Yes, he’s going to be back, as a columnist for Slate instructing the world on matters of government, regulation and finance. Perhaps one of his early columns will be on the topic “Why it’s a bad idea to lead a public crusade to toughen penalties for a particular legal offense if you yourself are an ardent repeat committer of it.” Prof. Bainbridge has some further thoughts, along with a collection of Jay Leno jokes.
Author Archive
From comments: lawyer referral fees
Reader Phil Grossman, in comments to yesterday’s post about the hawking of injury case leads to lawyers, advances some interesting contentions, including some I’m not knowledgeable enough to evaluate, about lawyer referrals and fee-splitting:
…Lawyers are the only professional group that considers it ethical to pay referral fees. The bar associations allow and approve referral fees as long as they are paid only to other lawyers.
In the sort of mass tort lawsuits that this company is dealing in, it is extremely common for ‘clients’ to be bought and sold, sometimes multiple times, with a typical referral fee being around a third of the contingency fee. The general public doesn’t realize that the lawyer advertising on TV or out on the Internet for mass tort clients is usually just a marketer, selling all the clients he collects to other lawyers. It is actually more lucrative to advertise for clients and then sell them to other lawyers than to do the actual work of representing clients.
If, for example, someone is injured in an auto accident, it is common for a relative or friend who happens to be a lawyer to offer to refer the victim to a “good personal injury lawyer”. But the victims aren’t aware that their relative or friend is probably making money off of their accident by collecting around a third or so of the contingency fee from the lawyer they have been referred to. Although bar association rules usually say the referral fee and its amount should be disclosed to the client, in practice it is always kept secret from the client, who thinks his or her lawyer relative or friend is just being altruistic.
But it appears that this company might be trying to collect money up front from its targeted lawyers, rather than taking the normal percentage payment of their referral fees from the contingency fees after the fact. If so, the targeted lawyers need to be very cautious indeed.
And:
Read On…
When you hear “monster”, they want you to think of them
Back in April we had occasion to note the aggressive intellectual property stance of a company called Monster Cable, which had drawn a memorably tart riposte from the recipient of one of its nastygrams. We didn’t catch a wider aspect of the story, noted by Engadget in May, which is that Monster Cable goes around demanding that a wide range of businesses stop using the word “monster” in contexts far removed from its own line of work (audio/video cables); it reportedly has demanded cash from such businesses in exchange for calling off its lawyers. One of its targets, a miniature golf operation called Monster Mini Golf, is now trying to bring the story to public attention (TechDirt, Dec. 3).
Claim: You rated our constituents as too creditworthy
“In what appears to be the first legal action of its kind, an association of community-based organizations has filed a federal civil rights complaint against two of the three largest Wall Street ratings agencies, charging that their inflated ratings on subprime mortgage bonds disproportionately caused financial harm to African American and Latino home buyers.” (Kenneth Harney, Washington Post, Nov. 29; Hans Bader, CEI “Open Market”, Nov. 30).
P.S. Mickey Kaus (permalinks gone again, scroll to Dec. 1):
Hmmm. Didn’t community-based organizations push for exactly this sort of reverse-redlining? I think they did. It’s one thing to argue that they maybe weren’t the major cause of the subprime meltdown. It’s another for them to pose as victims wronged by the very system they worked hard to set up (including the securitization that enabled banks to keep up “reverse redlining”).
Advice for frivolous pro se litigants
If you’re hoping to get the judge to take your complaint seriously, it’s best not to list your home address as “1600 Pennsylvania Avenue”, Washington, D.C., as did Ernest L. Dixon. (Mike Doyle, Suits and Sentences (McClatchy newspapers law blog), Dec. 2).
New Manhattan Institute study on case for loser-pays
Yesterday the Manhattan Institute unveiled a new study by my colleague there, Senior Fellow Marie Gryphon, entitled “Greater Justice, Lower Cost: How a ‘Loser Pays’ Rule Would Improve the American Legal System” (podcast; Pajamas TV video). It’s got an introduction by former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, whose endorsement of the idea all by itself counts as a welcome news story, I think. I was part of the panel discussion held to welcome the paper, along with Philip Howard of Common Good, Ted Frank of AEI (and this site), and NYU law professor Mark Geistfeld. Some coverage of and reactions to the study: ABA Journal, AmLaw Litigation Daily, Quin Hillyer @ Washington Examiner, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Legal NewsLine, Jane Genova, and Jim Copland and Michael Krauss at Point of Law.
Wal-Mart trampling suit
Father and son Fritz Mesadieu and Jonathan Mesadieu say they were in the crowd during the now-notorious Black Friday crowd-crush episode at a Long Island Wal-Mart. They say they were left with neck and back pain for which they want $2 million. (Wisecracks about a stampede to court are in extremely poor taste and should be avoided.) Their attorney, who gets a prominent mention in the CNN coverage, is named as Kenneth Mollins, apparently the very same attorney Kenneth Mollins whose skill in transforming seemingly minor or transient injuries into litigation Ted saluted in June (h/t commenter Don Parks). (“Customers injured in crush suing Wal-Mart”, CNN, Dec. 2). More: Eric Turkewitz has some thoughts on the underlying liability issues, the Mesadieu/Mollins claim aside.
“10 Things Never to Put in Email”
Because hostile lawyers will be looking for them in discovery: “We’re going to do this differently than normal,” “I don’t want to discuss this in e-mail. Please give me a call,” “Don’t ask. You don’t want to know,” and seven more. (Roger Matus’s Death By Email, Dec. 2)(& Schwartz, Sylvester/Wichita Eagle).
Telling blonde jokes in workplace
Reversing a trial court that had granted summary judgment to the defense, a court of appeals in Washington state has reinstated a suit entitled Strong v. Wright in which
the plaintiff sued her former supervisor because he told “blonde jokes” (apparently plaintiff was blonde), made fun of her house, ridiculed her husband’s job, and referred to her as a “bum mother” because she put her son in therapy. The plaintiff alleged that this treatment “caused her to vomit and to have anxiety attacks, depression, and heart palpitations.” Really. Blonde jokes=heart palpitations.
Dennis Whitlind at World of Work has more (Nov. 14)(via O’Keefe).
Lawyers! Getcher hot “pearl-shucked” case leads!
Readers keep sending me examples of what they say are unsolicited emails in which a marketing firm that calls itself ServicesToLawyers offers “pearl-shucked” personal injury case referrals, along the lines of the sample emails reprinted here and here, though with variations in the particular mass tort or torts for which leads are being hawked (Avandia, etc.) An April email attributed to the same sender offers the tempting chance to become “King of Motorcycle Accidents“, or at least King for one’s own locality, since “Not All States [Are] Available”.
Virginia personal injury law blogger Ben Glass wonders (Nov. 5) who would knowingly engage a lawyer who had purchased case leads drummed up in such a manner.