“The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld a lower court’s decision to slash White & Case’s legal fee in a bankruptcy-related case from $5.5 million to $1.8 million, criticizing the firm’s fees as excessive.” The prominent law firm “made the fee request in 1999 in connection with its representation of 25,000 retirees from the textile manufacturer St. Louis-based Monsanto, which later spun off into the company Solutia, also of St. Louis. Solutia subsequently filed for bankruptcy and sought to alter Monsanto retirees’ benefits.” White & Case was asking as much as $370 an hour for some of its lawyers’ time, although one of the nation’s most prominent plaintiff’s lawyers, Frederic Levin of Pensacola, Fla., was contenting himself with $250 an hour for his work in the same case. (Julie Kay, “White & Case to Get Less Than Half Its Bill for Bankruptcy Case”, Miami Daily Business Review, Jan. 10). More on bankruptcy fees: Sept. 22, 2004 and links from there.
Author Archive
Reminder: D.C. conference on 9/11 fund tomorrow
A reminder: I’ll be among the panelists at a half-day conference on Capitol Hill tomorrow sponsored by the Manhattan Institute and examining the lessons of the 9/11 compensation fund. Attendance is free, but you must register in advance here.
Guestblogger thanks
Thanks again to Caleb Brown, who’s guestblogged here over the past week. His regular posts can be found at catallaxy.net.
Catfight in Philly
“Two of the most prominent personal-injury law firms in Philadelphia have gone to war with each other over a star litigator, a portfolio of clients, and tens of millions of dollars in potential fees. The law firm of the late James E. Beasley has accused a rival firm, Kline & Specter, of luring away one of its top litigators, Andrew J. Stern, and improperly soliciting clients from the Beasley Firm.” (L. Stuart Ditzen, “A battle of firms for fees, clients”, Philadelphia Inquirer, Jan. 12). Both firms make repeated appearances in the archives of this site.
“Do not eat iPod Shuffle”
That’s the disclaimer buried in small print toward the bottom of Apple’s page explaining its new music-playing gadget. It isn’t, of course, a serious disclaimer, merely serving to call attention to the device’s minute dimensions (smaller than some packs of gum) and stir up buzz (as with this very post).
Discussion of judicial selection
Over at Point of Law, a new featured discussion has begun on the problem of state judicial selection, and what if anything to do about the problem of judicial campaigns funded (often very richly) by lawyers and litigants with interests before the courts in question. Discussing the topic are Alex Tabarrok of George Mason University, whose work (PDF, with Eric Helland) on the relation between judicial selection and tort awards has been widely talked about (he’s also a founder and principal of the excellent blog Marginal Revolution), and David Rottman, Principal Court Research Consultant the National Center for State Courts (more on panelists). It promises to be a highly illuminating week.
Car veers into truck’s lane
…and so a jury has ordered the trucking company, Auction Transport Inc., to pay $22.5 million over the resulting injuries to a young passenger in the accident, which occurred at rush hour on Kansas City’s I-435. Mary Coleman’s car, allegedly sideswiped by a third vehicle, had careened in front of the truck, but attorneys argued that the truck driver had been “driving too fast in congested traffic and not watching the road.” The jury found the trucking company responsible for just less than half the fault of the accident — a greater share of fault than the allegedly sideswiping driver — and Coleman for hardly any of it; the application of Missouri’s joint and several liability rule ensures that the company will be on the hook for nearly the entire amount. Good thing the truck had not swerved unpredictably into the car’s path to cause the accident — then it would have been more the fault of the car than of any other party, right? (Joe Lambe, “Crash victim awarded millions”, Kansas City Star, Sept. 25). More: CoyoteBlog comments.
Oklahoma high court judge sues colleagues
Frontiers of age discrimination: Marian P. Opala, a justice of the Oklahoma Supreme Court, has gone to federal court to sue all eight of his colleagues charging age bias. Members of the court select one of their number to serve as chief justice, and for years the seat has rotated automatically among members, but lately, as Opala’s turn was drawing near, the court voted to change the rules to adopt a different selection method. Eugene Volokh called the justice’s equal protection claim “very, very weak” and said it was annoying to see an official of a state court seek the intervention of a federal court against the authority of his own. (Adam Liptak, “Oklahoma Judge, 83, Files Bias Suit Against Colleagues”, New York Times, Jan. 5).
Ted’s mythbusting at Point of Law
Maybe he’s too modest to mention it here, but over at our sister website, Ted has been on a roll with several devastating posts correcting fallacies that have circulated during the past week’s intense news coverage of liability reform:
* The George Soros-sponsored, David Brock-run media gadfly organization, Media Matters for America, recently criticized the Washington Post for running coverage that was not (to its taste) sufficiently critical of medical malpractice reform. Trouble is, as Ted shows, Media Matters itself blundered into whopping errors on the subject, badly misrepresenting the views of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). “This is what MMFA gets for relying on ATLA fact sheets instead of primary sources.”
* Pointing to evidence that payouts by 98 Massachusetts doctors accounted for more than 13 percent of one year’s malpractice payouts in the state, the New York Times concluded that cracking down on bad doctors could greatly help the malpractice crisis. But the numbers announced in the study warrant no such conclusion;
* The Association of Trial Lawyers of America is out with a supposed fact sheet on medical malpractice, which (no surprise) Ted finds to be full of gross distortions. Equally embarrassing, he catches Illinois Democratic Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky posting on her official website a huge chunk of the lame ATLA argumentation, cut and pasted without acknowledgment of its interest-group origins. (Allen Adomite at Illinois Civil Justice League has more).
* Finally, Ted discovers the Alabama Trial Lawyers Association claiming that a profitable year in the property insurance business is reason to doubt that there’s a crisis in the liability insurance business.
Memo to fireworks abusers
At Forest Avenue and Sixteenth Street in Des Moines, two miscreant youths who’d been riding with friends in a rented 1999 Chevy Blazer began shooting off a large quantity of fireworks at persons and vehicles in the neighborhood. What happened next is somewhat muddled by the contradictory accounts of various witnesses, but involved the detonation of the substantial trove of fireworks in the Blazer’s cargo area, severely injuring several of the car’s occupants. Last month the Iowa Supreme Court ruled against a lawsuit seeking to make Enterprise Rent-a-Car pay for the injuries through vicarious liability, saying the accident could not reasonably be attributed to the driving of the young woman who’d rented the vehicle. (Wells v. Whitaker and Enterprise). Random Mentality (Dec. 10) has more.