How many errors can you spot in the Jeannette Borzo/California Lawyer magazine story on legal blogging and its sentence about this weblog?
As best as most people can tell, the history of legal blogs began in July 1999 when two lawyers-a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and another attorney from New Jersey-launched Overlawyered (www.overlawyered.com).
Yesterday the Manhattan Institute released a new report by my colleague Jim Copland, "Trial Lawyers Inc. -- Asbestos". As I note at Point of Law, even as a longtime observer of asbestos litigation I found it quite an eye-opener. I'm happy to announce that Jim Copland will be joining us tomorrow for a guestblogging stint to explain some of his findings.
What if we are "actively aligning incentives against" having such a thing? (Coyote, Apr. 14).
Separately, Coyote explains why he isn't very active in his own blog's comment section, though he often learns things from it.
Overlawyered is placed high up above the fold in the new law section in Guy Kawasaki's fascinating "Alltop" project.
This website is mentioned in an article on allergies and chemical sensitivities in the workplace, specifically on the case of Susan McBride, who's suing her employer, the city of Detroit, for not preventing a co-worker from wearing perfume to the office (see Jul. 6 and Jul. 18, 2007; earlier Detroit case, May 25, 2005). (Lisa Belkin, "Sickened by the Office (Really)", May 1).
In the April American Spectator, William Tucker has a lengthy piece on the question of whether scandals, legislative setbacks and a more critical public view toward litigation together signify that the power and influence of the trial bar has peaked. This site is mentioned in the piece and I'm quoted, observing that "People have called the top of this market before and they've always turned out to be wrong." (not online, apparently; Jane Genova discusses).
Overlawyered is now among the blogs carried by the "content on demand" news service.
Jane Genova gets a report that access to her blog Law and More is blocked in the Rhode Island State Court Law Library, and I offer some conjectures as to why based on similar experiences at Overlawyered, in which posting about sexual harassment cases and even gun litigation has been enough to get me (temporarily) blocked (& welcome Above the Law readers).
This may be inside baseball for those who lack interest in blog mechanics, but since it is excellent news for Overlawyered and its readers, we'll boast about it: volunteer Andrew Grossman has stepped forward to accomplish for us something we'd been dearly hoping to accomplish, namely installing redirects that will get several years' worth of older (2003-2008) posts to display in current URL format. The underlying problem is that we've been through three iterations of Movable Type and each had a different way of creating the URL format for a post:
http://www.overlawyered.com/archives/001600.html (first method)
http://www.overlawyered.com/2004/11/rr_didnt_warn_not_to_walk_on_t.html (same post, second method)
http://www.overlawyered.com/2004/11/rr-didnt-warn-not-to-walk-on-t.html (same post, current method -- note use of hyphens instead of underscores)
Simply discontinuing the old versions would cause thousands of old links, both incoming and internal, to break. But the continued existence of the old versions led to several kinds of problems: they could no longer be formatted properly, so they looked ugly if not unreadable; moreover, users of Google and other search engines would encounter two (or, more recently, three) textually identical versions of the same post, which was confusing at best. Hence the need for redirects.
Aside from his having done us this service, another reason to commend Andrew Grossman to your attention is his day job as Senior Legal Policy Analyst, Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at the Heritage Foundation. His writing interests there include "federal criminal law and the problem of 'overcriminalization' -- the practice of turning minor civil offenses into serious criminal acts," and other topics equally well matched with ours here, including the likely boon to litigation from Congress's CPSC expansion, the ill-conceived ADA Restoration Act under consideration on the Hill, and Judge Posner's summary approach to dubious expert witness testimony. We hope he'll be guest blogging in this space before long.
I was a guest on the Houston radio station this morning discussing personal responsibility and our propensity to litigate. A few recent cases possibly on point: "Inmate Sues Jail, Blames It for His Escapes"; five of her friends as well as the inevitable bar sued after college student's fatal alcohol binge; and lawyer gambles away client money at the tables, then sues casinos for not stopping her. (Corrected original post title which got the call letters wrong).
For being the first Overlawyered blogger to have a post cited in a federal case. In Taylor v. XM Satellite Radio, Inc., 533 F.Supp.2d 1151 (N.D. Ala. 2007), XM argued that the class action demanding a refund for a 24-hour outage was moot because they offered refunds well before the class certification motion was made. Plaintiffs disputed this, arguing they did not know about the refund offer until after they moved for class certification. One questions the relevance of the time of the certification motion (and, indeed, the court found this factual claim irrelevant) given that the refund offer was to the entire class rather than just to the named plaintiffs, but one reason that the court expressed skepticism at the attorneys' claims was the existence of an Overlawyered post by David discussing the refunds and the ludicrousness of the suit. Case dismissed for mootness, though the court also noted that XM had no contractual obligation to provide continuous uninterrupted service.
The news service picks up on a report from the Chamber-backed Legal NewsLine, whose reporter Chris Rizo had called me up for a reaction to the new website SueEasy.com (on which see earlier post). Other blog reactions to the same site include Steel Turman ("like a carpool for ambulance chasers"), Everett White, Just Average American.
As mentioned, I know very little about RSS, Atom, feeds, etc. but just try to take the minimum steps needed to make sure readers can follow the site that way if they wish. This note from a reader in Australia is not the first to indicate that our software upgrade and site redesign of recent weeks may have caused some disruption:
I hope you'll accept my apology in advance, but it just occurred to me today that I hadn't had any feeds from you for quite some time now. I use Bloglines as my newsreader. I tried to resubscribe to Overlawyered using a different type of feed and that seemed successful, but when I looked at what had been supplied with the different type of feed, all of the material was from mid-March. Are you able to throw any light on this? Is there some problem with Bloglines and Overlawyered? Is there something I can do to restore the feeds? Thanks for any assistance.
Knowledgeable comments welcome.
William Pentland's Forbes article (see yesterday's post) has sparked a fair bit of coverage, including: NAM "Shop Floor", Mark Obbie's LawBeat, Law and More, the Baton Rouge Advocate, Philadelphia personal injury firm Pomerantz Perlberger & Lewis LLP (proud of their city's reputation as bad news for libel defendants), and KGBT (Harlingen, Tex.).
Forbes compiles its list and is kind enough to quote me at some length. Scariest of the scary? Los Angeles (ADA filing mills); Miami (med-mal); Atlantic County, N.J. (pharmaceutical); Starr County, Tex. (personal injury); Cook County, Ill. (product liability; I'm quoted on the Cook premium for otherwise routine injury cases); Mississippi (class actions; more properly, group and other mass actions, given the state's peculiar way of handling such claims); Clark County, Nev. (construction litigation); West Virginia (environmental lawsuits); Philadelphia (I'm quoted on the city's tradition of libel suits by public officials); (William Pentland, Forbes, Apr. 7; slideshow).
Site search, which has been broken for the past couple of days, is back working now. Pre-2003 archives are now broken, but I expect to get them reinstalled fairly soon. (Update: fixed now.)
Unfortunately, the inherent limitations of Movable Type and its upgrades are forcing a retreat from one of my long-held objectives, namely to provide this site's archives with stable longterm URLs. The previous URL formats we used are not supported by MT 4, which means that after our upgrade-in-progress is finished, existing links to individual posts published before March 2008 will mostly break. With minor exceptions the material itself will not vanish from the site, but it will reside at new URLs and you will need to do more searching for it. Sorry.
That's the kind of blog we try to run around here:
Created by OnePlusYou
The hearing is now on-line (I'm at the 55:18 mark; Maxine Waters is at the 2:10:20 mark), as is my written testimony.
Things I should've said: that a dictator did a good job in the past hardly means that a dictatorship is a good idea, even if you can reappoint the same dictator. But one can be dumbfounded by the stupidity of some questions.
According to our software, we passed that milestone today.
...for our 404 page ("17 brilliant 404 pages and why they are cool", Royal Pingdom, Mar. 28).
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