We’ve posted four more letters from readers on our letters page. Topics this time include cameras in the jury room; the controversy over whether it is proper for doctors to consider turning away trial lawyers as patients; and the case where a woman was taken into custody on a mistaken warrant arising from a food infraction at Yellowstone Park.
Author Archive
A view from the plaintiff’s bar
Plaintiff’s attorney Bruce Fagel, MD, JD, a malpractice specialist in Los Angeles, spoke with Medical Economics for a cover-story interview in their last-but-one issue (“How I pick the doctors I’ll sue”, Aug. 20). The whole thing is worth a look; here are two snippets.
On how juries decide:
When doctors are cross-examined in a deposition or during trial, they often try to avoid responsibility for their actions. In fact, some defense attorneys encourage this attitude, instructing their clients not to answer even reasonable questions. As a result, jurors may ultimately be convinced of a doctor’s negligence not by the nature of his actions in the case, but by what looks like intentional evasion of responsibility when explaining why something went wrong.
The real value of our jury system in medical malpractice cases has little to do with the jurors’ ability to understand the medical facts and issues in the case. In fact, it’s widely accepted that they don’t understand much of the clinical information presented to them. What they do understand is when a witness is telling the truth. Doctors would do well to remember that.
And on tort reform:
I don’t think the idea of a cap on noneconomic damages is unreasonable, since it’s so difficult to put a dollar value on pain and suffering. What’s unreasonable is the fact that MICRA [the California medical liability law] was passed in 1975, and the $250,000 limit wasn’t tied to inflation. As a result, each year plaintiffs here are really getting less money. Today that $250,000 is worth less than $75,000 in 1975 dollars. So it’s a real problem for plaintiffs with legitimate claims for pain and suffering.
Calif. court shutters habeas “writ mill”
A state appeals court has ordered ex-lawyer Richard Dangler Jr. of Sacramento to pay $25,000 in sanctions for operating “a ‘writ mill’ where law students and disbarred lawyers worked without supervision in filing pointless petitions for paying inmates”. The attorney had filed “a series of what he conceded were ‘patently frivolous and contemptuous’ habeas corpus petitions. Dangler resigned from the State Bar in May with charges pending against him.” (Jill Duman, “Court Says Ex-Lawyer Put Students to Work in Writ Mill”, The Recorder, Sept. 3).
Disappearing swings, cont’d
In addition to liability and safety fears, the Americans with Disabilities Act turns out to play a role in the decline of swing sets at public playgrounds: it seems the least expensive way to make a swing set safer is to surround it with sand, but sand is considered a non-accessible surface for wheelchairs which makes it suspect under the ADA. (Scott Simonson, “Safety rules retiring playground standby”, Arizona Daily Star, Sept. 7). See Mar. 28, Aug. 23, etc.
Lawyer bills $300/hour for sleeping
Amazing story from South Texas of six lawyers who got themselves appointed guardians ad litem to represent minors’ interests in a bus-crash case called Goodyear Dunlop Tires vs. Gamez et al. “Four of the six lawyers were appointed less than three weeks before Goodyear settled the case, and one only eight days before the settlement. Yet according to Austin lawyer Debora Alsup, who worked on the appeal, all six asked for $100,000 in fees,” payable by the tire company. They asked for $400-500 an hour, two or three times their customary fee, arguing that “those rates were customary for ad litem fees in Webb County.” As for the lawyers’ self-report of hours worked, well, suffice it to say that one of them was so bold as to bill for more than 24 hours in a single day, while another billed 48 hours for travel over a two-day period, including compensation for being asleep. And on and on, as the Houston Chronicle’s Rick Casey reports (“Lawyer bills for missing tuck-in time”, Aug. 31):
?One lawyer billed 53 separate entries of 0.1 hour each in one day for reviewing 16 filings by plaintiffs, “which were identical except in minor respects,” according to the appeals court.
?One lawyer billed between two and four hours at $500 per hour to review each of numerous one-page deposition notices, for a total of 50 hours for reviewing the notices.
District Judge Raul Vasquez of Laredo gave the lawyers a lot of what they sought, but a three-judge panel in San Antonio disagreed, calling the fees “unconscionable”. And here is the perfect grace note to the affair, as reported by Casey:
One appeals judge, Sarah Duncan, wrote a concurring opinion concluding the full court should “report these attorneys to the grievance committee.”
In Laredo the grievance committee is chaired by Marcel Notzon III, the lawyer whom Judge Vasquez awarded the most fees in this case.
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CD price fixing settlement, cont’d
Ted Frank reported Aug. 23 on the Compact Disc Antitrust Litigation Settlement, in which music distributors and retailers agreed to donate 5.5 million CDs to libraries, valued at 20% below retail, as part of the rationalization for a multi-million-dollar payment of fees to plaintiff’s counsel. Now the Washington Post has more details about how the musical selections — by and large, unpopular stuff that had been sitting unsaleable in warehouses — were stuffed randomly into boxes for shipping, so that libraries wound up getting large multiples of CD titles they would not have greatly coveted in the first place (Karin Brulliard, “An Influx of Outmoded CDs”, Washington Post, Sept. 6). Alex Tabarrok also comments (Sept. 6). Coming up next: will Newsday and other newspapers plagued by circulation scandals agree to make it up by shipping libraries bundles of week-old papers?
Diving’s decline
The once dominant U.S. men’s and women’s diving teams suffered their worst performance ever at the Athens Olympics, shut out from medals for the first time since diving was introduced at as an Olympic sport 92 years ago. (“Chinese dive to record haul”, AFP/Independent Online (South Africa), Aug. 29). Why the falloff? “After a golden age in the seventies — a decadent, late-Roman last hurrah — the American pool has suffered a gradual decline: thanks, for the most part, to concerns about safety and liability, diving boards have been removed and deep ends undeepened. At municipal pools across the country, the once-ubiquitous one-metre springboard has become an endangered species; and the three-metre high dive — the T. rex of the community pool — is now virtually extinct. … Ron O?Brien, U.S.A. Diving?s national technical director, and the former coach of Greg Louganis, said last week, ‘You can’t put your finger on any one thing, but having so many diving boards taken out around the country has had a serious impact on our sport, no question about it.'” (Field Maloney, “Cannonball!”, The New Yorker, Aug. 30 issue (posted Aug. 23))(via Common Good)(more about pool and diving liability).
Update: N.Y. auto leasing still stalled
New York Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver is still dug in to protect the state’s ultra-harsh law holding auto lessors liable for accidents involving the cars they lease, although it’s had a devastating effect on car leasing in the Empire State (Jun. 9, 2003 and links from there). Here’s the New York Daily News blasting him in a recent editorial:
The Senate wants to abolish vicarious liability, bringing New York into line with 49 other states, but Silver’s Assembly wants to have car companies pay hundreds of millions of dollars into an insurance pool that would cover accidents in leased cars. The trial lawyers are all for it because the pool would give them lots of money to grab, cash that would come from drivers in the form of higher leasing fees. And who are the trial lawyers? Arthur Luxenberg is the group’s second vice president, while Perry Weitz serves on the board of directors. And who are they? They’re the name partners of Weitz & Luxenberg, the law firm that lists Silver as of counsel.
The law “costs consumers more than $130 million a year and has led to a 36 percent decline in the number of vehicles leased in New York each year, according to the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers (Alliance) and the Greater New York Automobile Dealers Association (GNYADA).” (“Vicarious liability costs New York consumers and businesses millions”, Business Council of New York State, Jun.). “More than 19 automakers and every major retail bank in New York have stopped or curtailed car leasing. …In addition, [according to trade groups], vicarious liability has contributed to the closing of 70 leasing companies since September 2000.” (“N.Y.’s Vicarious Liability Costly for Consumers and Auto Dealers”, Insurance Journal, Jul. 19). For more, see the New York State Auto Dealers Association website.
Close call for California Senate
Meeting in private caucus, the majority Democrats in California’s state senate have selected as the next leader of that chamber Sen. Don Perata, D-Oakland, rather than rival contender Sen. Martha Escutia, D-Whittier. That’s good news for California business because Escutia, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, has been a key supporter of trial lawyer causes and chief sponsor of many bills backed by the litigation lobby. (Steve Lawrence, “Democrats pick Oakland lawmaker as new Senate leader”, San Francisco Chronicle, Aug. 24; “Perata, president pro tem” (editorial), San Francisco Chronicle, Aug. 26). Operatives with close links to the state’s trial lawyers had waged a mudslinging campaign against Perata (Dan Walters, “Lawmakers engaged in bitter battle for control of California Senate”, Sacramento Bee, Jul. 9, no longer online).