Posts Tagged ‘Arkansas’

April 18 roundup

March 30 roundup

  • “Woman Sues Adidas After Fall She Blames on Sticky Shoes” [Lowering the Bar]
  • Texas lawmakers file loser pays proposals [SE Tex Record] Actual scope of proposals hard to discern through funhouse lens of NYT reporting [PoL] Marie Gryphon testimony on loser-pays proposals in Arkansas [Manhattan Institute, related]
  • Google awarded patent on changing of logo for special days [Engadget via Coyote]
  • “Civil Gideon in Deadbeat Dad Cases Would Be ‘Massive’ Change, Lawyer Tells Justices” [Weiss, ABA Journal, Legal Ethics Forum]
  • Amateur-hour crash-fakers in Bronx didn’t reckon on store surveillance camera [NY Post]
  • “Plaintiffs’ Lawyers in Cobell Defend $223M Fee Request” [BLT]
  • Show of harm not needed: FDA kicks another 500 or so legacy drugs off market, this time in the cold-and-cough area [WaPo]
  • “Wal-Mart v. Dukes: Rough Justice Without Due Process” [Andrew Trask, WLF]

February 17 roundup

December 4 roundup

  • Insurance mandate or no, New Jersey specialists tending to duck out of high-legal-risk procedures like mammography [Amy Handlin, Gloucester County Times via NJLRA]
  • Audi redux, or something different this time? L.A. Times endorses charges of sudden acceleration against Toyota [Holman Jenkins/WSJ, FindLaw “Injured“]
  • Ghastly idea of the year: Rep. Waxman wants federal government to be “responsible” for fixing journalism [Coyote, Bainbridge]
  • “Arkansas Judge Tosses Defamation Lawsuit Against Dixie Chicks Over ‘West Memphis Three’ Letter” [Citizen Media Law, Longstreth/American Lawyer]
  • Judge Weinstein: falsification by arresting officers seems “widespread” in NYPD [Balko, Greenfield]
  • U.K.: Carbon ration cards? [Krauthammer]
  • Nova Scotia, Canada: “A Couple in their 70s Wave at A Kid…And In Swoop the Cops” [Free-Range Kids]
  • Barbra Streisand loses suit over aerial photo of her Malibu home taken by environmental group; by suing, she ensures that many thousands more people will see the photograph, in what is dubbed “Streisand effect” [six years ago on Overlawyered]

Gene Cauley gets seven years

The Arkansas plaintiff’s lawyer says he was too embarrassed to make layoffs as his finances turned sour, which is why he stole the $9.3 million in class-action settlement funds [WSJ Law Blog, ABA Journal] Earlier here, here, and here.

More from Kevin LaCroix:

An earlier WSJ.com Law Blog post reported (here) that Cauley was in fact a protégé of Bill Lerach. Today’s article on Bloomberg (here) about Cauley’s criminal sentencing notes that Cauley joins a growing list of plaintiffs’ securities class action attorneys who have “been jailed for felonies,” including Bill Lerach himself and his former law partners, Mel Weiss, Steven Schulman and David Bershad, and including even Marc Dreier.

These gentlemen of course made their living for many years accusing corporate officials of fraud. Ahem. Yes, well…isn’t ironic, don’t you think?

The rise and fall of Gene Cauley

Who would have dreamed that a protege of Bill Lerach would wind up later copping to a felony rap resulting from ethical infractions? (Wait, don’t answer.)

At a barbershop in 1994, [Cauley] says, he picked up Forbes magazine and saw a profile of Lerach; it was the famous article, where the attorney was quoted as saying, “I have the greatest practice . . . I have no clients.”

Cauley approached Lerach and was soon launched in a thriving class action practice (“His usual way to deal with things was to yell and bang things and threaten,” said a fellow plaintiffs lawyer, Glen DeValerio of Boston.) It came crashing down under revelations that the Little Rock, Ark.-based lawyer took $9 million from clients’ settlements to spend on firm overhead and unrelated investments. [Koppel/WSJ, ABA Journal, interview-based WSJ Law Blog story first, second]

“Lawyer charged with stealing over $600,000 in client settlement money”

According to Manhattan D.A. Robert Morgenthau, New York lawyer Marc Bernstein “settled these cases pretty cheap, then took the money and ran.” [NY Daily News, press release] Meanwhile: “Prominent Arkansas plaintiffs securities lawyer Gene Cauley is expected to plead guilty for failing to pay clients $9.3 million in settlement funds he was supposed to be holding as their escrow agent.” [ABA Journal, earlier] According to a report dated February (PDF) from the ABA’s Center for Professional Responsibility, New York is among the states that have adopted payee notification reforms intended to catch this category of fraud at an early stage; Arkansas has not. For more on payee notification, see my 2006 paper with Peter Morin.

“Prominent Arkansas Lawyer Probed Over Missing $9 Million”

“Prominent Arkansas plaintiffs’ lawyer Gene Cauley has landed in some hot water due to his apparent inability to produce more than $9 million in settlement money he was overseeing for clients, according to federal court records.” His lawyer, John Wesley Hall, told Judge Jed Rakoff at a hearing “that the missing settlement funds ‘are presently unavailable,’ but Hall declined to elaborate, citing Cauley’s privilege against self-incrimination.” He says, however, that Cauley is working to “find the money and pay it in 90 days” and expects to “make everyone 100% whole”. [WSJ Law Blog].

Reused axles in manufactured homes

Despite some objections by class members to the resulting class action settlement, its approval is consider likely; class lawyers are set to bag $15 million while class members will get mostly vouchers unless they care to take delivery of the actual (generally useless to them) axles and wheels used to transport their manufactured homes. [SE Texas Record; Texarkana, Keil & Goodson, Nix Patterson & Roach, Crowley Norman, W.H. Dub Arnold]