Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Archive for July, 2008

“Bloggers win 92% of cases”

Assuming, that is, they aren’t brought down by the legal costs before ever getting a resolution (Christopher J. Boggs, “Blogs Can Get Insurance Clients ‘SLAPP’ed!”, Insurance Journal, Jul. 14, via Instapundit who got it from Robert Cox, Media Bloggers Association).

In other news of online speech and liability: “Anonymous commenting may have just gotten a little less anonymous. With the help of a subpoena issued six months ago, attorneys for two Yale Law School students have succeeded in unmasking several anonymous users of the Web forum AutoAdmit whom the women are suing for defamation.” (Isaac Amsdorf, “Lawyers to name defendants in AutoAdmit case”, Yale Daily News, Jul. 31, via Volokh).

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N.J.: mower sent golf ball flying

At least that was Thomas Guhl’s theory as to why the ball struck his windshield with high velocity while he was driving near the Eagle Oaks Golf and Country Club, injuring him. His $725,000 settlement is based on the theory that the golf club was negligent for not installing netting along Asbury Avenue that would have kept balls from landing on a neighboring homeowner’s lawn, and that Canfield Lawn and Landscaping was negligent because it hadn’t checked that lawn for golf balls before mowing. (“Man injured by golf ball gets $725K”, AP/Newark Star-Ledger, Jul. 31).

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Meter maid’s miracle recovery no bar to $1.6 million award

When meter maid Mercy Zamora’s cart crashed, she was injured — with such serious and permanent injuries, testified her husband, that she could no longer engage in strenuous or demanding physical activities. Then a defense lawyer introduced a photo showing Zamora with arms thrown over her head in triumph after completing a 10-kilometer race. If you think that spelled an ignominious end to the case, you must be a new reader here: the jury nonetheless “awarded about $1.6 million against Cushman Inc., maker of the cart Zamora was driving, and employer city of San Francisco, which had already settled out.” (Scott Graham, CalLaw “Legal Pad”, Jul. 22; CJAC, Jul. 24).

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July 31 roundup

  • Raft-flip mishap at Riviera Beach, Fla. water park: family’s collective weight far exceeded posted limit on warning signs, they’re mulling suit [Palm Beach Post]

  • New Rigsby/Katrina depositions include sensational new allegations of Scruggs misconduct as well as touches of pathos [Point of Law]

  • “Al Gore Places Infant Son In Rocket To Escape Dying Planet” [The Onion]

  • So much coverage of Hasbro vs. Scrabulous but so little solid reportage by which readers might judge strength of copyright infringement claims [Obbie]

  • City of Seattle spokesman says police actions in shootout with gunman might have “saved countless other lives”, which hasn’t saved city from being sued by injured bystander [Seattle Times]

  • First the vaccine-autism scare, now this? “Mercury militia” crows after FDA agrees to move forward with statement on possible risks of dental amalgam, but maybe there’s not a whole lot for them to chew on [Harriet Hall, Science-Based Medicine]

  • Of lurid allegations in paralegal Angela Robinson’s suit against Texas plaintiff potentate Richard Laminack, the most printable are the ones about chiseling fen-phen clients and not paying overtime [American Lawyer; Laminack response]

  • U.K. attorney suing former bosses for £19 million: that wasn’t me at the interview, that was my alternative personality [Times Online]

  • Allegation: Foxwoods croupier thought he could mutter lewd comments in Spanish about Anglo female patrons, but guess what, one was entirely fluent [NY Post]

  • “Richard Branson claims to own all uses of ‘Virgin'” [three years ago on Overlawyered]

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“The greediest piece of garbage that ever lived”

Seems there’s no surfeit of collegiality among L.A. lawyers whose names figure in the Terry Christiansen connivance-at-wiretapping trial. (Amanda Bronstad, “A Tale of the Tape in Christensen Wiretapping Trial”, National Law Journal, Jul. 16; “In Opening of Wiretap Trial, Christensen Claims He Was the Victim”, Jul. 21).

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Litigation accounting disclosures

There’s a fairly big controversy under way about a proposed FASB (Financial Accounting Standards Board) standard that would require public companies to provide much wider disclosures of where, how and by whom they are being sued or might be sued in the future, and to attach dollar signs to the possible exposures. I’ve got a write-up at Point of Law.

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Suit: Kids’ “punching game” is middle school’s fault

Matthew Walls, a 13-year-old in the 7th grade at Robert Smalls Middle School in Beaufort, S.C., engaged with a classmate in a rather alarming-sounding pastime, namely “the ‘Open Chest Game’ in which two people punch each other in the chest.” You wouldn’t think a kid could get hurt doing that, but Walls did: he struck his head on the way down and ended up in the hospital in critical condition, though he’s back attending school (a different one) now. Donna Walls, Matthew’s mother, has now sued the Beaufort County School District, the state of South Carolina, and three former superintendents personally, and seeks punitive damages. (Jonathan Cribbs, “Mother sues school district over child’s punching injury”, Beaufort Gazette/Island Packet, Jul. 25; more).

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How trial lawyer urban legends get started

Public Citizen wrote a report about New York medical malpractice that said:

Physicians who made three or more malpractice payments between 1990 and 2006 – accounting for no more than 4 percent of New York’s doctors – were responsible for nearly half (49.6 percent) of medical malpractice dollars paid out on behalf of doctors in the time period.

This is technically true, but wildly misleading; we previously refuted this precise statistic as a natural statistical consequence of any randomly distributed set of payouts–and given that doctors in high-risk professions such as neurosurgery or ob/gyn are far more likely to be sued than dermatologists or gerontologists, the random concentration effect is going to be even more pronounced, so the Public Citizen statistic is meaningless without a showing of speciality-adjusted correlation between time periods–something no study has ever found.

But note how blogger Eric Turkewitz writes an op-ed in a small-town New York newspaper that isn’t even satisfied with simply misleading the public, and says something that is out-and-out false:

4 percent of the state’s doctors contribut[e] to half of the malpractice suits [emphasis added]

Not remotely true. “Nearly half of payments” has been turned into “half of malpractice suits.” Justinian Lane, who knows or should know that the latter statistic isn’t true, because his blog posted about the original statistic, then repeats the lie either thoughtlessly or deliberately:

Maybe doctors should discipline the four percent of doctors that make up half of all malpractice claims.

Will either of them retract the false claim with the same fanfare that they made it? Stay tuned. (They certainly won’t explain that there’s nothing damning about the accurate statistic–though I have been refuting this for over three years, Public Citizen and trial lawyers and their fans continue to regurgitate the data as if it means something.)

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