- More fen-phen scandals: Possible smoking-gun email in Kentucky case (see Walter’s post today) came from Chesley firm computer; Vicksburg lawyer first attorney convicted in Mississippi fen-phen scam. [Courier-Journal via Lattman; Clarion-Ledger (h/t S.B.)] (Updated with correct Courier-Journal link.)
- Allegheny College found not liable by jury for student’s suicide; school raised issue of student privacy concerns. Earlier on OL: May 30; Dec. 7, 2004. [WSJ]
- Update on the tempered glass versus laminated issue earlier discussed in Overlawyered (Feb. 15, 2006; May 16, 2005; May 13, 2005, etc.) [LA Times]
- Massachusetts court rejects quack sudden acceleration theory. (See also Dec. 20, Aug. 7, etc.) [Prince]
- California bill would bar carpenters from school campuses. [Overcriminalized]
- New book: Antitrust Consent Decrees in Theory and Practice [Richard Epstein @ AEI]
- To be fair, I went to school with “young Mr Sussman, the boyish charmer”, and I don’t know how to pronounce “calumnies” either—it’s one of those words I’ve only seen written, and never heard spoken [Steyn; MSNBC]
Posts Tagged ‘Kentucky’
NY Times on Ky. fen-phen scandal
We’ve been beating the drums on this one for a while (Mar. 6 and Aug. 25, 2006, Jan. 24, Feb. 14, Feb. 21, Mar. 19, 2007; Point of Law May 10, 2005) and it’s nice to see the Times’s Adam Liptak with a front-pager this weekend on the affair. The story begins by telling the story of what happened when W.L. Carter, one of the clients in the 440-member batch, went to pick up his check from the fen-phen settlement:
The check was, for starters, much smaller than he had expected. And his own lawyers threatened to retaliate against him if he ever told anyone, including his family, how much he had been paid. “You will be fined $100,000, you will go to jail and you will be sued,” Mr. Carter recalled them saying.
Liptak writes: “Legal experts said the fraud might be one of the biggest and most brazen in legal history.” Or at least one of the biggest and most brazen that’s come to light: batch settlements in mass tort cases are frequently so secretive in their details, and so carefully drawn up to repel inquiries from outsiders or from clients themselves about who got what, that we can at best speculate about whether the Kentucky scandal is an outlier. (“Fraud Inquiry Looks at Lawyers in Diet-Drug Case”, Mar. 22).
P.S. As Ted notes above, today’s Louisville Courier-Journal adds some new information about the alleged role played by Stanley Chesley’s Cincinnati law firm (Andrew Wolfson, “Court filing ties lawyer into diet- drug pay scheme”, Mar. 26; Lattman, Mar. 26).
Grand jury looking at Ky. fen-phen scandal
A grand jury is expected to hear testimony this week about the role of three Lexington lawyers in the now-infamous Kentucky fen-phen settlement (Feb. 14, etc.). “Frank Bentley IV, a lawyer representing [Cincinnati’s Stanley] Chesley, said he is not a target of the criminal investigation.” (Andrew Wolfson, “Grand jury to look at diet-drug attorneys”, Louisville Courier-Journal, Mar. 15). Last month one of the lawyers caught up in the scandal, William Gallion, said “that he did nothing wrong and that a lawsuit filed against him and others in the case is simply the result of ‘a cottage industry of lawyers who attack class-action settlements.'” (Andrew Wolfson, “Attorney denies wrongdoing”, Courier-Journal, Feb. 11).
Coca-Cola promotion tweaks client-chasers
Let’s just hope no one tells the Kentucky bar about the new Coke Zero campaign, with its reference to a supposed law firm by the name of Covet & Yourminy. (Stuart Elliott, “Can’t Tell Your Cokes Apart? Sue Someone”, New York Times, Mar. 5). The Times misses the chance to mention the similarity of the widely noted AllTel campaign last year (Jul. 6, Aug. 3).
“Will Sue For Food”, cont’d
Kentucky trial lawyers just won’t let up in their po-faced indignation about that innocuous cartoon in the state bar magazine (see Feb. 15 roundup). “‘The cartoon exhibits an indifference to the rights of all Kentuckians to access the justice system — the very system the KBA is charged with preserving on behalf of its members and their clients,’ Bowling Green lawyer Steve Downey, the immediate past president of the trial lawyer group, said in a letter to the bar association.” (Andrew Wolfson, “Trial lawyers find nothing funny in cartoon”, Louisville Courier-Journal, Feb. 19). David Lat covers the story (Feb. 20). What would have taken guts, I think, is for the Kentucky bar magazine to have run a cartoon making reference to the state’s deeply embarrassing fen-phen fee scandal. But let’s not hold our breath waiting for that.
Kentucky fen-phen scandal, cont’d
It just keeps getting juicier:
The attorneys accused of misappropriating more than $64 million from Kentucky’s fen-phen settlement initially withheld another $27.7 million, which they turned over to their clients only after the Kentucky Bar Association began investigating the case, newly filed court records show.
The additional payments also came after one of the lawyers — Melbourne Mills Jr. — discovered in January 2002 that the settlement was for $50 million more than the other two lawyers, William Gallion and Shirley Cunningham Jr., had told him, according to the records.
Mills was so angry that when Gallion showed up at his birthday party on Feb. 6, 2002, Mills called him “a thief” and insisted that more money be given to the clients, according to a deposition from Mills’ administrative assistant, Rebecca Phipps.
(Andrew Wolfson, “Lawyers held 2nd cache of diet drug settlement”, Louisville Courier-Journal, Feb. 11; Beth Musgrave, “Fen-phen ruling could come soon”, Lexington Herald-Leader, Feb. 13). Earlier coverage: Mar. 6 and Aug. 25, 2006, Jan. 24, 2007, etc.
Lawyer: guess maybe we burned that fee documentation
Sensational new disclosures in the scandal (Mar. 6, Aug. 25, etc.) over self-dealing by lawyers in divvying up the results of fen-phen litigation in Kentucky:
The three lawyers accused of plundering Kentucky’s $200 million fen-phen settlement “tore up or burned” notes showing how much they paid themselves and their clients, according to one of the lawyers.
Depositions obtained by The Courier-Journal include Lexington attorney Melbourne Mills Jr.’s description of a secret meeting that he said he and lawyers William Gallion and Shirley Cunningham Jr., also of Lexington, held at Gallion’s house in 2001 to divvy up an extra $10 million beyond what they’d already paid themselves from the settlement. …
[Attorney Angela] Ford alleges that Mills’ description is a “dramatic indication of a cover-up.”
She has asked that those lawyers and another attorney, Stan Chesley of Cincinnati, who helped negotiate the settlement, be forced to surrender $62.6 million in funds they allegedly misappropriated — as well as $59.5 million they paid themselves in fees….
Kentucky courts have never required a lawyer to “disgorge” or return a fee for misconduct, but courts in other states have done so, according to Ford’s motion….
Chesley, who was hired by the Lexington lawyers to negotiate the settlement, said he had no reason to question why he was paid $20.5 million — $7 million more than his contract outlined — in part because he could not “believe that these good folks would have sent me more money than I was entitled to.”
In her motion to force the lawyers to give up their fees, Ford said the defendant lawyers, including Chesley, breached their duties in a “spectacular and unparalleled way” by giving only about one-third of the settlement to the clients.
“The facts of this case truly are as egregious as it gets,” she said in court papers. ..
Since the settlement, Gallion and Cunningham have both become permanent residents of Florida, a state that Ford notes allows debtors to keep their homes when they take bankruptcy.
Stanley Chesley was, and remains, one of the most famous plaintiff’s lawyers in the United States and a major powerbroker in national Democratic politics. The article also sheds further light on the close ties between now-disgraced Judge Joseph F. (“Jay”) Bamberger, who approved the Kentucky fen-phen settlement and has since resigned, and the plaintiff’s team in the litigation. (Andrew Wolfson, “Lawyer: Fen-phen notes destroyed”, Louisville Courier-Journal, Jan. 21).
More: a companion piece in the same paper profiles the Cincinnati-based Chesley (Andrew Wolfson, “A breach of duty; wealth mounts for ‘prince of torts'”, Louisville Courier-Journal, Jan. 21)(via Lattman).
October 27 roundup
- Bill Moyers calls his lawyers. [Adler @ Volokh]
- Jim Copland: 9/11 suits against New York City over emergency recovery work “simply wrong.” [New York Post]
- Did the PSLRA help shareholders? [Point of Law]
- 32-year-old Oregon grocery store employee sues, claiming that Green Day stole his never-recorded high-school writings. [Above the Law]
- Does one assume the risk of a broken nose if one agrees to a sparring match at a karate school? [TortsProf]
- “At KFC (né Kentucky Fried Chicken), the chicken is still fried. At Altria (né Philip Morris), the cigarettes still cause cancer. And at the American Association for Justice, some will say that the trial lawyers are still chasing ambulances.” [New York Times via Point of Law]
- More on global warming lawsuits. [Point of Law]
- Dahlia Lithwick, wrong again when bashing conservatives? Quelle surprise! [Ponnuru @ Bench Memos; see also Kaus] Earlier: POL Oct. 6 and links therein. Best commentary on New Jersey gay marriage decision is at Volokh.
- Michael Dimino asks for examples of frivolous lawsuits. What’s the over-under until it turns into a debate over the McDonald’s coffee case? [Prawfsblawg]
- Unintended consequences of campaign finance reform. [Zywicki @ Volokh; Washington Times]
- Who’s your least favorite Supreme Court justice? [Above the Law]
- More on Borat and the law. [Slate] Earlier on OL: Dec. 9 and links therein.
- “Thrilled Juror Feels Like Murder Trial Being Put On Just For Her.” [Onion]
- A revealing post by the Milberg Weiss Fellow at DMI: companies make “too much” profit. I respond: “Again, if you really think the problem is that insurance companies charge ‘too much’ and make ‘too much’ money, then the profitable solution is to take advantage of this opportunity and open a competing insurance company that charges less instead of whining about it. (Or, you could use a fraction of the profits to hire a dozen bloggers and thus solve the problem at the same time keeping the whining constant.)” [Dugger]
Deep pocket files: Plaintiff: McDonald’s should’ve warned me and my boss not to be gullible
McDonald’s week continues on Overlawyered (Sep. 22; Sep. 20). McDonald’s is being sued over a trend of strip search hoaxes we discussed two years ago.
Here, a caller from a payphone in Florida tricked a Hinesville, Georgia, McDonald’s male manager and 55-year-old male employee into strip searching and molesting a 19-year-old female employee, who put up with the telephone-instructed molestation for thirty minutes before putting an end to matters. The franchise immediately fired the two men three days after the February 2003 incident, and offered the female victim counseling and a new job, but she instead quit and sued the franchise and McDonald’s. McDonald’s did warn the franchise (and other franchises) about the hoax in 1999 and 2001, (and the McDonald’s training manual now explicitly rules out strip searches of employees rather than relying on common sense) but such warnings are, of course, evidence that they should have warned more, according to the plaintiffs. The district court threw out the suit against McDonald’s, and many of the claims against the franchisee.
The defendants’ attorneys apparently have little faith that the law will have the common sense the employees lacked and blame the appropriately responsible parties rather than the deep pockets: to avoid liability they are buying into the plaintiff’s theories and seeking to blame each other in September 15 arguments before the Eleventh Circuit on interlocutory appeal. Some more aggressive defense might have had an effect: “The whole thing is really stupid,” said Senior Judge Peter Fay. (Alyson M. Palmer, “Bizarre ‘Strip-Search Hoax’ Case Before 11th Circuit”, Fulton County Daily Report, Sep. 25).
Comair: “Second autopsies possible”
In Flight 5191’s aftermath: “Some families are planning to hire private pathologists to perform second, independent autopsies, in addition to the ones performed by the state medical examiner’s office.” The idea would be to look for evidence that victims did not die from blunt force trauma from the crash, as officially conducted autopsies suggest, but instead survived that trauma and thus could have suffered prolonged agonies in the ensuing blaze, as Fayette County Coroner Gary Ginn initially assumed before getting the autopsy results. If an argument could be sustained that the loved ones’ sufferings were prolonged, the door would be opened to getting huge additional monetary awards from defendants, aside from the millions expected to be paid anyway. (Linda B. Blackford, Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader, Sept. 17).