Roy Pearson’s $55 million pants lawsuit has begun; the Washington Post’s Emil Steiner is liveblogging the trial. There is a series of about ten posts so far, starting with this 10:02 AM entry.
In case you were holding your breath waiting to find out: the case doesn’t sound as if it has gotten any less frivolous. (Apparently Pearson has found a few dry cleaning customers who were also dissastisfied with their service. Well, I’m sold. He also somehow managed to invoke Godwin’s Law.)
This list of “Five ways to avoid costly litigation”, from the British site Human Law Mediation, is not exactly earth-shattering, but I did want to flag Carolyn Elefant’s post linking to it at Law.com’s Legal Blog Watch, which begins:
Of course, some lawyers want to encourage, rather than avoid, costly litigation, because that’s how they boost their billables. But if your client can’t afford a costly fight, or would rather focus its energy on building its business rather than embroiled in disputes, then take a look at this tips…
Raise your hand if you had “two days” in the “How long before Avvo ran into legal difficulties?” pool. According to the Seattle Times’ blog, on June 7 — just two days after Avvo publicly launched as a lawyer rating service — a local criminal defense lawyer, John Henry Browne, threw the lawyer’s equivalent of a temper tantrum. An excerpt from his demand letter to Avvo:
I wanted to notify you that I have retained counsel and will be exploring a lawsuit against your corporation for the ridiculously low rating you gave my law practice and the practice of other well-known and competent attorneys. We have yet to determine whether it will be a class action lawsuit or not. However, your rating and the attendant publicity has damaged my law practice and will continue to do so. In an effort to limit damages, I request that you remove your profile of me from your website immediately.
You’ve got to love the claim that his law practice was damaged in a total of two days. It’s also questionable as to whether he has a cause of action in any case; Google regularly gets sued by those who want their websites rated higher, and regularly wins these suits (see, e.g., Mar. 1, Mar. 23, Nov. 2002.) These are likely constitutionally protected opinions, although it’s obviously early to judge the merits of a lawsuit we haven’t even seen about a website whose methods are unclear.
We first mentioned Avvo on June 8. In the comments, Ted noted some problems with his ratings under Avvo’s system — but surprisingly, did not threaten to file a lawsuit. (Full disclosure: Avvo apparently hasn’t yet figured out that I’m a lawyer. But I assure you that the state of New Jersey extracts annual dues from me right on schedule.)
As we reported in April, trial lawyer John O’Quinn is subject to a potential contempt hearing for allegedly improperly withholding $18.9 million of settlement money from his breast implant clients. It turns out that this wasn’t the first mention of the scandal in Overlawyered. In August 1999, Walter reported:
As one of the wealthiest and most successful plaintiff’s lawyers ever, Houston’s John O’Quinn has been known to call press conferences at which he’s leveled charges highly damaging to his opponents’ reputations, accusing them (for example) of conspiring to “remain silent, conceal or suppress information” about problems with their products and operations. So what happened June 4 when O’Quinn was himself sued by a group of unhappy former breast-implant clients seeking class-action status against him? As Brenda Jeffreys reported in the June 14 Texas Lawyer, O’Quinn “didn’t hesitate before pummeling the class action lawyers with a libel suit” charging the lawyers with “encourag[ing] the news media to disseminate false, slanderous and libelous comments about Plaintiff” — said encouragement consisting of their press release about the lawsuit, and the press conference they were planning that would have explained it further.
Had the lawyers challenging O’Quinn succeeded in holding their press conference, interesting questions might have been aired. Their suit charges that a group of women numbering at least 2,000 were wrongfully overcharged tens of millions of dollars in claimed expenses, and that the firm of O’Quinn and Laminack breached its fiduciary duty to them; it sought a fee forfeiture totaling $580 million. But O’Quinn’s firm rushed to court to ask for a temporary restraining order to prevent the lawyers from holding a press event, and on June 7, while a judge was considering that motion, they agreed to a gag order and called off the conference they’d scheduled for that day. The whole process — from the first public notice of the suit to the gag order in hand — had taken only three days. “O’Quinn’s quick action may have prevented a firestorm of public attention to the class action suit,” writes the Texas Lawyer’s Jeffreys. It is not recorded whether any of the defendants O’Quinn has sued have ever tried, let alone succeeded in, such a tactic against him.
Here’s an entertaining wrinkle we haven’t reported: the case was sent to an arbitrator, because trial lawyer O’Quinn had required his clients to sign a binding arbitration agreement in the event of disputes! (The irony here is far greater than any Judge Bork personal injury suit.)
The Houston Chronicle reports that the three Houston attorneys on the arbitration panel determined in March that O’Quinn’s deduction was not authorized by his contracts with his clients, and that they are now deciding damages. The former clients, now represented by Joe Jamail, are asking for O’Quinn to completely disgorge all of his fees, a legitimate possibility under the Burrow v. Arce decision, which would be over half a billion dollars. Arbitration decisions are generally not appealable. It’s unclear what has happened to O’Quinn’s countersuit against his clients alleging libel. (Mary Flood, “O’Quinn’s law clients win round against him”, Houston Chronicle, Jun. 9 (h/t W.F.)).
Arbitration is generally quicker than litigation, but O’Quinn seems to have successfully stalled this case for over seven years, not to mention avoid any publicity from it. To date, we are the only media source that has even mentioned the contempt hearing.
More things that it’s really inadvisable to do if you’re a lawyer:
David Giacalone has some thoughts on now-notorious Atlanta personal injury lawyer Andrew J. Speaker, who doesn’t seem to have lived up very well to the Lakoff-prescribed billing of “public protection attorney” (Jun. 1). But see: Elizabeth Whelan, in the New York Post, thinks the pillorying of Speaker’s decision to fly home has been overdone (“Free Andrew! Hysteria and the TB Case”, Jun. 2). Updates: Jul. 8 (some passengers sue Speaker), Dec. 2 (no one flying with him caught TB).
We regularly complain about the fact that the legal system is unable — or at least unwilling — to police attorneys who violate the rules. But this failure is not limited to the plaintiff’s bar in civil cases. Lawrence Floyd was a prosecutor in Cuyahoga County who, according to the judge, “deliberately committed prosecutorial misconduct” by making unconstitutional remarks at a murder trial, forcing the judge to declare a mistrial.
His punishment? A $26,000 fine — the amount that a new trial will cost taxpayers. Sounds reasonable, right? Not quite: the judge declined to fine Floyd; instead, she fined taxpayers that amount of money. That’ll show him.
(via Crime & Federalism)
I had an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal yesterday on the subject, hailing the recent California state court decision which recognized the unethical nature of that class of fee arrangements for public counsel. More at Point of Law here; Ted had a related post on Wednesday.