Practicing without professional liability insurance? It isn’t just doctors who do that sometimes; it’s lawyers, too, and many of them don’t take kindly to the notion of disclosing to clients their uninsured status, as a proposal in Georgia would have them do. It tends to throw into an ironic light all those laws — customarily enacted with the vigorous support of organized lawyer groups — which require, e.g., taxi drivers to maintain liability insurance before heading out on the road. (Greg Bluestein, “Lawyers Could Face Disbarment for Failing to Disclose Coverage Status”, Fulton County Daily Report, Nov. 3).
Posts Tagged ‘ethics’
A blawg’s pro bono trial
The Uncivil Litigator is a blog of a mid-level associate whose practice consists mostly of insurance disputes. The insights into his daily practice and the litigation culture, told with appropriate humility, will be interesting for law students and laypeople, but so are the unspoken assumptions behind UCL’s work, which unwittingly demonstrate some of the problems with the legal system.
In particular is a pro bono case taken on behalf of an elderly woman with a $800 dispute over an auto accident, resulting in a jury trial. The nine-post tale, told over several months on the blog, is an entertaining small story in and of itself. But, while he complains about the recalcitrance of the opposing defense attorney, at no point does UCL stop to think that he’s partially responsible for thousands of dollars of societal resources (including seven people are giving up a day of work to sit on a jury) that are going to resolve this dispute. Or that his client, the opposing party, the opposing party’s customers, and society as a whole would’ve been better off if he had spent the time he worked on this case with paying clients, and his firm simply wrote the plaintiff a check for a small fraction of those fees. Pro bono means uncompensated legal services for the public good, but here, as with too many law firm pro bono programs, a law firm imposed a huge externality on the public and an opposing party essentially for the purpose of subsidizing an expensive and inefficient training exercise to get a young lawyer experience. Junior stockbrokers aren’t given $20,000 from the public fisc to churn for practice, but when lawyers do the equivalent, it’s extolled as part of the category of cases where the pro bono lawyer really is working for the public good without pay.
Update: UCL responds, though he confuses a systemic criticism (are there better ways for society to handle small disputes than full-blown trials with all the trappings?) with a personal criticism that wasn’t there.
Another update: Professor Martin Grace initiates a discussion on his weblog.
U.K.: “Medics slam ‘money for referrals'”
Following a rules change this spring which for the first time allowed solicitors to share fees with third parties, law firms across England have begun offering money to doctors for the referral of injury cases. “Lawyers Higgins and Co, from Birkenhead in Wirral, has been offering GPs ?175 for every patient they refer to their firm. … The British Medical Association said it believed doctors being offered money for compensation referrals was ‘inappropriate and gives the appearance of a conflict of interest.'” One danger, for example, is that doctors in cases of unclear diagnosis will be given an incentive to diagnose a malady for which compensation can be sought rather than one for which there is no one to blame. “But the Law Society said there was nothing wrong with this practice, as long as all parties were aware that money had been exchanged.” (BBC, Aug. 27) (& letter to the editor, Jan. 17).
Touchy Colorado bar
Last month the Colorado Bar Association sent a letter to both major political parties in the state instructing them to have their candidates “focus on the issues, avoid name-calling, and not resort to stereotyping any groups of people as the scapegoats for society?s complex problems. This includes generalized attacks aimed at judges or lawyers.” According to a Denver Post editorial (“How many lawyers does it take…”, Sept. 20):
“It totally cracked us up,” said Chris Gates, chairman of the Colorado Democratic Party. “I’ve received a lot of letters advocating for this issue or that, but this was the first letter that said ‘could you please refrain from saying mean things.”‘
Ted Halaby, a prominent lawyer and chairman of the state Republican Party, said the letter “showed a certain ultra-sensitivity.”
House votes to strengthen sanctions against meritless suits
By a 229-174 vote, largely along party lines, the U.S. House of Representatives has passed the proposed Lawsuit Abuse Reduction Act, sponsored by Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas); it now goes on to an uncertain future in the Senate. (see Point of Law Sept. 9, Aug. 17, Jun. 21; this site, Jun. 21). (Bloomberg, Reuters, AP). The bill would restore the stronger Rule 11 standards which used to entitle victims of meritless litigation in federal court to recompense in the form of sanctions: a previous Congress, following a major push by the litigation lobby, gutted Rule 11 in 1993. A source on Capitol Hill who is in a position to know suggests that we might want to provide a link to the House Judiciary Committee Report on today’s bill, the Lawsuit Abuse Reduction Act. “The report compiles in one place a ton of information on the problem of lawsuit abuse, with many of the examples of frivolous lawsuits drawn from your Web site”. And indeed, a quick glance at several sections of the report suggests that we did serve as an important source of material, for which we’re grateful.
Court: Flatley can sue sex-charge lawyer for extortion
A California appeals court has ruled that Michael Flatley, famed for the dance productions “Riverdance” and “Lord of the Dance”, can sue D. Dean Mauro, “a Waukegan, Ill., attorney who filed a $35 million suit falsely accusing the Irish dancer of raping an ex-stripper in a Las Vegas hotel room.” Twenty-five days after a sexual encounter between Flatley and Tyna Marie Robertson, Robertson called police to claim the encounter had been rape. According to the court ruling, “Mauro spent the next few months calling the dancer’s lawyers … threatening to ‘go public’ with the allegations, to ‘ruin’ Flatley and demanding $1 million for his and Robertson’s silence.” After Flatley sued Mauro for extortion, Mauro unsuccessfully invoked the protection of the state’s “SLAPP” (“Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation”) statute and also unsuccessfully claimed that his communications with Flatley’s lawyers were protected by the litigation privilege for lawyer-to-lawyer communication. “The only thing he did was represent his client,” said James Holmes, a lawyer for Mauro. “It’s all privileged.” The original lawsuit by Robertson was withdrawn after Flatley countersued. (Mike McKee, “Calif. Court Revives Lord of the Dance’s $100M Extortion Suit Against Lawyer”, The Recorder, Sept. 3). Update Jul. 30, 2006: Calif. high court agrees Flatley can sue.
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).
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.
Bad lawyer files: Fourth yacht’s the charm
Or, “Not only loose lips sink ships.”
Bloggers Grace and Wallace point us to the tale of the infamous (and now suspended) attorney Rex DeGeorge, which has important lessons how the plaintiffs’ bar has made insurance more expensive for all of us: because insurers who suspect fraud risk substantial liability for “bad faith” denial of coverage (e.g., May 5, where an insurer who merely investigated an $8,000 chiropractor’s bill was hit with a $150,000 judgment), insurance scamsters can manipulate the system by threatening a suit. For an individual case, simply defending the non-payment may be more expensive than making the payment; even on a systematic basis, the risk of losing a case and facing punitive damages can put insurers in a bind. This is lengthy, but worth it.
Fieger does it again
We’ve previously covered the exploits of Geoffrey Fieger (Jul. 24; May 31, 2001). Fieger is nationally known for defending Dr. Kevorkian, but he’s also had over $100 million in jury verdicts thrown out because of his outrageous behavior in court. Fieger’s strategy is to inflame the jury, get a huge verdict, and then hope it stands up in response to the inevitable defense motion for new trial and appeal. Most recently, in a cerebral palsy case Fieger sought to blame on a Dr. Ronald Jordan, he delivered the following in a closing argument:
“Please, please, nurses,” Fieger said in his closing arguments, “I’m a little baby, I want to play baseball, I want to hug my mother, I want to tell her that I love her. Help me. Please help me to be born.”
Judge Lawther “called it a ‘performance far beyond the bounds of theatrical license,’ designed to appeal to the jury’s natural sympathy through passion and prejudice–two factors the law says should not enter into verdicts.” (Compare: John Edwards’s closing argument in a similar case discussed in a New York Times article we linked on Jan. 31.) A Cuyahoga County jury voted 6-2 to award $30 million to Walter Hollins in May, and the judge tossed the verdict last week. Fieger defends his closing as “his specialty.” Just so. (James F. McCarthy, “Judge rejects $30 million for malpractice”, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Aug. 27). (Updates: more on case, Oct. 11; verdict reinstated, Nov. 20).