Norwalk officials will deny the claim, city attorney M. Jeffry Spahr said.

"The official response is her claim is denied and poop happens," he said.

The claim by Mahopac, N.Y., resident, Kelly DeBrocky was filed with the city clerk on April 7. It came across Spahr's desk yesterday.

...

Spahr said he has seen some frivolous claims, but the feces claim reeks.

"Some wacky stuff comes across. I don't know if people are more litigious. My opinion is two things are at play. No. 1, people are resistant to taking responsibility for their own actions and No. 2, they feel there always has to be somebody to blame," he said.

Other claims without merit, Spahr said, include a boater who blamed the city after his boat, docked at the city marina, filled up with water in a heavy rainstorm and sank, and parents who hold the city responsible when their children fall and injure themselves on playground monkey bars.

Spahr also cited a suit by boxer Travis Simms two days before he won the super-welterweight title in January 2007.

Simms said that a 2005 injury he suffered during a basketball game at Benjamin Franklin School due to city negligence sidelined his boxing career for two years.

The city is waiting to see whether Simms will drop the case amicably.

Spahr said that long after that is resolved, lawyers in his office will still be talking about the feces claim.

"That's kind of way up there in a take-the-cake kind of thing," he said.

The mother claims she had to discard her toddler's clothes and shoes and return home after the incident, and wants reimbursement. Spahr's response: "I'm also having a tough time picturing why (the child) had to be bathed after stepping in this unless he thought it was some kind of poop sandbox." (Alexandra Fenwick, "City: Mom's claim stinks", Stamford Advocate, May 8 (via Romenesko)).

Ted Fields was injured in an auto accident with Jimmy Woodley; Woodley's insurer went bankrupt, so Fields, on January 30, 1997, asked Allstate to pay $25,000 in medical bills and lost wages. Allstate sent Fields forms to fill out, and he did so three weeks later; when Allstate didn't pay instantaneously, he sued them in March 1997 for bad faith. Fields turned the discovery process into a far-reaching investigation of all of Allstate's claim procedures; the judge refused to constrain irrelevant deposition questioning, at which point in 1999 Allstate offered Fields the full amount of his $50,000 policy limit rather than waste hundreds of thousands in trial. Fields refused; his attorneys filed several separate motions of default rather than litigate the underlying issues after the trial court denied a summary judgment motion. An appellate court found that Allstate was entitled to summary judgment because of the lack of any evidence of bad-faith in responding to Fields's claims; the Indiana Supreme Court overturned that ruling on a procedural technicality that the appeal was premature.

The trial court ruled that Allstate was not allowed to present evidence that it was not liable for actual or punitive damages or that it acted "with anything other than dishonest purpose, moral obliquity, furtive design, and/or ill will." A jury, hearing this one-sided sham of a trial, awarded $20 million in damages, though one would hope the Court of Appeals, hearing a timely appeal, makes the same decision it made before. Press coverage fails to mention that Allstate wasn't allowed to defend itself at trial; the plaintiff told the jury that the dispute caused high blood pressure, heart problems, and a stroke, though then the question becomes why he isn't suing his attorney.

Today, the Court of Appeals of Indiana reversed.

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).

In another indication that heavy-handed pursuit of a blogger might not have worked out very well as a legal strategy, Shoemaker's own clients, the Sykes family, have now voluntarily dropped their vaccine-autism suit against Bayer, which was the basis for the subpoena (Seidel, Orac).

Perhaps-ominous sequel: Seidel points out in a new post that Shoemaker's legal papers accuse her of arguably tortious conduct in her comments on autism litigation, including interfering with "witnesses' professions, professional relationships, and economic opportunities", and that the witnesses in question in the Sykes suit, Dr. Mark Geier and David Geier, have previously pursued long and costly litigation against four scientists and the American Academy of Pediatrics over an article in Pediatrics which disputed the Geiers' findings. The suit -- which was eventually dismissed without prejudice as to the scientists, and dismissed with prejudice as to AAP -- contended that damages were owing because the article in question had cut into the Geiers' potential income as expert witnesses.

But companies such as Purina are not interested in discussing the matter. Brand management isn't a seminar. They are interesting in executing and maintaining a policy of complete domination of not only their brand equity space, but a comfortable semiotic buffer all around that space to the full extent that they can get away with it. Judges simply do not award fees or otherwise penalize brand owners for overreaching under the Lanham Act, though the Act empowers them to do so (the exceptions are notable and hence reportable). For this reason it is worth it to Purina and companies like it -- it is a rational economic and corporate choice -- to litigate these cases at the small risk of actually getting to a final adverse judgment regarding a trademark they have no right to anyway, as weighed against the much higher possibility that the other side will surrender $10,000, $25,000 or even $100,000 worth of fees into the process -- dollars that are orders of magnitude more significant to the defendant (or declaratory judgment plaintiff) than for a corporation that probably has counsel on a retainer anyway.