Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

My Condolences, My Card

The mother of a teen killed by a drunken driver was standing at his casket during his wake when lawyers Robert D’Amico and Jimmy Burchfield sidled up next to her and offered their services.

Kathleen Gemma filed a complaint with the Supreme Court’s attorney disciplinary board, saying the two should have left her alone while she was saying her last goodbyes to her son Anthony Gemma. Gemma said one of the lawyers talked about his billboard.

D’Amico and Burchfield say that Gemma brought up the idea of pursuing legal action.

Not difficult to figure out which story is true here, is it?
(Providence WPRI, February 26)

In the height of irony, the wesbite for the law firm of D’Amico & Burchfield contains this slogan:

We’ll Take Care of You Like Family Would

N.B. — This story recently ran on WPRI television, but Anthony Gemma’s accidental death occurred in December of 2006. There is no public report of whether any disciplinary action was taken against either lawyer.

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Absent father of Banita Jacks children: I’m suing the city

Family members of the children Banita Jacks murdered, who apparently cared so much about the children that they didn’t notice Jacks had starved them to death months before they were discovered, “have hired lawyers to pursue claims against the D.C. government for failing to prevent months of neglect and abuse. … In interviews yesterday, the grandmothers’ lawyers declined to say when their clients last saw Jacks or her daughters.”

DC taxpayers will be thrilled to note that the city is refusing to rehire three workers fired in a scapegoating frenzy after the Jacks revelations, even after a hearing officer has held that the firings were unwarranted. More lawsuits to come. (Keith L. Alexander and Petula Dvorak, “D.C. Could Have Done More To Help 4 Sisters, Families Say”, Washington Post, Feb. 28).

For an example of the post-Jacks overreaction, see Hans Bader at POL, who has beat me to the Greg and Julianna Caplan story, which was also extensively covered in the Marc Fisher blog.

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Unclear on the concept

Bizarro-Overlawyered hasn’t quite gotten the hang of how to put forward their propaganda campaign to deprive consumers of the choice of arbitrating disputes.

A New Orleans woman, Patricia Dicorte, says she got ripped off by her contractor in May 2007, so she took him to an arbitrator, and in July 2007—a fraction of the time it would take in a civil suit of that magnitude—she had an arbitration ruling in her favor for $219 thousand. Unfortunately for her, she then took it to the cesspool of Orleans Parish Courts for enforcement, and Democratic Judge Yada Magee—a colleague of the cousin of the contractor—violated the Federal Arbitration Act and threw out the arbitrator’s ruling. (Dennis Woltering, “Despite arbitrator’s ruling woman still fighting contractor”, WWL-TV, Feb. 25). This will eventually be reinstated on appeal at some unnecessary expense, but somehow Kia Franklin is advertising this fiasco as an example of problems with arbitration (!), rather than as a problem with the judicial hellhole of New Orleans. (If the judge isn’t willing to give a fair ruling for the consumer in something as straightforward and administrative as arbitration judgment enforcement, what makes Franklin think that the consumer would have had a better chance with that judge in a civil trial?)

Judge Magee is best known for railroading negligence findings for 1800 plaintiffs against Dow Chemical in bogus silicone breast implant litigation in 1997, a decision thrown out by a Louisiana appellate court in 2002. Spitzfaden v. Dow Corning Corp., 833 So.2d 512 (La. App. 2002).

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A New Suspect Class?

Is Southwest Airline discriminating against the Pretty Girls again?

“I think they were just discriminating against because we were young decent-looking girls. I mean, nobody else on the plane looked like us except us,” she said. “[The flight attendants] were like older ladies. We were younger. Who knows, they could have been just jealous of us because we were younger.”

You can’t make this stuff up.
(Tampabays.com, Feb. 27)

H/T Wizbang (with video)

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Damnum Absque Injuria?

Sean Dubowik is a Phoenix strip club owner who had the words “Hot Rod” tattooed to a most private (and sensitive) part of the male anatomy.

This feature was noted with some degree of amazement, although probably not by the type of person Dubowik intended. His gall bladder surgeon, one Sean Hansen, made the observation during surgery prep, and made use of his cell phone to record the artwork. He then showed it around the hospital a bit, resulting in one of the surgical staff (the one with the conscience) calling Dubowik.

Dubowik said he’d gotten the tattoo on a $1,000 bet.

“It was the most horrible thing I ever went though in my life,” Dubowik said. He said he chose Mayo Clinic for treatment because his mother had five surgeries there.

“They were supposedly the best of the best. I have no complaints about the medical care I was given,” he said. “But now I feel violated, betrayed and disgusted.”

Query: can one who has his penis tattooed with “Hot Rod” on a $1,000 bet convince a jury — any jury — that he could be “violated, betrayed and disgusted”?
(AP, Dec. 17, 2007)

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Not Not Guilty Guilty!!

Overlawyered reported last summer on William Ross’s findings about the double billing of clients, and Ted opined on it at Point of Law.

Cameron Stracher’s book (his second) entitled Double Billing: A Young Lawyer’s Tale Of Greed, Sex, Lies, And The Pursuit Of A Swivel Chair is careful not to assert that there was double billing going on in his fictional New York white shoe law firm, but there was certainly plenty of churning, redundant/unnecessary work, etc., the ethics of which is comparably impugned by the principles behind the rule against double billing.

In light of Judge Matsch’s repudiation of Big City trial counsel’s conduct in the Medtronic Case, I got to thinking about unethical lawyer conduct, and asked myself this:

Aside from the obvious business remedy available to the client, does trial counsels’ misconduct excuse the client from paying their bill (or enable them to recover the fees paid)? Does the answer to that depend on whether the client was complicit in the unethical strategy?

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Outsourcing, With a Kicker

In the state of Mississippi during the last 5 years, 27 law firms have been retained by Mississippi Attorney General James Hood to purse state lawsuits on contingency. Those firms have collectively donated more than a half-million dollars to Hood in the last two election cycles. Apparently, the legislature is troubled by this combination of for-profit motivation and campaign fundraising, and has passed a bill to pursue competitive bidding before signing contracts of more than $500,000 with private lawyers. It also requires a review board to examine contracts, and it limits contingency fees to $1 million.

Hood isn’t pleased — and the WSJ has his number:

Should state Attorneys General be able to outsource their legal work to for-profit tort lawyers, who then funnel a share of their winnings back to the AGs? That’s become a sleazy practice in many states, and it is finally coming under scrutiny — notably in Mississippi, home of Dickie Scruggs, Attorney General Jim Hood, and other legal pillars…
This kind of quid pro quo is legal in Mississippi and most other states. However, if this kind of sweetheart arrangement existed between a public official and business interests, you can bet Mr. Hood would be screaming about corruption. . . . A decision to prosecute is an awesome power, and it ought to be motivated by evidence and the law, not by the profit motives of private tort lawyers and the campaign needs of an ambitious Attorney General.”

That leaves a mark.

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Judge Sues Sniper, Defense Lawyer “Mystified”

A family court judge who was shot in his chambers by a man whose bitter divorce he was handling has sued the gunman, seeking damages totaling more than $100,000.

…Mack’s civil lawyer, Mark Wray, said the suit “mystified” him. Mack has long since lost the fortune he earned from the pawn shop, and his client’s 9-year-old daughter is getting the last of it, Wray said.

Mystified, is he? Maybe it has something to do with the conspirators.
(News Observer Feb. 23)

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Guestblogger this week

With a deadline looming for me, I expect to be posting less this week. Fortunately Peter Morin, who’s guestblogged here before, has agreed to step in to fill the gap. Check out Peter’s regular site, WaveMaker.

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Whistle While You Work

The “National Whistleblower Center” wants folks to send a message to their congresspeople protesting the lack of whistleblower provision in the new Consumer Product Safety Commission reform bill (S.2045):

“The CPSC reform bill needs to provide vital protections for honest employees who report safety violations–such as toxins in toothpaste and poisonous lead in our children’s toys. Without these protections, whistleblowers may not come forward to report dangers of products until it is too late.”
(Whistleblower Blog)

What will those damn Democrats do next!?

Clarification: In my haste to produce some content before I got too busy this morning, it seems that I failed to project my usual degree of irony and sarcasm on this particular post — and in all candor, I did not check archives to see what OL had published before. The Whistleblower Center action alert that the Whistleblower Blog links to reports that “The House version of the CPSC reform bill does not include whistleblower protections,” and exhorts supporters to “Take Action Today! It is crucial that you contact your representative and let him/her know that you expect them to support American workers and families – NOT the interests of big business.”

Now that I have had time to check Thomas, it appears that there is no House version of the bill after all, and therefore the “action alert” is (characteristically?) deceptive.

Correction: (I’ll get this one right if it kills me) — Ted corrects me that a House version did in fact pass the House in December.