David Lat, er, profiles the marketing efforts of attorney and reggae musician Peter “P’Ta Mon” John, who calls himself “The Thugs [sic] Lawyer,” and has a toll-free number with the five-letter combo “NOT ME.”
Archive for August, 2007
Lerach retires; nearing a plea deal?
Law.com reports in its summary:
Renowned plaintiffs attorney William Lerach, lead partner at Lerach Coughlin, announced Tuesday he’s stepping down from the firm he started when he split off the West Coast offices of what is now Milberg Weiss. Lerach said he’s planning to take some time off. That could include going to prison, or at least the U.S. Attorney’s Office. Lerach is said to be nearing a deal with federal prosecutors related to legally questionable payments Milberg Weiss made to its lead plaintiffs and a former expert witness.
The WSJ Law Blog similarly reports that “Lerach has not been charged, but he is in advanced talks with prosecutors on a plea deal that could be announced in September and involve serving prison time, according to two people familiar with the investigation.” It also has Lerach’s departure memo to colleagues at the law firm that will now be known as Coughlin Stoia Geller Rudman & Robbins (cross-posted from Point of Law).
Fieger’s Arizona censure
Yet another ethical run-in for bad boy Michigan lawyer Geoffrey Fieger, aside from all the ones we’ve told you about already including his recent campaign finance indictment: the Arizona Supreme Court has censured Fieger for holding himself out on letterhead as a member of the Arizona bar, and undertaking a matter to be tried in an Arizona court, even though he was under suspension at the time. The September issue of Arizona Attorney carries the following in its “Lawyer Regulation: Sanctioned Attorneys” column:
Gordon Ramsay on U.S. litigation
“We were issued a writ because, God bless America, if the toilet paper is not thick enough and you come out with a rash on your ass [you’ll get sued].” — Scottish celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay, who is being sued over his upcoming reality-TV show “Kitchen Nightmares”. Martin Hyde sued Ramsay and the show’s producers after being fired during the filming of a “Nightmares” episode which depicted unsafe and unsanitary conditions at the Manhattan restaurant Hyde managed (which was closed by the city health board shortly after the taping); Hyde claims aspects of the show were staged, which Ramsay denies. (James Hibberd, “Ramsay Blasts ‘Kitchen Nightmares’ Lawsuit”, TV Week, Aug. 28).
When lawyers fight
At least we can be sure that lawyers don’t treat each other any better than they treat other parties in litigation. Texas Lawyer provides us with a story of how two plaintiffs lawyers, who started out on the same side of a class action suit, managed to turn a dispute amongst themselves over $28,000 in fees into an eleven year fight with an ultimate award of over $250,000.
“The Secret Life of Judges”
Via Adam Liptak’s (TimesSelect) column, Judge Dennis Jacobs has given an important speech (published in the Fordham Law Review), describing a problem we have noted here before:
I am not—I repeat, I am not—speaking about a bias based upon politics or agenda, economic class, ethnicity, or para-ethnicity. When I refer to the secret life of judges, I am speaking of an inner turn of mind that favors, empowers, and enables our profession and our brothers and sisters at the bar. It is secret, because it is unobserved and therefore unrestrained—by the judges themselves or by the legal community that so closely surrounds and nurtures us. It is an ambient bias.
The result is the incremental preference for the lawyered solution, the fee-paid intervention or pro bono project, the lawyer-driven procedure, the appellate dispensation—and the confidence and faith that these things produce the best results. It is an insidious bias, because it is hard to make out, in the vast maze of judicial work and outcomes, the statutes, doctrines, and precedents that are woven together like an elaborate oriental rug in which the underlying image of the dragon emerges only after you stare for a while. I discern in this jumble a bias in favor of the bar and lawyers: what they do; how they do it; and how they prosper in goods and influence.
Disparaging a trademark
Can a court really issue an injunction ordering someone to refrain from engaging in such disparagement in blog comments and other such public forums? A federal court did so in the case of Freecycle Network, Inc. v. Oey (Eugene Volokh, Aug. 14).
Yet more on privacy/disability laws and Seung Hui Cho
Perils of privacy laws, as discussed earlier here, here, here and here:
Fairfax County school officials determined that Seung Hui Cho suffered from an anxiety disorder so severe that they put him in special education and devised a plan to help, according to sources familiar with his history, but Virginia Tech was never told of the problem.
The disorder made Cho unable to speak in social settings and was deemed an emotional disability, the sources said. When he stopped getting the help that Fairfax was providing, Cho became even more isolated and suffered severe ridicule during his four years at Virginia Tech, experts suggested. In his senior year, Cho killed 32 students and faculty members and himself in the deadliest shooting by an individual in U.S. history….
Professors and school administrators at Virginia Tech could not have known of Cho’s emotional disability — Fairfax officials were forbidden from telling them. Federal privacy and disability laws prohibit high schools from sharing with colleges private information such as a student’s special education coding or disability, according to high school and college guidance and admissions officials. Those laws also prohibit colleges from asking for such information.
The only way Virginia Tech officials would have known about Cho’s anxiety and selective mutism would have been if Cho or his parents told them about it and asked for accommodations to help him, as he had received in Fairfax….
Although the only way college officials could have known about Cho’s problem would have been from Cho, experts said that asking for help is an almost impossible task for someone with selective mutism.
(Brigid Schulte and Tim Craig, “Unknown to Va. Tech, Cho Had a Disorder”, Washington Post, Aug. 27). More: Hans Bader at CEI’s Open Market (Aug. 27).
Letter to the editor
In the August 27 Legal Times:
To the editor:
I appreciated the chance to speak with reporter Tony Mauro about Stoneridge v. Scientific-Atlanta, an upcoming Supreme Court case that will be discussed at an AEI panel on Oct. 5. Unfortunately, a sentence in his Aug. 20 article [“High Court Head Count at Issue,” Page 1] incorrectly implied that I thought the decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit in the case was an “anti-investor ruling,” when that characterization is solely Mauro’s.
On the contrary, as I have written in The Wall Street Journal and told Mauro, I believe that the 8th Circuit’s dismissal of the case redounds to the benefit of investors in general and that the best result for investors (if not for trial lawyers) would be affirmance by the Supreme Court. And I say that even though I am a putative class member in Stoneridge.
Theodore H. Frank
Resident Fellow
American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research
Washington, D.C.
“So they started acting like a bunch of lawyers”
How can we not jump on the Nixon Peabody wagon? [Above the Law; NYT; Law Blog; TechDirt; many other links]