejandro Chafuen/Forbes] Here’s Buckley in the National Post:
If litigation rates are four times smaller in Canada than the United States, this should not occasion surprise: Subsidize something and you get more of it; penalize it and you get less of it.
Differences in legal ethics matter, too. In America, more than elsewhere, lawyers are encouraged to advance their client’s interests without regard to the interests of justice in the particular case or broader social concerns. American lawyers’ professional culture is unique in permitting and implicitly encouraging them to assert novel theories of recovery, coach witnesses, and wear down their opponents through burdensome pretrial discovery.