- Big news: California judge: contingency-fee lawyers hired by state present inherent conflict of interest. [POL roundup; Santa Clara v. ARCO]
- Must-read post about Westrup Klick’s fishing for clients in class actions. [Cal Biz Lit; Lattman; Bodner v. Oreck Direct]
- Why not let the market decide the optimum level of securities litigation? [Jim Copland @ NY Sun; AEI event; 10b5 blog; W$J]
- More on subprime mortgages. [Frank @ POL; Michael Lewis @ Bloomberg via Kirkendall]
- Watch what you say about lawyers dept.: Filmmaker complains about lawsuit in memoir, gets sued by former opposing attorney for libel [Ferlauto v. Hamsher @ Don Murphy]
- Update on clinic sperm mixup case [On Point]
- Tunc pro nunc: Justice Roberts is a funny guy [Kerr @ Volokh]
- So is this Arkansas attorney. [Snopes]
- Seven years ago on Overlawyered, Pets.com sues Conan O’Brien show over sock-puppet dogs; ATLA tries to threaten senator. Three years ago: $3M verdict (including punitive damages) for failing to fire truck driver who had speeding tickets; also three years ago, motorcyclist runs from police at 130 mph, crashes, dies, family sues. Two years ago, blogger takes big paycut and gets new job.
Archive for April, 2007
Jack Thompson sues Gawker Media
The anti-game attorney cites reader comments on the Gawker site Kotaku that he considers personally threatening. (GamePolitics.com, Apr. 25; Kotaku, Apr. 23; earlier Kotaku post). Mark Methinitis at Law of the Game says that in his view the complaint “falls well beyond the norm of complaint drafting and more into the realm of a self-promoting tirade” (Apr. 25).
Saw sex book by mistake; $10K apiece demanded
In Bentonville, Arkansas, Earl Adams says his two teenage boys, ages 14 and 16, were perusing the local library shelves when they accidentally ran across a copy of “The Whole Lesbian Sex Book”, for which traumatization they deserve $10,000 apiece. It happened, Adams said, while they were browsing for material on military academies (titter ye not!) and the shock to their sensibilities from exposure to the “immoral” volume resulted in the boys being “greatly disturbed” and undergoing “many sleepless nights in our house.” According to the Washington Post, Library Journal has deemed the sex guide by Felice Newman suitable for public libraries. (Emil Steiner, “Off/Beat: Arkansas Dad Sues Library Over Lesbian Book”, Washington Post, Apr. 25; “Father Says Sons Traumatized By Lesbian Library Book”, 365gay.com, Apr. 20).
Update: Speechless in Seattle
Free speech survives intact: the Washington Supreme Court has unanimously ruled that radio talk show hosts’ urging of listeners to support a ballot measure does not constitute a “contribution” to the yes side for purposes of mandatory reporting under campaign finance law. (Ryan Sager, New York Sun blog, Apr. 26). We covered the charges against KVI hosts Kirby Wilbur and John Carlson Jul. 11 and Jul. 19, 2005. Eugene Volokh has extensive coverage of the new decision. A concurring opinion by Justice James M. Johnson, joined by Justice Richard B. Sanders, terms the enforcement a case of “abusive prosecution”. More: Michelle Malkin; John Fund, OpinionJournal.com, Apr. 30.
Roy L. Pearson, Jr. and the $65 million pants
Attorney (and now administrative judge) Roy L. Pearson, Jr. paid $10.50 to have some pants altered at his dry cleaners’, but was dissatisfied with the results, so sued them on grounds that their “Satisfaction Guaranteed” sign was consumer fraud. Among his claimed damages is the need for a car to find a new dry cleaner. Pearson at first demanded $1150 for a new suit, but turned down offers from the dry cleaner to settle for $3000, for $4600, and for $12000, and claims DC consumer protection law entitles him to $65 million. The Chung family has removed their “Satisfaction Guaranteed” sign. (Marc Fisher, “Lawyer’s Price For Missing Pants: $65 Million”, Washington Post, Apr. 26; Obscure Store blog; DCist, Apr. 13; ABC-7, Apr. 12).
Update: May 1.
Walk away
Yesterday’s Daily Business Review brought us the story of lawyers running wild in worker’s compensation cases. Today, it provides another outrageous story of legal abuses, in a $3 million medical malpractice lawsuit:
Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Gisela Cardonne Ely was shocked. She had just watched a videotape of a medical malpractice plaintiff, who claimed in 2004 that she was permanently paralyzed, walking down the street with the use of a cane in 2005.
“This is the worst case of misrepresentation, of outright fraud, that I have ever had in 22 years,” Cardonne Ely said during a March 15 hearing in the case of Wanda Davis-Johnson. “I’m telling you, Mrs. Davis, I’m looking at you in the eyes. I am dismissing your case. I have seen enough. … I’m making a specific finding that there was a scheme to defraud the court.”
The woman’s attorney, of course, claims to be just as surprised as the judge. Meanwhile, the vindicated defendant hospital “will be seeking to recover $225,000 in legal costs from Davis-Johnson,” but one suspects that the odds of ever collecting that are somewhere between none and less than none.
What’s unusual about this story is that the hospital’s attorneys obtained this damning evidence in April 2005, but did not reveal it until almost two years later, in January 2007. According to the hospital’s attorneys, they were afraid that the videotape wouldn’t be sufficient to prove fraud on the part of the plaintiff. (What does it say about the system if a videotape showing an allegedly paralyzed person walking is insufficient to prove fraud?)
The plaintiff’s lawyers complained about the delay:
“If they had shown that videotape to us, we wouldn’t have spent another 21 months of litigation time, cost, stress to the doctors involved and waste of the court’s time,” Lawlor said. “I don’t have any clue what they were thinking or why anybody would go forward other than to try to set a trap for my law firm.”
But despite this, when confronted with the evidence, Lawlor didn’t exactly roll over and admit error:
But Lawlor and his law firm did not withdraw from the case or ask that the case be dismissed. Lawlor unsuccessfully argued against the defense motion to dismiss based on fraud. He also filed errata sheets to Davis-Johnson’s two depositions seeking to change her testimony.
The only thing he did do was drop his motion for punitive damages based on the allegedly “egregious” actions of the hospital.
Family reunions ought to be interesting, anyway; according to the story, the hospital’s lawyers got confirmation of the fraud when the plaintiff’s sister-in-law called up and told them.
Never too late for a lawyer
In 1921, there were massive race riots which led to the destruction of the black section of Tulsa, Oklahoma and the murder of dozens or hundreds of blacks. (See Wikipedia for one account.) At the time, the official story exonerated local whites, blaming the riot on blacks; eventually, the whole incident was forgotten. In 1997, the Oklahoma legislature set up a commission, which issued a report four years later which found that in fact white residents, aided and abetted by the local government, were at fault.
Enter the lawyers. Eighty-two years after the incident, Johnnie Cochran, Charles Ogletree and other prominent attorneys filed a federal civil rights suit against the city of Tulsa and the state of Oklahoma on behalf of the survivors, seeking monetary damages and injunctive relief. As you might expect, courts don’t look too kindly on eight-decade old lawsuits, and so the federal district and appellate courts dismissed the suit, on the grounds that the statute of limitations had long since passed. (The Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal.)
So now the lawyers (well, not Johnnie Cochran) are in Washington, trying to get Congress to retroactively extend the statute of limitations so they can sue. Ogletree is a driving force behind the slavery reparations movement, which so far has also foundered on statute of limitations issues; if he succeeds here, be assured that he won’t be resting on his laurels.
(To be clear, unlike many of the suits we chronicle on Overlawyered, the Tulsa suit is not inherently frivolous, and it may well be legitimate to assign blame to the city and state, for actions that (unlike slavery) were illegal even at the time. But, to reiterate: eighty years.)
Edwards war chest
Strong fund-raising helps keep the North Carolinian a credible Democratic alternative; AP cites in particular the generosity of the lawyers at Lerach Coughlin (Jim Kuhnhenn, “Clinton reports $24 mil in the bank, trails Obama in primary donations”, AP/DeKalb, Ill., Daily Chronicle, Apr. 16).
Oz: railway slip-fall blamed for rape
Reasonable foreseeability? “A woman has won nearly $240,000 compensation from RailCorp after a judge ruled she was raped because she had broken her ankle weeks earlier at a Sydney railway station. RailCorp was found responsible for the woman’s rape at a private home, because she could not escape with her leg in plaster, and for her subsequent depression.” (Geesche Jacobsen, “A fall, a rape – and $240,000”, Sydney Morning Herald, Apr. 26).
New Jersey Turnpike Authority v. Local 196
Tim Sandefur has an amusing account of an arbitrator’s appalling decision to reinstate a tollbooth collector fired for shooting paintball guns in moving highway traffic. The arbitrator’s decision is wrong, but I’ll disagree with Tim and agree with the New Jersey Supreme Court’s decision that it’s not the court’s place to substitute their judgment for that of the arbitrator’s. The benefit of having arbitration is the lower cost of ensuring finality in decisions and avoiding litigation, and permitting appeals destroys that benefit if matters are simply going to be relitigated in court. If an arbitrator is consistently more wildly wrong than a litigation system (a questionable proposition) such that those lower costs are not justified by the higher error rate the remedy is to negotiate for different dispute resolution procedures in future union contracts. And that goes even when the arbitrator mistakenly rules in favor of the plaintiff.