Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Archive for April, 2012

“Employers grow reluctant to offer internships following complaints”

Gee, thanks, lawsuit-filers: “Internships can be the key to the start of a successful career, but the positions are getting harder to find because a lot of employers are now nervous to offer them.” [KHOU] A New York attorney has filed a much-publicized series of suits seeking class action status to represent unpaid interns at organizations including Harper’s Bazaar magazine and the Charlie Rose show. [Atlantic Wire]

Relatedly or otherwise, a federal judge has dismissed the class action filed by social activist Jonathan Tasini alleging that the Huffington Post was violating the rights of its unpaid bloggers by basing a profitable media platform on their work. [Reuters, AP]

Filed under: ,

April 3 roundup

  • In time for Easter: egg prices soar in Europe under new hen-caging rules [AP]
  • For third time, the Environmental Protection Agency backtracks on claims of harm from gas “fracking” [Adler; U. Texas study on drinking water safety, CBS Dallas] Yes, there’s a plaintiff’s lawyer angle [David Oliver] Don Elliott, former EPA general counsel, on why his old agency needs cutting [Atlantic] Blow out your candles, coal industry, and so good-bye [Pat Michaels/Cato, Shikha Dalmia]
  • Following the mad logic wherever it leads: “State Legislators Propose Mandatory Drug Testing of Judges and Other State Officials” [ABA Journal]
  • Proposal: henceforth no law may run to greater length than Rep. Conyers’s copy of Playboy [Mark Steyn]
  • Creative American lawyers: “Carnival cruise ship briefly seized in Texas” [AP]
  • “Overlawyered” is the title of a new commentary in The New Yorker, not related to a certain website [Kelefa Sanneh]
  • Repressive Connecticut “cyber-harassment” bill [Volokh, Greenfield, Popehat] And now, not to be outdone, Arizona… [Volokh]

Filed under: , , , , , , , , ,

Madison County: no more trial dates for unfiled cases

“A state court judge in Madison County, Ill., [has] ordered an end to the court’s practice of allotting trial dates to local asbestos plaintiffs firms before they had filed any cases. The order was hailed by defense advocacy groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the American Tort Reform Association, which have long criticized Madison County’s system on the grounds that it allowed local firms to market their trial slots to out-of-state plaintiffs.” [AmLaw Litigation Daily, sub-only; Chamber-backed Madison County Record]

Filed under: , ,

Lawyers’ and law schools’ mission, cont’d

More grist for a revised/expanded edition of Schools for Misrule:

“At Howard, they tell us as soon as we get there, ‘If you’re going to be a lawyer, you’re either a social engineer or a parasite on society.’ … that’s how I think about life, is to be a social engineer, and that’s what my parents always were trying to be,” he said.

Kevin Cunningham, quoted on MSNBC (& Hans Bader).

Filed under: ,

Feinstein: California needs to crack down on ADA access-suit mills

“In a March 8 letter to fellow Democrat and Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, Feinstein accused plaintiffs lawyers of coercing business owners into paying five-figure settlements by threatening potentially costlier lawsuits targeting minor violations under the state’s access and civil rights laws.” Democrats in Sacramento have thus far tended to back the interests of the state’s very active ADA-mill legal sector. [The Recorder/Law.com]

More: Good column from Andrew Rose at the San Francisco Chronicle.

Filed under: ,

“Harvard’s Shareholder Rights Project is Wrong”

According to the Harvard Law School online catalog, the SRP is “a newly established clinical program” that “will provide students with the opportunity to obtain hands-on experience with shareholder rights work by assisting public pension funds in improving governance arrangements at publicly traded firms.”

Marty Lipton and others at Wachtell, Lipton don’t like the idea and criticize it here. More at NYT DealBook (via Bainbridge).

Reader J.B. emails to say:

Whatever one thinks of Wachtell’s substantive critique of the attack on classified/staggered boards, it’s kind of interesting for a law school to be promoting a “clinical program” in which the kids get to work for institutional investors with bajillions of dollars in assets (and, you know, the wherewithal to retain sophisticated counsel at market rates) rather than the sort of boring old indigent individuals that are the traditional law school clinic client base.

A different view: Max Kennerly.

Filed under: , ,