Posts Tagged ‘chasing clients’

Medical roundup

  • “Here’s how lawmakers want to fix our kidney shortage” [Robert Gebelhoff, ideas of Sally Satel and others; Alex Tabarrok on Rep. Matt Cartwright (D-Pa.)’s proposed Organ Donor Clarification Act]
  • AMA: Lawyer ads stirring up pharmaceutical litigation are scaring viewers into going off needed medications [Jessica Karmasek, Forbes]
  • How does Cuba score such good infant health data? Fudging statistics, jailing truth-tellers helps [video, Free To Choose TV, “Dead Wrong” with Johan Norberg]
  • Per Swedish study, lottery winners do not get healthier after their windfalls. Some implications about health care and inequality? [Alex Tabarrok]
  • Really, AMA: declaring shootings a public health crisis at best a political stunt [Trevor Burrus]
  • Is ten years too long, Your Honor? “New York Lawmakers Push to Extend Deadline for Med-Mal Suits” [Insurance Journal]

“The dubious business of investing in mass torts”

“Elite personal-injury lawyers tell stories about having been pursued by litigation financiers offering tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars to buy a piece of their mass torts dockets.” But for unwary investors it can be a shark-eat-shark world. Nor is it free of hazards for plaintiff’s counsel, even when sophisticated: “AkinMears, the Texas plaintiffs’ firm that allegedly spent $45 million to acquire a huge docket of mesh cases last summer, subsequently told me and my reporting partner Jessica Dye that it was unaware some of those cases had originated at offshore call centers. The firm also told us that an unexpected significant percentage of clients opted not to proceed or not to use AkinMears as counsel when their cases were transferred.” [Alison Frankel, Reuters]

February 10 roundup

  • Feds arrest almost the entire elected leadership of Crystal City, Texas, population 7,000, in corruption probe [New York Daily News] In 2005 we noted, emerging from that little town where everyone seemed to know everyone else, a highly curious $31 million verdict against Ford Motor;
  • Crane collapse chasing in NYC: Eric Turkewitz shines a spotlight on the ethical debris;
  • “The Eight Weirdest People, Places and Things Donald Trump Has Sued” [Daily Caller slideshow, I get a mention]
  • A trademark tale: departing Yosemite concessionaire can take historic place names when it goes [David Post, Coyote with a somewhat different view]
  • “Legal action against soldiers ‘could undermine Britain on the battlefield’ warns chief of general staff” [Con Coughlin, Telegraph]
  • Human subjects research/Institutional Review Boards: “The Obama administration is quietly trying to make it harder to study public officials” [Michelle Hackman, Vox]
  • Comedians, start your engines: lawyer who sued over intimate male enhancement promotion now sues over dating service promotion [New Jersey Civil Justice Institute]

Medical roundup

  • “No, Donating Your Leftover Tissue To Research Is Not Like Letting Someone Rifle Through Your Phone” [Michelle Meyer answers “Henrietta Lacks” author Rebecca Skloot; related, Richard Epstein/Hoover]
  • “Women Should Not Have to Visit a Doctor for Birth Control” [Jeffrey Singer, Time/Cato]
  • Lawyer ads can scare TV viewers into discontinuing medically indicated therapies. But is more regulation the right answer? [reform group Sick of Lawsuits]
  • Johnson & Johnson followed federal government’s own advice on labeling a drug, and got slammed by a jury in consequence [WSJ editorial]
  • U.S. opinion resistant to ratifying treaties that would create an international-law right to health care, so how about smuggling it in via congressional/executive agreement? [Nicholas Diamond, Harvard “Bill of Health”]
  • Denmark, like other Scandinavian countries and New Zealand, has replaced malpractice suits with iatrogenic injury compensation scheme [Pro Publica]
  • Has liberalized patient access to opioids been a net harm? Study suggests no [Tyler Cowen]

Liability roundup

  • Mechanics of high-volume injury litigation: “A disgruntled former law firm employee spills secrets on a mass tort factory” [Paul Barrett, Business Week] More on chasing clients: new Chamber Institute for Legal Reform research finds 23 of top 25 Google key words linking ads to user searches are for personal injury law firms; TV advertising by lawyer is projected to reach $892 million in 2015, up 68% from 2008. Yet more: Daniel Fisher/Forbes (“San Antonio car wreck attorney” goes for $670 per click on Google), Tampa Bay Times (“Highly groomed attorney duo …shown moving in slow motion on courthouse steps to a hard rock beat”);
  • Flurry of other new papers by U.S. Chamber’s Institute for Legal Reform, many connected with its annual Legal Reform Summit, include one on how the trial bar has been successful at lobbying the Obama administration. Plus a new edition of “101 Ways to Improve State Legal Systems”;
  • In speech, Rudolph Giuliani recalls tort-law challenges he faced as NYC mayor [Corpus Christi Caller-Times]
  • A quarter century later, trial lawyers’ initiative to take revenge against insurer adversaries continues to harm California insurance customers [Ian Adams, “The troublesome legacy of Prop 103,” R Street Institute, paper in PDF, summary]
  • A story we’ve covered before: Mississippi attorney general Jim Hood and the flow of funds from and to private lawyers he hires [Steve Wilson/Mississippi Watchdog, quotes me]
  • Most New York counties have passed resolutions calling for reform of the state’s unique scaffold law [Lawsuit Reform Alliance of New York]
  • You’d think indictment of Mikal Watts, Texas law major-leaguer with friends in high D.C. places, would be playing bigger in the press [Tim Carney]

Liability roundup