Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Update: $1.3M legal malpractice verdict overturned

We covered the verdict two years ago, noting an editorial that said “Pundits have argued that real tort reform will only come when the lawyers start suing the other lawyers…. that time has arrived.” But the Mississippi Supreme Court held that the lawyers had not committed malpractice as a matter of law.

Perhaps correct, and I shed no tear for the plaintiff’s loss of a windfall. But it sure would be nice if doctors got the same benefit of the doubt. Instead, when medical experts differ over whether a doctor acted reasonably, courts throw up their hands and decide it’s okay for a jury to decide. Lawyers seem not to have to worry about being held to that sort of second-guessing standard. (Baker Donelson Bearman & Caldwell, P.C. v. Muirhead, 2006 WL 177593 (Miss. January 26, 2006).) David Rossmiller discusses the case, but dodges all of the substantive issues.

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Nominate-a-case thread

Here’s another experiment: use the comments section to suggest a legal case or news story you think belongs on this site. A few ground rules:

* Only stories with live links, please. No stories that have happened to you or a friend personally, no matter how compelling, unless you can point to someone’s already-published writing or reportage on it.

* It doesn’t have to be something that just happened, but if it’s not new, do check our archives to see whether we’ve already covered it. Here’s a stored Google search to start you off.

* As usual, comments are held for review, along the lines of a letters to the editor section.

Steve Berman sues Apple over iPods

Specifically, Seattle attorney Steve Berman (Nov. 24, 2003 and links therein), on behalf of a Louisiana man, accuses Apple of selling a “defective” product because it can cause hearing loss if one turns up music to maximum volume using headphones. The lawsuit, filed in San Jose, seeks class action status, even though each member of the putative class will come to the table with different pre-existing knowledge about audio safety and different usage patterns for their device. (Many iPod users don’t use headphones at all.) Each iPod comes with a warning that “permanent hearing loss may occur if earphones or headphones are used at high volume,” but, of course, the lawsuit alleges that the warning is insufficient. The plaintiff, John Kiel Patterson, doesn’t even claim that his hearing has been damaged, thus making it a typical “Harm-Less Lawsuit.” (Dan Goodin, AP/Yahoo, Feb. 1, h/t W.F.)

Update: a pdf copy of the complaint.

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Don’t know much about property

Authorities have finally cracked the largest burglary ever reported from a Massachusetts residence, the 1978 theft of a Cezanne and six other paintings from the Stockbridge home of collector Michael Bakwin. And who’d been holding on to the paintings all these years? Retired criminal defense attorney Robert M. Mardirosian, 71, who came into their possession soon after their theft when the burglar — whom Mardirosian was representing in an unrelated matter — left them at the lawyer’s residence. (The burglar had intended to fence the paintings right away, but Mardirosian had advised him he might get caught doing that.) Not long thereafter the burglar was slain by criminal associates. Mardirosian created dummy corporations and accounts to hold the paintings and at least twice tried to sell them, but was blocked when the Art Loss Register, which intervenes to prevent the sale of stolen art, took steps to stop that from happening. Mardirosian, who now lives in a gated community in Falmouth on Cape Cod, says he acted from legitimate motives: “My whole intent was to find a way to get them back to the owner in return for a 10 percent commission.” (Stephen Kurkjian, “1978 art heist solved”, Boston Globe, Feb. 1). Plus: updates February 2011 (on attorney’s conviction and return of paintings to owner).

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Phila. judge: no right to anonymous online disparagement

Watch what you say about lawyers (and everyone else), cont’d: a “Philadelphia judge has ruled that a valid defamation claim trumps any right to speak anonymously on the Internet….Common Pleas Judge Albert W. Sheppard Jr. ordered the operator of two now-defunct Web sites to turn over the identities of the anonymous authors of comments on the sites that allegedly defamed a Philadelphia law firm….In the suit, the Klehr Harrison firm complains that its reputation was severely disparaged by comments on the two sites that falsely accused its lawyers of being ‘thieves,’ committing ‘fraud’ and ‘lying’ to a judge.” Although courts in some other states have protected anonymous online commenters from demands that their identity be disclosed, Sheppard said Pennsylvania law was not obliged to follow that path. (Shannon P. Duffy, “Law Firm’s Defamation Claim Found to Trump Critics’ Internet Anonymity”, The Legal Intelligencer, Jan. 23). For more on the legal hazards of criticizing Pennsylvania lawyers and judges, see Nov. 30, 2003, Mar. 16, 2004, and Oct. 24-25, 2001.

Comments are open (be very careful, please).

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“Exit, pursued by a lawyer”

In his suit against playwright Nancy McClernan and producer Jonathan X. Flagg, director Edward Einhorn claims (inter alia) “that his staging contributions to [the play] ‘Tam Lin’ — contributions that his former collaborators say they excised — constitute a copyrighted work of intellectual property, owned by him, and that the defendants must therefore pay for infringing the copyright.” According to the New York Times, the suit raises wider questions of interest to “the famously collaborative process of theater-making”:

Are directors engaged in anything akin to the kind of authorship protected by copyright laws? If so, what’s to stop them from demanding payment whenever a play they once directed is revived? And what would that mean to the free flow of ideas in an art form that borrows heavily from all available sources?

(Jesse Green, New York Times, Jan. 29). P.S. Lattman has more (Jan. 30) including a link to the play’s website.
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Unrelatedly, the third in our series of proposed logos is one of several sent in by David Thomasson of Washington, D.C., whose many writing and consulting activities include a dynamite series of editorials on litigation reform in the recently launched newspaper, the Washington Examiner.

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