Filling in a detail readers wondered about before, on why Little League was named as a defendant: “The game in which Steven Domalewski sustained the injury was a Police Athletic League contest rather than a Little League event. Attorney Ernest Fronzuto countered that Little League Baseball officially approved the bat and by its actions led players, coaches and parents to believe the bat was safe for play among 10-, 11- and 12-year-olds.” (Bob Condor, “Living Well: Youth baseball injury stats: Ouch!”, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Jun. 1).
Posts Tagged ‘shotgun defendant selection’
Thomas Bentey v. St. Thomas University Law School update
We wrote about this lawsuit when it was first filed in 2006, and were curious what was up with it. Bentey flunked St. Thomas U Law School; he then retained an attorney, Michael Lombardi, to sue numerous defendants alleging that it was consumer fraud for St. Thomas to admit him in the first place and seeking an injunction over Bentey’s contracts grade, suggesting a second person who should’ve flunked law school. The case was transferred from New Jersey to the Southern District of Florida in December 2006, and the multiple defendants filed a joint motion to dismiss in March 2007. The parties then apparently agreed that Bentey would voluntarily dismiss his case in April 2007; the terms of the settlement were not publicly discussed, but I’d be surprised if they weren’t simply a walk-away.
A Thomas Bentey who lives in New Jersey has a public Facebook page, though we make no representation that it’s the same Thomas Bentey.
17 doctors sued, all but one dismissed before trial
September 10 roundup
All-New England edition:
- Massachusetts bar-exam flunker drops suit over gay-marriage question [Boston Herald, OnPointNews; see Jul. 7]
- “We cannot get rail service between Nashua and Boston because a cap on liability may be unconstitutional in New Hampshire thanks to the trial lawyers” [letter in Nashua Telegraph; earlier news story]
- Whodunit? Everyone, as in a certain Christie novel: Rhode Island nightclub fire lawsuits name 93 different defendants [New York Times; see Feb. 16, 2006]
- Update: skull-fragment-keeping officer Callahan departs the Norwalk, Ct. police force [Created Things; earlier Jan. 23 and Jun. 21]
Minneapolis bridge aftermath
A federal judge has rebuked a large Minnesota personal-injury law firm that, even before rescuers had emerged from the treacherous waters, had petitioned for access to the I-35W site for three attorneys and two expert witnesses. And Democrat-Farmer-Labor State Rep. Ryan Winkler has suggested establishing a public compensation fund, along the lines of the 9/11 fund, for victims who agree not to sue:
The legal spectacle about to play out threatens to drag on for years and impose huge costs on some defendants.
In the future, as Winkler has pointed out, even the largest contractors may hesitate to work on Minnesota’s riskiest projects: repairs to crumbling infrastructure. “If engineers and constructors are scared away from bidding,” he warns, “it will be a long time before our infrastructure is adequate and safe.”
(Katherine Kersten, “After I-35W bridge collapse, lawyers promptly pounced”, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Sept. 2). Earlier: Aug. 9, Aug. 2.
Suit: plaintiff was too stupid to be admitted into law school
Thomas Joseph Bentey flunked out of St. Thomas University School of Law of Miami, and claims it was a conspiracy of the school to admit students it knew would flunk out, and wants his tuition and room and board back (as well as damages for lost wages and “embarrassment”). (The complaint also complains that Bentey’s mother called the law school, but that it refused to review his C grade in Contracts II, and seeks an injunction for a review of the grade.) The attorneys seek class action status, which is frivolous on its face, because the individualized issue of whether a St. Thomas student flunked out because of their own underachieving would clearly predominate any group inquiry even if the conspiracy theory had any basis in rationality. One might also make some adverse inferences about Bentey’s attorney, Michael Lombardi of Lombardi & Lombardi, for coming up with such a cockamamie theory of recovery that will only result in more embarrassment for his client, but he is a “Super Lawyer.” Other defendants in the shotgun complaint include the ABA and the Department of Education, suggesting hopes for a number of nuisance settlements. (Bentey v. St. Thomas University School of Law, No. 2:06-cv-03463-PGS-RJH (D.N.J.); Leigh Jones, “Law School Sued for Expelling Students”, National Law Journal, Sep. 1).
Update: Orin Kerr comments at the VC blog.
Breaking: $105 million Aramark verdict reversed
The New Jersey court’s opinion yesterday in Verni v. Harry M. Stevens ordered a new trial because of the unfairly prejudicial evidence introduced at trial. (Laura Mansnerus, “Court Overturns Jury Award Against Stadium Concessionaire”, NY Times, Aug. 4; Kibret Markos, “Paralyzed Cliffside girl may have to go through new trial”, NorthJersey.com, Aug. 4).
Plaintiffs sought to blame a drunk-driving accident several hours after a Giants game on stadium beer vendors, a feat eased when the drunk driver, Daniel Lanzano, settled with plaintiffs and changed his testimony to be consistent with their theory of the case. Lanzano drank at two go-go bars after the game. The court also noted the failure of the jury to be instructed to consider the relative liability of other settling parties that the plaintiffs had sued in a shotgun complaint, including the NFL, the Giants, Toyota, and Michael Holder, who committed the sin of drinking with Lanzano that day. We had provided extensive coverage from the beginnings of the suit: Oct. 10, 2003; Jan. 21, 2005; a must-read Feb. 2, 2005 post; Jun. 6.
Update: another aspect of the appellate court opinion is that it recognized corporate boundaries. The trial court sought to hold Aramark liable for alleged negligence of its subsidiaries.
Naming peripheral medical defendants
In the comments section at Sebastian Holsclaw’s, following a long discussion of the recent Mello-Studdert study on medical malpractice, talk turns to the practice of naming every doctor in the vicinity as a defendant when filing a medical liability claim. A couple of trial lawyer advocates defend that unsavory practice, and Holsclaw responds (via Rovito):
The problem is that extraneous defendants are often not dropped quickly. In many complex cases you can’t possibly get through the discovery phases without plunking down huge amounts of money. Maybe I’ve just been remarkably unlucky, but when I’ve worked on the defense side the vast majority of cases involved defending people who were just tack-on defendants. In all of these cases $30-60,000 (in fees) was spent before the defendants could get out of the case. Often an additional sum (usually in the $5-10,000 range) was paid to stop the bleeding even though everyone (including/especially the plaintiff’s attorney) that the defendant would never be found liable. One plaintiff’s attorney was well known to push for largish settlements from innocent parties — if you refused he would drag you until the day of trial (throwing up just enough smoke to avoid summary judgment) and then drop you without comment on the morning of the trial (after you had incurred all the expense of expert retention, expert testing and all of the trial preparation). It is the kind of thing that gives lawyers a bad name, but it happens in every city.
(cross-posted from Point of Law).
Tactical advantages of shotgun lawsuits
Why sue every physician on the patient’s chart? One reason, via KevinMD (May 6): “Plaintiffs’ lawyers love it when physicians point fingers at each other. They can just sit back and watch the doctors destroy each other.” (Berkeley Rice, “Watch out for this malpractice trap!”, Medical Economics, May 5).
Lied about her age to get into wet T-shirt contest
Not only that, but she assumed the whirring video cameras were just for onlookers’ personal use. Certainly she wasn’t expecting the spring break footage to turn up in commercially available compilations. So Monica Pippin is now extracting legal settlements from entities including Playboy and Anheuser-Busch; however, the Daytona Beach hotel at which the contest took place objects to being sued on the grounds that it “had no role in producing or distributing the videos and did not profit from them”. (Kevin Graham, “Lawsuit says video exploits teen’s naivete”, St. Petersburg Times, Apr. 28). Similar: Sept. 28-30, 2001; Mar. 6-7, 2002.