Posts Tagged ‘loser pays’

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.

Medical roundup

  • Crisis of sterile injectables rages on, among victims are premature infants who need parenteral nutrition [Washingtonian (“Even if the FDA’s doing something terrible, we can’t criticize them. They regulate us.”) via Tabarrok, earlier here, here, here, etc.]
  • “Tweets not medical advice” [@Caduceusblogger via @jackshafer]
  • “Why Your Dog Can Get Vaccinated Against Lyme Disease And You Can’t” [Curt Nickisch, WBUR]
  • Cites distinctive Connecticut law: “Hospital Successfully Sues its Patient’s Attorneys for Filing a Vexatious Malpractice Suit” [Alex Stein, Bill of Health]
  • Should adversarial medical examinations be videotaped? [Turkewitz]
  • “Lawyers Have Learned To Distort Pharmacovigilance Signals” [Oliver on FDA Adverse Event Reporting System (FAERS), earlier]
  • Causation from nasal decongestant at issue: “Judge orders UW to pay $15M to Snoqualmie family” [KING5]
  • “The ban on compensated transplant organ donation has led to hundreds of thousands of excess deaths. A ban on compensated sperm and egg donation would lead to a dearth of lives.” [Alex Tabarrok, related on Canada]

Intellectual property roundup

“Massive lawsuit against bloggers is reined in”

A lawyer who’d been widely and scathingly criticized over his handling of a case — unfairly he thought — proceeded to sue bloggers and journalists for defamation, so many that the total of defendants reached 74. It’s over now, but a New York state judge declined to award sanctions, which may possibly say something about the difficulty of obtaining sanctions under today’s prevailing legal standards, especially in New York. [Tom Crane, San Antonio Employment Law Blog; Popehat (“Our legal system is so broken that it can take years to resolve even the most patently vexatious, harassing, and incompetently prosecuted lawsuits like this one.”)]

P.S. “Loser pays would have been valuable here. Costs to each defendant would teach a memorable lesson.” [@erikmagraken]

Attorneys’ fees roundup

  • We’re worth it: lawyers in credit card case want judge to award them $720 million [Alison Frankel, Reuters] Johnson & Johnson will fight $181 million payday for private lawyers in Arkansas Risperdal case [Legal NewsLine]
  • British Columbia, Canada: “Lawyer Ordered To Pay Costs Personally For ‘Shoddy Piece Of Counsel Work’” [Erik Magraken] Ontario client questions lawyer’s fee [Law Times]
  • Sixth Circuit: attorneys fees statute not intended to cover dry cleaning and mini-blinds [Legal Ethics Forum]
  • Indiana lawmaker goes back to drawing board on loser-pays bill [Indiana Law Blog]
  • ‘Shocked’ by $3M legal fee in fatal car-crash case, judge tells lawyers to pay plaintiff lawyer $50K [ABA Journal]
  • Seth Katsuya Endo, “Should Evidence of Settlement Negotiations Affect Attorneys’ Fees Awards?” [SSRN via Legal Ethics Forum]
  • In Israel, more of a discretionary loser-pays arrangement [Eisenberg et al, SSRN via @tedfrank]
  • British cabbie beats ticket, recovers only some of his legal costs. Still better than he’d do here, right? [Daily Mail]
  • Turnaround guru Wilbur Ross: current structure of bankruptcy fees encourages lawyer “hyperactivity” [Reuters]

Will loser-pays bring down notorious copyright troll?

Cathy Gellis, guesting at Popehat, has a long post on the latest in the Prenda Law saga. A relevant paragraph:

The default rule in American litigation is that everyone pays for their own lawyers. But some laws, the Copyright Act being one of them, have provisions so that the loser pays for both sides’ lawyers. … But just because a judge may grant an award of attorney fees doesn’t mean the money will ever be recovered; enforcing a judgment often presents its own expensive challenges, meaning a wronged defendant can still be saddled with the costs of his own defense. However the California Code of Civil Procedure has a provision, § 1030, to help mitigate that financial risk by allowing defendants in similar positions as Mr. Navasca [a man seeking fee recovery from Prenda Law over a questionable copyright action] to require plaintiffs to make an “undertaking;” that is, to post a bond that would guarantee, when the defendant inevitably wins his fees, that he would actually get the money.

Both provisions could prove important in bringing the rogue legal enterprise to heel. If only other areas of law besides copyright had loser-pays, and other states besides California emulated the “undertaking” idea. Earlier on Prenda Law here and here.

Intellectual property roundup

  • Sounds promising: “Peeved politicians want ‘loser pays’ rule for patent trolls” [Joe Mullin, Ars Technica] Defense of patent trolls in Wired mag [Michael Risch]
  • Scènes à Faire: the copyright exception for scenes that inevitably suggest themselves [Bruce Boyden, ConcurOp]
  • If the terms of service/purchase say you don’t have a right to resell the digitized book or song, maybe you don’t [The Digital Reader on court decision against ReDigi startup]
  • Pay to quote a single word from a newspaper? That’s what the popup at Canada’s National Post seems to suggest [Doctorow, BoingBoing]
  • Inside copyright enforcers’ “bait-car” operations [TechCrunch]
  • “Firm and two of its lawyers must pay $200K over frivolous patent case” [Sheri Qualters, National Law Journal]
  • “Crazy copyright bot (now suspended by Twitter) threatens those who tweet tiny poem” [Rob Beschizza via @ChrisBellNZ]

Disabled rights roundup

  • California Supreme Court: fee shift in disabled-rights claim can go to winning defendant, not just plaintiff [Jankey v. Song Koo Lee, Bagenstos/Disability Law]
  • That’s Olsen with an “e”: “Lawmaker wants to protect cities from frivolous lawsuits over A.D.A.” [California Assemblywoman Kristen Olsen; L.A. Times] “Gas stations confront disabled-access lawsuits” [Orange County Register] Serial ADA filer hits New Orleans [Louisiana Record] ADA drive-by suits in Colorado and elsewhere [Kevin Funnell]
  • And this lawyer follows a see-no-evil policy regarding ADA filing mills: “I refuse to pass judgment on other attorneys here.” [Julia Campins]
  • Child care center could not turn away applicant with nut allergy because Iowa disabled-rights law said to have expanded its coverage of categories when the U.S. Congress expanded ADA, though Iowa lawmakers enacted no such expansion [Disability Law]
  • Feds join in LSAT accommodation suit [Recorder]
  • Official in San Francisco’s mayoral Office on Disability files disability-bias claim [KGO]
  • “Testing employees for legally prescribed medications must be done carefully” [Jon Hyman]

Should the state pay the legal defense costs of acquitted criminal defendants?

Scott Greenfield, contra Radley Balko, believes the idea would prove “problematic, if not disastrous,” in real life, especially if enacted in the form of two-way fee-shifting (as distinct from a one-way fee payable only to defendants). It is worth noting that although legal systems around the world predominantly embrace loser-pays principles in civil litigation between private parties, they more or less uniformly decline to carry a similar principle over to criminal prosecution.

Elephant sized payout in Ringling Bros. abuse of process case

According to a press release from Feld Entertainment, which owns the Ringling Bros.-Barnum & Bailey circus, the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) has agreed to pay $9.3 million to settle racketeering and other charges arising from alleged litigation abuse in lawsuits beginning in 2000 over elephant welfare. Feld says ASPCA and others paid a plaintiff and fact witness in the case whose testimony a judge described as not credible. It says it intends to continue suing other animal-welfare groups that it has named in connection with the episode, including the Humane Society of the United States, and Fund for Animals, as well as attorneys. [more on circus’s side of dispute; earlier here, here, here, here] More: John Steele, Legal Ethics Forum.