Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Author Archive

“Where there’s blame, there’s a claim”

Obituaries detail the life and fast times of Mark Langford, the British entrepreneur who founded The Accident Group and rode it to a fortune advertising for “no-win, no-fee” injury claimants, becoming closely identified with the U.K.’s emergent U.S.-style “compensation culture”, before the group collapsed in ignominy four years ago. When his company found itself unable to pay its bills, Langford famously sacked 2,500 employees via text message; “While thousands were left without a penny following TAG’s collapse, Langford and his wife, a fellow director of the firm, were not. As staff began ransacking the company’s offices in Manchester, the couple headed for the Spanish sun.” (“Mark Langford”, The Telegraph, Apr. 11; David Brown & Jon Clarke, “Fugitive boss who sacked his staff by text is killed in Costa car crash”, Times Online, Apr. 11).

Perhaps the most successful instigator of injury litigation in his nation’s history, Langford appeared not to have fully internalized in his own conduct the tort system’s norms about avoidance of needlessly unsafe conduct:

He was at the wheel of his red Ferrari 355 F1 Spider three years ago [i.e., circa 2000] when he hit a 73-year-old war veteran who was crossing the road. The impact that killed Bill Thornley hurled him 15ft into the air and ripped his clothes off, a jury was told at Manchester crown court. However, they cleared Langford of causing death by dangerous driving and convicted him of the lesser offence of careless driving. He was fined £1,000 but retained his driving licence.

Langford, who criticised the dead man in court for trying to cross a busy, wet road in twilight, insisted he was abiding by the 40mph limit, contradicting witnesses who claimed he was doing 55mph. Some jury members, unaware that he had a conviction for drink-driving, covered their faces with their hands on learning he had served a 22-month ban and recovered his licence only six months before the fatal crash.

(“Profile: Mark Langford”, Times Online, Jun. 1, 2003). Our earlier coverage appeared Aug. 5, 2003.

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Playing “Redneck Woman” on the jukebox…

…resulted in a pro se suit from a black customer alleging that the airing of the popular country song constituted racial discrimination. The Fifth Circuit upheld a lower court’s decision to dismiss the suit against the Wichita, Kansas restaurant. (Brackens v. Texas Roadhouse in Wichita (PDF); Mississippi Law Blog, Feb. 6).

Incidentally, even before posting this item, this website already provides one of the very few current search hits on “Redneck Woman” + “Fifth Circuit”.

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April 11 roundup

  • Chief exec of 1-800-ATTORNEY ended up needing one himself, pleading guilty to securities fraud charge [NYLJ, Lattman]

  • Cost of providing liability insurance for Pennsylvania prison doctor greatly exceeds his pay [Shamokin, Pa. News-Item, Dr. Robert Hynick, Northumberland County Prison]

  • “Scottish sociopaths sipping their single malt Glenlivet” — yep, Jack Thompson is suing Grand Theft Auto developers again [GameSpot]

  • Anna Nicole Smith fee-ing frenzy: $4,265 for Bahamas cellphone roaming part of “fair and reasonable” lawyer’s bill [TMZ]

  • Working in a prosecutors’ office? More about nailing ’em than making sure justice was done [Dean Barnett via MedPundit]

  • Don’t forget imprisoned Egyptian blogger Abdelkareem Nabil Soliman [Palmer @ NRO, Doherty @ Reason]

  • “Pretexting” to fish out adversaries’ secrets: yes, lawyers do it too, now that you mention it [Elefant]

  • Which is more dangerous to kids, a house with a swimming pool or a house with a gun? Think carefully before answering [Stossel]

  • For shame: Supreme Court of Canada gives go-ahead for British Columbia’s retroactive tobacco recoupment suit [Ottawa Citizen, CBC, Bader; earlier]

  • Anti-biotech activists score, farmers squirm as judge halts sale of Roundup Ready alfalfa [Farmer-Stockman, Feedstuffs, Truth about Trade & Technology](more: Coyote)

  • Soap opera actor sues after ABC writes his character out of the script [five years ago on Overlawyered]

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His reputation to protect

Defamation-suit Hall of Fame: a New Zealand prisoner serving a life sentence for the notoriously brutal murder of a 17-year-old girl has won cash compensation from newspapers which described him as a rapist. “Andrew Ronald MacMillan was granted legal aid – a government- funded scheme which allows people who cannot afford legal representation to get a lawyer – to sue Fairfax Media, publishers of New Zealand newspapers The Press and Dominion Post, for defamation and punitive damages.” The victim, whose body was discovered nearly naked, had suffered violence in intimate places, but authorities never charged MacMillan with rape in the case. (“Murderer gets compensation from paper over rape allegation”, DPA/MonstersAndCritics.com, Apr. 10). Two and a half years ago MacMillan won $1200 for hurt feelings and humiliation because the Corrections Department had not shown him the text of a letter accusing him of misbehavior while on prison furlough. (Bridget Carter, “‘Hurt feelings’ win killer $1200 compensation”, New Zealand Herald, Aug. 23, 2004).

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“Obama Makes Inroads Into Edwards’ Trial Lawyer Base”

For better or worse, John Edwards isn’t as special this time around:

For years Edwards has relied on the support of his fellow trial lawyers’ deep pockets to help get him elected — first to the Senate and then three years ago, when he made a run at the White House and then became running mate to Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., who won the Democratic nomination. But as Edwards mounts his second presidential bid, he has struggled to attract plaintiffs lawyers beyond his stable of longtime donors, just as other Democratic candidates, such as Sens. Hillary Clinton from New York, Barack Obama from Illinois, and Joseph Biden Jr. from Delaware, have been actively wooing the plaintiffs bar. …

Many of the trial lawyers who supported the Kerry-Edwards ticket in 2004 have chosen to throw their lot in with Obama or are keeping their options open by donating to multiple candidates. The fracturing of the trial-lawyer constituency could have dramatic effects on the total dollars Edwards will be able to raise. …

Also cited as hurting Edwards with some past givers: the steps he took to moderate his image on litigation reform during the 2004 campaign, including his endorsement of pre-screening of merit in medical malpractice cases. Even Sen. Biden is making inroads:

Biden has long been seen as a supporter of the trial lawyer community on the Senate Judiciary Committee, where he has opposed legal-liability proposals and bills that would limit claims against health-care providers. No candidate is more visibly tied to the trial bar than Edwards. But Clinton and Biden, who also headlined a national trial lawyer convention in Miami Beach in February, have both said they’re opposed to caps on punitive damage awards.

Despite Obama’s silence on the issues trial lawyers care about, those who support him say they are confident he will back trial lawyers when the time comes.

(Anna Palmer, Legal Times, Apr. 9).

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Trial lawyer (this time R) for President?

John Edwards may not be the only plaintiff’s attorney in the White House race:

Mr. Thompson [Sen. Fred Thompson, R-Tenn., much buzzed about as a late-entering Republican possibility] has also been criticized for failing to back some comprehensive tort-reform bills because of his background as a trial lawyer. Here he insists his stance was based on grounds of federalism. “I’m consistent. I address Federalist Society meetings,” he says, noting that more issues should be left to the states. For example, he cast the lonely “nay” in 99-1 votes against a national 0.8% blood alcohol level for drivers, a federal law banning guns in schools, and a measure limiting the tort liability of Good Samaritans. “Washington overreaches, and by doing so ends up not doing well the basics people really care about.” Think Katrina and Walter Reed.

(John Fund, “Lights, Camera . . . Candidacy?”, OpinionJournal.com/WSJ, Mar. 17).

On Sen. Thompson’s behalf, it can be said that he did co-sponsor the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, which was enacted into law after he left the Senate. Thus he presumably recognizes that in some situations, federal action can be necessary and proper to prevent a few state courts from imposing their views on the unwilling citizens of distant states. One hopes Thompson also goes so far as to realize that federal curbs on state-court litigation in those circumstances do not necessarily infringe on proper precepts of federalism and decentralization, but in fact can work in defense of them, by protecting the right to self-government of sister states and their citizens. The question is whether he has gone on to consider that quite a few other federal interventions into state-court litigation, in such areas as class actions, product liability and punitive damages, can be defended on very similar grounds (namely, that they are needed to restrain state courts from exporting their legal doctrines to other states) and thus are entirely consistent with “good federalist” precepts.

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Judge: Clients have no right to learn how much their lawyer got

It might only upset them, or perhaps upset other lawyers:

The judge in a 2004 federal class action lawsuit over fuel gauge damage caused by tainted gasoline made at Shell-Motiva refinery in Norco has sealed records on how he divided $6.8 million in legal fees among 79 lawyers in the case.

U.S. District Judge Ivan Lemelle has ordered each lawyer, on pain of being sanctioned, not to reveal how much they were paid.

Lemelle’s late January decision to keep the information under wraps has drawn criticism from some of the lawyers and has attracted the attention of Loyola Law School ethics professor Dane Ciolino.

Ciolino says the situation violates the right of the lawyers and the public to have access to court records. Additionally, he said, it flies in the face of a Louisiana attorney ethics rule that says a client is entitled to know how his lawyer shares fees with other lawyers.

(Susan Finch, “Judge seals records on legal fees in suit”, New Orleans Times-Picayune, Apr. 6)(& welcome Robert Ambrogi readers).

Update: And now it’s reported that the judge has turned down a motion to unseal the fee records (Susan Finch, “Judge won’t unseal fee records”, New Orleans Times-Picayune, Apr. 10). Further updates: May 22 (WSJ editorial covers); Jun. 7 (judge unseals records).

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KCET on Prop 65 abuse

At the “Life and Times” department of the Southern California public broadcasting station, reporter Val Zavala examines a problem often discussed in this space (May 26,, Apr. 5, Apr. 29, and Dec. 26, 2006, among many others):

This story is about a long-standing soda-pop store in Highland Park, Calif., that was hit with a legal notice telling them that they are selling hazardous products. The owner says that they don’t make the product, but that they have informed the public according to the Proposition 65 law. But the law allows them to be sued anyway. Their only choice? Settle or go to court. As Val Zavala reports, some attorneys are making millions abusing Proposition 65.

The ten-minute video has expired, but the station’s blog entry about the show has links and discussion (Feb. 28).

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More on infant mortality stats

Linda Gorman of the Independence Institute writes in an email:

I was finally catching up on my reading on Overlawyered.com and came across your Feb. 4 post on the possibility that Amber Taylor had a point when she noted that the IRS might give U.S. parents an incentive to count have a dead baby classified as a live birth.

This assumes that parents can affect the classification on the death certificate. U.S. parents do not typically fill out death certificates. She needs to provide evidence that parents affect classifications in meaningful numbers in the United States before anyone should take this speculation seriously.

The evidence that birthweight registration varies from country to country rests on statistical comparisons of the number of very low birthweight infants recorded. An early paper, which is very short, is here (PDF). These studies have been followed by a number of papers on birth registration in various European countries. At this point, the evidence suggests that what are counted as live births in the U.S. are often considered fetal deaths in other countries. They are thus not included in infant mortality statistics, and OECD has (finally) included a note to this effect in its international comparisons of infant mortality. It wouldn’t be a public policy issue if those who wanted to reduce the amount of privately provided medical care in the United States hadn’t used it as an indicator of the poor performance of the U.S. health care system. If you’d like more references, I’d be happy to provide them.

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