Aggressive solicitation by lawyers has been raising hackles in Los Angeles since the commuter train crash. (Carol J. Williams, “Lawyers swoop in after the Metrolink crash, looking for clients”, L.A. Times, Oct. 5)(earlier)(via Stier, Mass Tort Prof).
Posts Tagged ‘Los Angeles’
L.A.: Hospitals can’t discharge homeless patients
Thanks to a new city ordinance, they get to provide some of the world’s most expensive free hotel service to patients who are well enough to leave but refuse. (WSJ health blog, Aug. 4).
More: Numerous interesting comments from readers including this from Throckmorton:
This is not just in L.A. but happens all around the country as well. Our area saw this increase with the rise in nursing home suits. Nursing homes are now very reluctant to accept patients who are at risk for decubitus ulcers, etc. This combined with the declining revenue has led to the situation where there are no places that will accept transfers from the hospital. As more and more patients fill the wards awaiting placement, the hospital has no choice but to divert those that need urgent care.
You may not be able to get a nursing home patient out of the hospital, but at least you will not have a problem finding them an attorney.
“Metrolink Train Accident Attorney Lawyer Los Angeles”
It doesn’t actually hang together as a phrase, but it does contain plenty of promising keywords for lawyers trolling for business from the fatal commuter wreck north of Los Angeles, so it rates highly on Google. (Kevin O’Keefe, Sept. 19).
Radio silence? Suit against conservative talk show hosts
Los Angeles: “David Birke and his attorney Johnny Birke filed a complaint Aug. 27 against seven talk show hosts of KRLA-AM (870), Salem Communications Corporation and its owner Edward Atsinger III, alleging that they use the public airwaves to push Republican beliefs. David and Johnny Birke would not say whether they were related, citing attorney-client privilege. … Radio hosts Laura Ingraham, Dennis Prager, Michael Medved, Hugh Hewitt, Dennis Miller, Mike Gallagher and Kevin James are named as defendants in the suit.” The various defendants have defrauded the public and violated FCC obligations “by using their radio license to discuss only Republican issues, Johnny Birke said Monday.” (Veronica Rocha, “KRLA sued over content”, Glendale News-Press, Sept. 8). Radio Equalizer (Sept. 9) notes one presumed irony: “KRLA has in the past featured a show on the subject of lawsuit abuse.”
Regulating fast food
At American.com, Sara Wexler casts a critical eye at the redlining of new fast-food restaurants out of certain Los Angeles neighborhoods. I hadn’t previously noticed that LA was justifying the ban in part on the claim that South LA’s obese residents are “plac[ing] enormous costs on the California state Medicare system”–as a good an example of the future dangers to freedom of government-run health-care as any.
Baron money trail forced Edwards’ hand
Per Marisa Guthrie at the magazine Broadcasting & Cable, ABC News was able to force John Edwards’ hand in part because it had been tracing the Fred Baron money trail (which, it will be recalled, Edwards supposedly had nothing to do with). “According to multiple sources, Edwards was apoplectic that ABC News broke the story on its website and began promoting it early on Friday” because the former North Carolina senator — who, y’know, was beating up on himself so bad and wanted nothing more than to come clean with the American people — “had hoped to control the news cycle by making his admission late on a Friday night when the country was watching the Olympics and the long weekend yawned ahead.” Earlier here and here.
Many commentators have questioned whether Edwards was telling the truth about when the affair ended. (Despite her family’s publicly expressed wishes for a paternity test, Rielle Hunter says she won’t allow one; whether this refusal is or is not related to her presumably ongoing financial dependence on Fred Baron’s largesse is not for us to know.) A second question is whether Edwards was telling the truth on ABC when he said he hired Hunter first for her filmmaking skills and began the relationship later, thus dodging charges of having put his mistress on the payroll. Sam Stein at Huffington Post examines chronologies here. Relatedly, Advice Goddess Amy Alkon has this to say about the L.A. Times’s straightfaced description of Hunter as a filmmaker: “Katie, honey, in this town [L.A.], we know to look at imdb.com to see if somebody actually is a filmmaker. This is a good dating tip for you, too, dear, because half the guys you’ll meet at the bar in this town are ‘producers.'”
More: Welcome Michelle Malkin readers.
“Telling McDonald’s it can open franchises only in the white part of town”
William Saletan is appropriately appalled by the action of the Los Angeles City Council, which has moved to prohibit the opening of new fast food restaurants in South Central. Law and public health activists are trying to obtain similar legislation in New York and elsewhere, often pretending that they are not seeking to override the actual food choices of local residents. It’s a good idea not always to accept their factual assertions at face value:
“You try to get a salad within 20 minutes of our location; it’s virtually impossible,” says the Community Coalition’s executive director. Really? The coalition’s headquarters is at 8101 S. Vermont Ave. A quick Google search shows, among other outlets, a Jack-in-the-Box six blocks away. They have salads. Not the world’s greatest salads, but not as bad as a government that tells you whose salad you can eat.
(“Food Apartheid”, Slate, Jul. 31).
More: Several thoughts from Hans Bader, including this: “When Domino’s, a private company, decided not to deliver pizza and other fast food to certain dangerous parts of Washington, D.C., based on geographic region, not race, it was accused of racism by civil-rights groups, sued for discrimination, and demonized by D.C.’s City Council. … Why the double standard in favor of government bullies?” From commenter “Shine” at Matthew Yglesias: “What’s ironic is that many of the mom and pop restaurants were burned out during the 1992 riots. And the fast-food franchises promised two things that the post-riot LA political establishment (i.e., Rebuild L.A.) demanded above all else: minority ownership and jobs.” Another commenter there, “Too many Steves”, sniffs “a political favor to the existing franchise owners”, who stand to benefit from the throttle on competition, and whose interests of course diverge from those of the national franchisors, who are probably quite sincere in their opposition.
“The greediest piece of garbage that ever lived”
Seems there’s no surfeit of collegiality among L.A. lawyers whose names figure in the Terry Christiansen connivance-at-wiretapping trial. (Amanda Bronstad, “A Tale of the Tape in Christensen Wiretapping Trial”, National Law Journal, Jul. 16; “In Opening of Wiretap Trial, Christensen Claims He Was the Victim”, Jul. 21).
California trans fats: Terminator Nanny
Governor Schwarzenegger has signed into law the first statewide ban on the use of the maligned ingredient by restaurants and food service facilities. (Samantha Sondag, “Gov. signs nation’s first statewide ban on trans fats in restaurants”, San Francisco Chronicle, Jul. 25).
P.S. Speaking of the nanny state in California, Los Angeles is moving to ban new fast food restaurants from poorer sections of South Central L.A. on the explicitly paternalistic grounds that it knows better than local residents what they should be eating. Prof. Bainbridge has more.
Sacha Baron Cohen lawyer script
The “Borat” star, per AFP, “has sold Fox film studios a comedy, ‘Accidentes,’ about an ambulance-chaser-turned-hero, which he will produce and possibly star in, Variety magazine said Tuesday. The film is about a personal injury lawyer who becomes a hero among Los Angeles Hispanics for successfully defending a worker against a wealthy employer, but who in the process becomes the enemy of the city’s elite.” And see Defamer Australia with related graphic: “El Mejor Abogado”.