In Ohio, doctors treating the elderly are being given an “ultimatum: Stop seeing nursing home patients or get no insurance at all. … Frank O’Neil, vice president of corporate communications for malpractice insurer ProAssurance, said the company has made it a policy to stop insuring doctors whose main business is nursing home care. The lawsuit climate in nursing homes, O’Neil said, is worse than any other area of malpractice law, ‘bar none.'” (Tracy Wheeler, “Insurers push doctors to drop older patients”, Akron Beacon Journal, Feb. 15) (via MedPundit, who also covers the Ohio malpractice crisis in posts dated Feb. 14 and Feb. 17). See also Tracy Wheeler, “State seeks solutions to rising insurance costs”, Akron Beacon Journal, Feb. 15. For more on nursing home litigation, see Dec. 17 and links from there.
Archive for March, 2004
Varieties of legal practice
Sherry Fowler (Stay of Execution) has two posts looking at the good and bad points of practicing transactional law, and how it differs from a litigation practice (via Bainbridge).
“Lucky gambler sues Las Vegas casino”
“A Los Angeles lawyer who claims he was thrown out of Las Vegas last year because he was too lucky has sued MGM Mirage in a bid to force the casino to warn prospective gamblers that they can be barred for winning too much.” Ernest Franseschi, Jr., “who plays blackjack as a hobby, said casino officials did not accuse him of cheating, but of counting cards to determine which had been played — a practice that is not illegal.” “We, like any other business, reserve the right to refuse service,” said a spokesman for MGM Mirage. (Reuters/Yahoo, Mar. 3). On the longstanding war between casinos and card-counters, which occasionally spills over into litigation, see I. Nelson Rose (professor at Whittier Law School), “Dealing with Card-Counters”, 2002, at Rose’s site Gambling and the Law.
Probe of Connecticut tobacco deal
Picking up where our Feb. 24 posting left off: “The House committee that will decide whether to recommend the impeachment of Gov. John G. Rowland is examining a Waterbury law firm, one of four firms that brought Connecticut’s 1996 class-action suit against the tobacco industry and shared $65 million in fees.” The state’s attorney general, Richard Blumenthal, said: “I can tell you unequivocally that politics had nothing to do with this decision [to hire the Carmody firm]”. Such a card, that AG Blumenthal! (Stacey Stowe, “Impeachment Panel Examining Law Firm”, New York Times, Mar. 3)
Nurse Cullen’s references, cont’d
New York Times publishes its investigation into the 16-year career of the confessed killer nurse: “Mr. Cullen’s case has exposed a fundamental weakness in health care: the difficulty of prospective employers to learn of someone’s past troubles. Employers frequently refuse to pass on negative information, even about people they have fired, for fear of being sued for slander by the former employee. …[Mandated reporting systems are weak as well.] ‘There needs to be some kind of safe harbor that would allow past employers who’ve taken adverse actions to share that, and to describe the associated facts, without fear of legal action,’ said Dr. Arnold Milstein, a health care consultant and one of the founders of the Leapfrog Group, a national business alliance dedicated to improving health care.” (Richard Perez-Pena, David Kocieniewski and Jason George, “Through Gaps in System, Nurse Left Trail of Grief”, Feb. 29)(see Jan. 29, Dec. 18). Cut to Cure (Mar. 2) comments: “So we have the lawyers saying on the one hand if we will just clean our own house and get rid of the bad apples, the medical liability problem will take care of itself. But when such efforts are made, the lawyers try to put a stop to it.”
The Christian Science Monitor has a good roundup of the state of reference-chilling (Randy Dotinga, “Would you hire this man?”, Mar. 1) but then goes on to illustrate the problem only too well by way of a companion article whose advice is summed up in its title: “If an old boss smears you, hire a detective” (Jennifer LeClaire, Mar. 1). According to the latter piece, one complainant was successful in extracting a cash settlement from a former employer on the grounds that it had refused to respond at all to reference requests.
“Edwards gave loan to a federal judge”
“In 1994, when Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.) was still the biggest tort lawyer in North Carolina, he lent $30,000 to a federal bankruptcy judge who was then overseeing a case on which Edwards?s wife, Elizabeth, did much of the legal work. The judge, J. Rich Leonard, is a longtime friend of Edwards?s. … Jonathan Turley, a professor of law at George Washington University who has brought ethics charges against judges before, said the arrangement presented a ‘compelling case of conflict of interest. It is hard to imagine a judge could rationalize presiding in a case where he holds a loan from a couple,’ he said.” Both Judge Leonard and the Edwards campaign deny impropriety and say the loan was fully disclosed and was repaid. Although Elizabeth Edwards’s law firm received a $1 million contingency fee for its work in the case she handled before Leonard, the fee was paid after she had already left the firm and she has said that she did not receive any of the proceeds. (Geoff Earle, The Hill, Mar. 2). Plus: instant retrospectives on the Edwards campaign (Chris Suellentrop, “The Pretender”, Slate, Mar. 2; Michael Graham, “The littlest candidate”, National Review Online, Mar. 3).
“Dick Clark sued for age discrimination”
“A 76-year-old game show producer sued Dick Clark Monday, alleging the 74-year-old Clark called him a ‘dinosaur’ and refused to hire him because of his age.” When Ralph Andrews, who had produced game shows in the 1960s and 1970s, wrote the veteran television personality “to say he was interested in available positions, Clark wrote back, allegedly turning Andrews down because of his age. ‘I have great respect and admiration for your accomplishments, and wish you success in your desire to ‘get back to work,’ Clark’s letter read, according to the suit. ‘(But) the last development guy we hired was 27 years old. Another person who is joining our staff next week is 30. People our age are considered dinosaurs! The business is being run by “The Next Generation.”‘” Andrews now wants damages under age-bias law. (AP/San Francisco Chronicle, Mar. 1). More: if semi-anonyblogger Slithery D were running this site, he wouldn’t have posted the above item; but Virginia Postrel probably would’ve.
U.K.: “Union tells teachers to end all school trips”
Britain’s “second biggest teaching union advised its 223,000 members yesterday to stop taking children on school trips because ‘society no longer appears to accept the concept of a genuine accident’.” Members of the NASUWT union have been blamed, and in one instance sentenced to a prison term, after students drowned on outings in two separate incidents. “Because of growing allegations of abuse, the union has also advised members not to give children a lift in their own vehicles, not to place themselves in a ‘one-to-one situation’ with a child and not to drive a minibus on an educational visit.” The largest British teacher’s union, NUT, disagrees with NASUWT’s stand and says it continues to view field trips as essential. (John Clare, Daily Telegraph, Feb. 19).
Milberg Weiss client likened to frog
After a client of the prominent class action firm (see Feb. 4, Jan. 11, Jul. 1, earlier posts) said that it no longer wanted to take the lead role in the case of In re Copper Mountain Securities Litigation, Judge Vaughn Walker, of the federal district court in San Francisco, wrote: “A class representative suing to rescue distressed plaintiffs may sometimes appear to be a prince. But, in reality, the heroic prince, perhaps, is actually a frog.” Earlier, the Ninth Circuit had used the case to strike down Judge Walker’s attempt to employ an auction method to select the lead counsel for plaintiffs. (Brenda Sandburg, “Judge: Class Action Prince Was Really a Frog”, The Recorder, Feb. 19). More: Lyle Roberts at 10b-5 Daily has more details.
“Make you Ralph”
“The qualities that liberals have observed in him of late — the monomania, the vindictiveness, the rage against pragmatic liberalism — have been present all along. Indeed, an un-blinkered look at Nader’s public life shows that his presidential campaigns represent not a betrayal of his earlier career but its apotheosis.” (Jonathan Chait, The New Republic, Mar. 8). And Peter Brimelow, who with Leslie Spencer wrote a noteworthy piece of investigative journalism on Nader for Forbes more than a decade ago (“Ralph Nader Inc.”, Forbes, Sept. 17, 1990) has now reprinted that article at his VDare.com site. For more on Nader, see Feb. 22; Jun. 13, 2000; etc.