Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Archive for April, 2007

To the Moon, Alice

Great moments in school discipline, Clearwater, Florida, edition:

I don’t know if I can possibly do justice to this story. In February, an 18-year old Florida high school senior named Tyler Tillung was upset at his teacher because she wouldn’t let him into the auditorium to see the high school talent show (the “annual Lip Sync show,” so perhaps “talent” is an overstatement) because the auditorium was full. So… no, I don’t think I can type this without laughing, so I’ll just cut and paste from the story:

After she declined, he mooned the teacher. The lawsuit concedes that he made the act worse “by spreading his buttocks for an instant.”

Yes, you read that right. The word “lawsuit” was in there. Tillung proceeded to metaphorically moon the rest of us by following this up with a lawsuit. For some inexplicable reason, the school decided to punish him for what he calls a “childish joke.” They suspended him for six days, and then transferred him to a school across town. So of course he’s suing.

A lawsuit filed Tuesday in Pinellas-Pasco Circuit Court alleges the transfer was unreasonably harsh because it denies him the once-in-a-lifetime chance to graduate next month with his class, participate in senior activities leading up to graduation and play his final season on Palm Harbor’s varsity baseball team.

But don’t worry: we have it on good authority (from Tillung’s lawyer) that the lawsuit has merit:

To those who say the family is taking the issue too far, Tillung’s lawyer, B. Edwin Johnson, said “they don’t know the facts.” He added: “We’re talking about his graduation. That’s an important event in a guy’s life. … This kid deserves a break.”

As do the rest of us. And especially Clearwater taxpayers.

(Some of you kind-hearted folks may be tempted to give him the benefit of the doubt. You may think that while it’s frivolous to argue that the chance to graduate with one’s friends is an injury which the courts should consider, the chance to play with his team is more important, because it could affect his college chances. Don’t think that. First, he already has his acceptance. Second, there are only six games left on the school’s schedule, all but the last within the next two weeks; he wouldn’t get back on the team in time even if he won.)

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Deep pocket files: Newark police chase

The outrage is so common, we may have to create its own category. This one is in Newark, New Jersey: three car thieves running from police in a stolen SUV swerved into a group of pedestrians. Taxpayers are on the hook for a $3.6 million settlement, a substantial chunk of which will go to attorneys. [AP/Newsday] The Newark police department has “changed its chase policy” as a result; no mention in the press coverage that now criminals know that they are more likely to escape if they engage in a dangerous high-speed getaway, they’re more likely to engage in a high-speed getaway that will endanger the public. Earlier: Feb. 28; Feb. 27; Jan. 9; Nov. 27, 2005 and links therein.

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Jackpot?

An eighteen-year old named Jesse Tribble had a history of drug abuse. His mother, who had a prior history of drug dealing, gave him money when he told her that he wanted it to buy drugs. (She claimed she thought he was joking.) He then died of a drug overdose.

Obviously, a tragedy. And where there’s tragedy, there’s a lawsuit. In this case, Tribble’s father sued… Jack Whittaker, the man in whose house Tribble died. The theory? Whittaker didn’t supervise his 17-year old granddaughter adequately, and gave her too much money, so she might have bought the drugs with which Tribble overdosed.

The lawsuit settled last week. And you guessed it:

After the settlement was announced, Jimmy Tribble said his lawsuit was not about money but about getting the subpoenas to learn what led to his son’s death.

Conveniently, though, Tribble died at the home of a former Powerball winner, so even though it was really about information, according to media reports, “Money was involved in the settlement.” I wonder if Tribble’s parents would have been so eager to get answers if he had died in a janitor’s home.

Setting aside the fact that an 18-year old is apparently not responsible for his own choices, another disturbing aspect of the story is that nobody finds it remarkable that a lawsuit was purportedly filed solely to get information — as if a lawsuit were a therapy session rather than a method for assigning responsibility. (Of course, one may — and hopefully will — learn something in the course of a lawsuit, but information-gathering is not a legitimate purpose for a lawsuit.)

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Age before wisdom

Let’s suppose that a company is losing buckets of money, and needs to cut costs to stay afloat. It might start cutting back on various perks — a company jet, health club memberships for employees, whatever. And it might make the business judgment that cutting more expensive perks first is the smartest decision. But under California law, applying the same logic to employees — that the more expensive ones ought to be replaced first — can get an employer sued. Ask Circuit City, which laid off more than 3,000 employees last week, only to be hit with a lawsuit seeking class action status:

“The workers terminated were those with greater seniority and length of service — mostly likely the older members of the work force,” the lawsuit said. It cites California law, which states that “the use of salary as the basis for differentiating between employees when terminating employment may … constitute age discrimination.”

The wisdom of the California legislature never ceases to astound. The law does not require evidence of discriminatory intent on the part of the employer; the mere fact that older workers were disproportionately affected by the layoffs may be sufficient.

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Roundup

Follow-ups to some stories I’ve posted in the last few weeks:

  • Last month we reported on the lawsuit against Cory Lidle, alleging that he piloted his plane into someone’s apartment building in the crash which killed him last October. Now Lidle’s widow is suing MetLife, baseball’s insurer, for denying her payment under its accidental death benefit coverage. The policy had an exclusion for accidents in which players are piloting airplanes; Lidle’s widow is denying that Lidle was the pilot. In case you’re counting, that’s at least three lawsuits over this accident, despite the fact that the NTSB still hasn’t made any final determinations about the crash. (And I assume that we’ll see more from other residents of the apartment building.)
  • In February we discussed a ruling in the lawsuit against New York City over the Staten Island Ferry crash; at the time, the lawyers for the plaintiffs convinced a judge not to cap the damages the plaintiffs could recover from the city. The lead attorneys were so proud of their work that they felt they deserved a bonus; now they’re asking the court to cut other law firms’ fees so they can receive it. And they’re bickering over the request:

    “They didn’t do anything to help us,” said Michael H. Bush of the New Dorp firm of Chelli & Bush. “They never updated us with anything. We never got a phone call. We never got e-mails. We settled all of our cases prior to the motion being settled, and they just did nothing to help.”

    “They’re motivated by their own interests,” he continued. “They’re getting the publicity and they have their own million-dollar cases, too.”

    And

    Chelli & Bush didn’t attend any of “15 meetings” with the firms involved, nor did they show up for any of the court dates during the trial, Bisignano contended.

    “They contributed nothing, and yet they claim there was no benefit to them,” Bisignano said. “No honorable law firm would deny our right to be compensated for the services we performed that benefited every law firm and every complainant in this case.”

    Children, play nice.

  • Findlaw columnist Julie Hilden discussing Carol Burnett’s chances in suing Family Guy.

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April 4 roundup

All Point of Law edition:

  • I discuss Professor Charles Silver’s latest foray on Bizarro-Overlawyered. Silver and his coauthors are doing legitimate empirical work, but I don’t understand why he keeps making public statements that the published versions of his papers can’t support, and I especially don’t understand why he does that at the same time he’s criticizing the entire reform movement for any given politician’s oversimplified sound-bite. [Point of Law]

  • New Jersey Supreme Court limits benefits of forum shopping, with potentially fatal implications for pending $27 billion class action against Merck. [Point of Law; Beck/Herrmann]

  • The PRI study’s $865B figure isn’t perfect, as I earlier noted in a post since interpreted to mean that I “loved it.” [Point of Law; Turkewitz]

  • Plaintiffs’ bar attempts to smear next Wisconsin Supreme Court justice Annette Ziegler fail. [WSAW; Point of Law]

  • Tax breaks for the plaintiffs’ bar. [Day on Torts; Point of Law]

  • Don’t tell David Behar about this paper; it mentions “privity.” [Point of Law]

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“I don’t think that’s his fault; I think it’s the system.”

North Carolina lawyers were up in arms after a seven-month Raleigh News & Observer investigation reported that an attorney who was a Wake County Court-appointed guardian to manage the financial affairs of a series of incompetent parties had been awarded $3.4 million in legal fees since 1991 by courts from his fiduciaries’ accounts. Not over the possibility that cozy political connections and a flawed guardianship system permitted Robert Monroe to regularly charge the legal maximum commission and be “handsomely compensated for not having to do very much,” but apparently over the fact that the newspaper reported the story at all. [News & Observer; News & Observer ombudsman, both via Obbie]

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Look around, there’s negligence everywhere

Tod Lindberg:

Around the age of eleven, I had settled on an ambition: I would become a lawyer. A friend of my Aunt Marge’s had introduced me to the wonders of the law: “Look around you — negligence everywhere, as far as the eye can see.” “How about that person crossing the street outside the crosswalk,” I asked, “is that negligence?” “It sure is.” The perspective was illuminating….I found myself in a world in which everyone was at fault for something if only you looked closely enough. This would, of course, include oneself.

“Choices and Consequences” in Mary Eberstadt, ed., Why I Turned Right: Leading Baby Boom Conservatives Chronicle Their Political Journeys (Threshold Editions, 2007).