Seems it’s not considered tortious when it’s done for a good cause by Mothers Against Drunk Driving and the local constabulary to a captive audience of public school students. (Balko, Reason “Hit and Run”; Pat Sherman, “El Camino teens face heavy emotions brought about by drunken-driving dramatization”, San Diego Union-Tribune, May 30). P.S. Scott Greenfield apparently has been thinking along similar lines.
Archive for June, 2008
“They can’t bring my dog back…”
“…so the only thing they can do is give me money”. The $206,000 that Shawn Snider and Beth Bayless-Snider are demanding from Denton, Tex. taxpayers for the mistaken euthanization of their three-year-old black Labrador mix includes damages for loss of “future breeding opportunities”. (“Couple Sues City for $206G After Dog Mistakenly Euthanized”, AP/FoxNews.com, Jun. 2).
Weiss sentenced to 30 months
The judge chose to go near the high end of the plea-negotiated range of 18 to 33 months. (Bloomberg; earlier guilty plea, letters asking leniency from Arthur Miller et al., background).
Fieger gets off
All those reimbursements of employees who donated to John Edwards? Just one vast coincidence, not a purposeful way of evading federal campaign finance laws. Now that the verdict’s in, could we please repeal the campaign finance laws in question ASAP, before some less lucky soul tries the same thing and gets sentenced to time in the slammer because his name isn’t Geoffrey Fieger and his lawyer isn’t Gerry Spence? (David Ashenfelter and Joe Swickard, “Fieger, law partner acquitted of illegal political donations”, Detroit Free Press, Jun. 2).
Hospital bill-collecting and med-mal claims
The recent flurry of press attention to medical apology prompted this anecdotal recollection from Michael O’Hare at Same Facts (May 18) of his work 25 years ago on a Massachusetts state commission to address the malpractice issue:
The story was that soon after [in-house hospital lawyer] Fred arrived, he was assigned to get on top of malpractice claims, and he sat down with six months’ worth of files. All of them, he discovered, began with a collection action for non-payment of a bill. So he ordered the accounting office to send him every overdue account before any efforts at collection, and invited the deadbeat patient into his office for a conversation. Invariably, the patient was withholding payment because he thought he had been mistreated. Often, the patient was right. The next meeting was with the practitioner accused of having screwed up, and the outcome was sometimes an apology and a promise to fix the problem for free (for example, another operation at no charge to retrieve the forgotten sponge), sometimes an expression of regret for a bad outcome with an explanation that the hospital hadn’t actually erred: not everything in medicine works every time. Of course this required that Sanders and Fred drive out fear, so the staffers could be honest and sympathetic.
The result of this was a really spectacular reduction in malpractice costs, even counting in the “warranty service” repairs; I don’t remember the numbers but it was on the order of more than half, partly in fees to defense lawyers, partly in claim payments. Frequently the bill even got paid. The reduction in lawsuits occurred both when the hospital was wrong and said so, and when it was right and said so; it turned out a lot of the injured patients just wanted to tell a live person what had happened to them and get an apology. Of course the public relations benefits are enormous, if hard to measure. And quality always goes up when your own people aren’t afraid to talk to each other about instructive mistakes.
It’s notable that Fred’s pay didn’t depend on how many cases he litigated….
Full post here. More thoughts on medical apology: Melissa Clouthier, May 19.
Indian land claim roundup
* New Jersey: “A federal judge in Camden last week dismissed a lawsuit filed by a band of American Indians seeking to reclaim land they said the state sold out from under them more than 200 years ago. The Unalachtigo band of the Nanticoke-Lenni Lenape Nation demanded the return of 3,044 acres of the former Brotherton Reservation, which sits mostly in Shamong Township in Burlington County.” [Philadelphia Inquirer; Camden Courier-Post/Red Lake Net News, 2006 (expensive law firm of Reed Smith was representing tribal band, which was angling for casino rights)].
* A new C$550 billion land claim launched by the Whitefish Lake tribe (or “First Nation”, to adopt progressive Canadian terminology) includes the entire city of Sudbury, Ontario [Timmins Press, Sudbury Star]
* Second Circuit panel due this week to hear appeal on upstate New York Oneida claim, in which ejectment of current landowners is apparently (for the moment) off table as option [Rome [N.Y.] Sentinel; earlier on Indian land claim litigation].
Another victim in the Kentucky fen-phen settlement fraud
The press is starting to catch on to the scandal of Judge Bamberger not being charged in the Kentucky fen-phen settlement scandal, and we have criminal trial updates after the jump.
May 2008, a look back
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Does the ADA prohibit wi-fi? The plaintiff is an anti-microwave activist.
- DC Circuit: paper money violates the law.
- NY attorney: my vacation plans are worth $1 million.
- Overlawyered favorite Montgomery Blair Sibley suspended in Florida and DC.
- Ted objected to the proposed Grand Theft Auto class action settlement.
- FACTA declared unconstitutional by Alabama federal judge.
- Merck vindicated in Texas appeal; Mark Lanier throws tantrum.
- Barack Obama and tort reform.
- Waddah Mustafa‘s fly in a water bottle not worth hundreds of thousands.
- Jim Copland guest-blogged on asbestos: 1, 2, 3, 4.