Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Posts Tagged ‘Texas’

On C-SPAN tonight: “Protecting Main Street From Lawsuit Abuse”

Today I testified before the Senate Republican Conference about the effect on the economy of excessive litigation. A podcast is available on-line and, for the insomniacs among you, the hearing will be broadcast on C-SPAN tonight at 10:56 PM Eastern and again at 2:09 AM Eastern. Also testifying was Life Without Lawyers author Philip Howard; Crystal Chodes, who lost her job because of the expense of a meritless ADA filing mill suit; Texas doctor David Teuscher; and arbitration expert and University of Kansas law professor Christopher Drahozal.

If you just prefer reading what I have to say, my written testimony is on-line also:

The total loss to the economy from excessive tort litigation above and beyond a baseline of an employment at will regime and an average industrialized tort system can be estimated at between over $600 billion and over $900 billion a year, 4.3% to 6.5% of GNP, or a tort tax of between $8,000 and $12,000/year for an average family of four. And this is very much a conservative estimate, as other economists find much stronger effects than I have estimated here, as I have not tried to estimate a number of identifiable secondary and tertiary effects of excessive tort litigation on allocation of economic resources, and as I have not tried to estimate the likely effect of recent Congressional expansions of tort liability in the last twelve months.

I was pleased to hear from multiple Congressional staffers who are regular Overlawyered readers: one even surreptitiously added the website into my official biography. Carter Wood talks about the hearing and Senator Cornyn’s remarks over at Point of Law.

Update: video on-line at C-SPAN; my segment begins at 43:15 or so. And C-SPAN2 is rebroadcasting at 4:16 pm Eastern on Tuesday, March 17, which suggests that my appearance will be at about 5 pm Eastern.

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The Judge Sharon Keller case

Notice one thing missing in the New York Times’s discussion of the ethical complaint against Texas Court of Criminal Appeals Judge Sharon Keller? That’s right: any discussion of the underlying merits of the appeal that Keller refused to permit to be filed late. The Supreme Court held in Baze v. Rees that lethal injection was constitutional. Michael Richard, who raped and murdered a mother of seven, had multiple levels of meritless appeals, and this is a complaint that he should have gotten yet another one at the eleventh hour to raise a brand-new attack on his death sentence, and that Judge Keller should have politely informed the lawyers that they were asking permission for a late filing from the wrong judge to pointlessly delay the execution for another year while the Court decided Baze. One hopes that this ethical complaint and related press coverage is looked at as the political attack that it is. See also Beldar’s earlier analysis and follow-up.

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“Judge’s daughter sues driver she ran into during crash”

“Convicted last year of intoxication manslaughter for the death of her boyfriend, the 21-year-old daughter of a state district judge is suing the truck driver she ran into during a drunken driving crash. …[Elizabeth] Shelton had a blood alcohol concentration more than three times the legal limit, two tests showed.” (Brian Rogers, Houston Chronicle, Dec. 18). Feral Child has been digging up all sorts of interesting stuff about the lawyer representing Elizabeth Shelton, too — his name is Mark Sandoval — and his past dealings with her father, Harris County Judge Pat Shelton. He wonders whether it has something to do with standards being lower in Texas, although, unfortunately, we can think of this sort of thing going on in many other states too. And then Mark Bennett of Defending People jumps in and does even more research about Sandoval’s disciplinary record. And does he ever find stuff.

The Houston Chronicle deserves credit for breaking the original story, but as you may have noticed it took only hours for two skillful bloggers, SSFC and Bennett, to push it much farther. The blogosphere is proving itself extremely powerful in shedding a quick and bright light on some of the darker corners of the legal system.

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ATRA’s “Judicial Hellholes 2008”

The American Tort Reform Association is out with its annual ranking of the jurisdictions where it thinks civil defendants are farthest from being assured a fair trial, and they are:

  1. West Virginia
  2. South Florida
  3. Cook County, Ill.
  4. Atlantic County, NJ
  5. Montgomery and Macon Counties, Ala.
  6. Los Angeles County, CA
  7. Clark County (Las Vegas), Nev.

The list reflects the views of big-company managers and lawyers as to tort lawsuits; a poll of, say, doctors might result in different nominations (Brooklyn, Bronx, Long Island*, Philadelphia) and one of class-action or patent-infringement defendants would likely produce yet other lists.

ATRA has a supplementary “Watch List”, nicknamed by some of us “Heckholes”, of toasty but not quite infernal jurisdictions, on which it places the Rio Grande Valley and Gulf Coast of Texas, Madison County, Ill., Baltimore, Md., and St. Louis city and county and Jackson County, Mo. It also offers side essays on notable scandals among high-rolling lawyers, trial lawyer-AG alliances, and pro-plaintiff’s-bar lobbying efforts.

Some coverage of the report: Pero, ShopFloor (with this and this on AG alliances), Ambrogi, Genova, CalBizLit (“We’re Number 6! We’re Number 6!), TortsProf, Miller (Baltimore), and Turkewitz (cross-posted from Point of Law; also note this recent post).

* Commenter VMS makes a case that Long Island does not belong on such a list.

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December 11 roundup

  • Nastygrams fly at Christmas time over display and festival use of “Jingle Bells”, Grinch, etc. [Elefant]
  • Claims that smoking ban led to instantaneous plunge in cardiac deaths in Scotland turns out to be as fishy as similar claims elsewhere [Siegel on tobacco via Sullum, Reason “Hit and Run”]
  • Myths about the costs and consequences of an automaker Chapter 11 filing [Andrew Grossman, Heritage; Boudreaux, WSJ] Drowning in mandates and Congress throws them an anchor [Jenkins, WSJ]
  • Mikal Watts may be the most generous of the trial lawyers bankrolling the Texas Democratic Party’s recent comeback [Texas Watchdog via Pero]
  • Disney settles ADA suit demanding Segway access at Florida theme parks “by agreeing to provide disabled guests with at least 15 newly-designed four-wheeled vehicles.” [OnPoint News, earlier]
  • Update on Scientology efforts to prevent resale of its “e-meter” devices on eBay [Coleman]
  • Scary: business-bashing lawprof Frank Pasquale wants the federal government to regulate Google’s search algorithm [Concurring Opinions, SSRN]
  • Kind of an endowment all by itself: “Princeton is providing $40 million to pay the legal fees of the Robertson family” (after charges of endowment misuse) [MindingTheCampus]

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Professor fired for blog post charging students with plagiarism

Adjunct Loye Young at Texas A&M International University in Laredo had named and shamed students he said he had caught submitting essays not their own. The university “is paraphrased as stating that the professor ‘was terminated for violating the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, a federal law that prohibits the release of students’ educational records without consent.'” (Eugene Volokh, Nov. 18; Paul Caron, TaxProf, Nov. 18).

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“South again leads nation in nasty, expensive judicial races”

Alabama, Mississippi and Texas all host hotly fought races with a strong plaintiff-vs.-defendant dimension tomorrow: Democrat Deborah Bell Paseur vs. Republican Greg Shaw in Alabama, three challengers vs. three incumbents on the Mississippi Supreme Court, and Democratic challengers Jim Jordan, Linda Yanez and Sam Houston in races for the Texas Supreme Court. (Tom Baxter, Southern Political Report, Nov. 3).

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October 27 roundup

  • NYC judge tosses injury suit against Lawyers Athletic League filed by a player on Milberg’s team [NYLJ]
  • Kentucky fen-phen lawyers Gallion and Cunningham disbarred [Lexington Herald-Leader]
  • Worker’s comp doc claims he noticed abnormal lab result and told patient to check with his primary doc. Patient didn’t and harm ensued. Malpractice? [CalLaw Legal Pad, KevinMD, Happy Hospitalist]
  • Federalist Society publishes text of Judge Dennis Jacobs’s speech on pro bono, but Chemerinsky digs in rather than apologize [PoL]
  • Are HIPAA privacy rules suspended during emergencies? No, and what lovely situations that’s likely to cause [HIPAA blog, more]
  • One of the more unusual personal injury lawyer websites is “like a touchy-feely hybrid of Myst and The Office” [Above the Law]
  • Gold-collar criminal defense work? McAfee decides $12 million too rich a sum for defending CFO Prabhat Goyal [Bennett & Bennett, Greenfield]
  • Sounds promising: “Texas Supreme Court decision could end peremptory strikes in jury selection” [SE Texas Record]

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Terry Erwin Stork

Disbarred Austin lawyer Terry Erwin Stork has been sentenced to 15 years in prison for a pattern of stealing from elderly clients after their deaths. Among Stork’s many and colorful misdeeds:

The records said Stork lived in the home of a deceased client from 1987 to 2002 and deposited money from the sale of the home into his own bank account.

In another case, he was accused of letting the home of a client sit empty, driving the woman’s Buick LeSabre to disrepair and using her money to add to his rare china collection. He was also accused of failing to pass along inheritances to people and organizations that were supposed to get them.

Prosecutors at a sentencing hearing cited evidence “that Stork has continued practicing law since his arrest by using the identity of his brother, who is also a lawyer”. (Tony Plohetski, Austin American-Statesman, Sept. 23; Estate of Denial (“Shining Light on the Dark Side of Estate Management”), Sept. 12; ABA Journal, Jun. 30). Earlier: Jul. 3.

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