Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

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October 12 roundup

  • In Scotland, car repair shop faces music royalty suit because its employees listen to radios on the job [BBC]

  • Pediatricians grill kids about their parents’ drinking, gun ownership and antisocial habits — what, weren’t the hairdressers reporting back enough dirt for the authorities to work with? [Malkin, Szwarc]

  • Watch out for the new ADA Restoration Act of 2007, which would reverse several Supreme Court precedents with the aim of making it easier to file and win suits [Bader]

  • Don’t confuse Hollywood’s idea of lawyering, as in Clooney’s “Michael Clayton”, with the real kind [Lundegaard, MSNBC]

  • “It costs millions of dollars in litigation fees to show that a patent should not have been granted, and most big corporations have learned that the hard way.” [Chachkes @ CNet]

  • Banning all uses of lead from metal assemblies can result in “tin whiskers” leading to catastrophic failures in electronic devices — lucky those aren’t dangerous or anything [AP]

  • Armenian-American writer Garin Hovannisian isn’t an admirer of the Congressional genocide resolution [Boaz @ Cato-at-Liberty; see also Jul. 27]

  • Lynchburg, Va. woman: hey, I invented those pre-moistened cleaning wipes [News Advance via VLW]

  • Don’t listen to trolls like this Olson fellow [Mark Thoma comments]

  • Another round of coverage on libel tourism, SLAPPs and terror-support research [Broyde & Lipstadt @ NYT; Miller @ City Journal, Levitt @ The New Republic]

  • New at Point of Law: Ted on yet another iPhone suit, this time demanding a billion plus; further coverage of the Hofstra/Lynne Stewart affair; after many failures, lawyers score a $143 million verdict against Wyeth over hormone replacement drug Prempro/Premarin; more on the U.S. Navy, WWII and asbestos disease; new Irvine law school’s in the money; and much more.

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Car-sharing services sued

ZipCar and FlexCar are violating the Americans with Disabilities Act by not providing special hand controls for disabled drivers, according to a lawsuit which also names the District of Columbia as a defendant because it provides parking spaces to the popular car-sharing services. (Hank Silverberg, “Disabled Woman Files Lawsuit Against Car-Sharing Services”, WTOP, Oct. 11).

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Nastygram: don’t you dare post this nastygram on the web

Ted has briefly mentioned (Oct. 8) the recent doings of an outfit called Dozier Internet Law, whose cease and desist letter to a consumer-complaint site not only demanded that the site take down certain statements about Dozier’s client, DirectBuy, but also asserted that the cease and desist letter was itself the subject of copyright and could not be posted in part or full on the web. Eric Turkewitz, having called this approach “chuckleheaded” in an initial post (Oct. 5 — scroll), is now all over the story (Oct. 9 and Oct. 11), especially after attorney John Dozier of the firm in question submitted a comment whose clueless snippiness really must be seen to be believed.

More: from Consumer Law & Policy, Patry Copyright Blog, Legal Ethics Forum, and TechDirt, as well as extensive coverage at TDAXP.

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By reader acclaim: “Cop sues family after saving baby”

“A police officer has sued the family of a 1-year-old boy who nearly drowned because she slipped and injured a knee responding to their 9-1-1 rescue call.” Andrea Eichhorn, a police sergeant in Casselberry, Florida, responded to the pool accident, and now “claims the boy’s family left a puddle of water on the floor, causing her fall during the rescue efforts. She broke her knee and missed two months of work.” So she’s suing the Cosmillo family. “It’s a situation where the Cosmillos have caused these problems, brought them on themselves, then tried to play the victim,” says her attorney, David Heil. Joey Cosmillo, the infant in question, suffered severe brain damage and lives in a nursing home now. (Rene Stutzman, “Cop who fell on the job sues family of baby who almost drowned”, Orlando Sentinel, Oct. 10; AP/Florida Today, Oct. 10)(slightly reworded to clarify sequence of events).

Plus: commentary on the above (Mike Thomas, “Hello, 911? Send a cop — who won’t sue”, Orlando Sentinel, Oct. 11). And update: cop decides to withdraw suit after public outcry.

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“Deadly toys of yesteryear”

Robert Berry at RetroCrush reminisces:

See, when I was a kid, our toys were dangerous because of misuse. …Now that China’s trying to implement a worldwide population control by dunking everything in some sort of evil death juice, it appears that these old school “deadly” delights are probably the safer option after all.

Actually, I well remember lead toy soldiers, whose composition was exactly what the name implies; because lead is a soft metal, one way you could play with them was by applying pressure with your fingers to alter their shape a bit this way or that. Pratie Place, a while back, mourned the demise of such amusements as early-design Fisher-Price “little people” and Parker Brothers’ spring-load token game, “Booby Trap” — though a redesigned version of the latter is back, per Tom McMahon.

October 10 roundup

  • She wore a wire: defense attorney says administrative assistant to one of the three lawyers in Kentucky fen-phen scandal worked as FBI mole, circumventing attorney-client privilege [AP, Courier-Journal, Lexington Herald-Leader, ABA Journal]
  • Suing a lawyer because his deposition questions inflicted emotional distress? No way we’re going to open those floodgates, says court [NJLJ]
  • Counsel Financial Services LLC, which stakes injury lawyers pending their paydays, says it’s “the largest provider of attorney loans in the United States and the only Law Firm Financing company endorsed by the AAJ (formerly ATLA)”; its friendly public face is a retired N.Y. judge while its founder is attorney Joseph DiNardo, suspended from practice in 2000 “after pleading guilty to filing a false federal tax return” and whose own lend-to-litigants operation, Plaintiff Support Services, shares an office suite with Counsel [Buffalo News] The firm’s current listing of executives includes no mention of DiNardo, though a Jul. 19 GoogleCached version has him listed as President;
  • Patent litigation over cardiac stents criticized as “a horrendous waste of money” [N.Y. Times]
  • More on the “pro bono road to riches”, this time from a California tenant case [Greg May, Cal Blog of Appeal]
  • Not a new problem, but still one worth worrying about: what lawyers can do with charitable trusts when no one’s looking over their shoulder [N.Y. Times via ABA Journal]
  • Has it suddenly turned legal to stage massive disruptions of rush-hour traffic, or are serial-lawbreaking cyclists “Critical Mass” just considered above the law? [Kersten @ Star-Tribune]
  • “Look whose head is on a plate now”: no tears shed for fallen Lerach by attorney who fought him in the celebrated Fischel case [ChicTrib, San Diego U-T]
  • “Jena Six” mythos obscures graver injustice to black defendants, namely criminal system’s imposition of long sentences for nonviolent offenses [Stuart Taylor, Jr. @ National Journal — will rotate off site]
  • Economist David Henderson on restaurant smoking bans [Econ Journal Watch, PDF, via Sullum, Reason “Hit and Run”]
  • Technical note: we learned from reader Christian Southwick that our roundups were displaying poorly on Internet Explorer (Ted and I use other browsers) and we found a way to fix. So, IE users, please drop us a line when you encounter problems — we may not hear about them otherwise.

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