- “Highly embarrassing …ugly”: Florida Justice Association apologizes for race-baiting mailer intended to sway state senate race [Miami Herald, Orlando Sentinel]
- Fanny-state regulation: they wouldn’t really ban soft toilet paper, would they? [Washington Post via Logomasini, CEI “Open Market”]
- Update on David Michaels OSHA nomination [Carter Wood, PoL] More: Fox News.
- Library of Congress has expanded its law research website, includes archiving project for legal weblogs including this one;
- David Leonhardt, NYT economics columnist, looks at defensive medicine debate [“Economic Scene”]
- “Republicans denounce identity politics, except when they engage in it themselves.” [Heather Mac Donald, Secular Right]
- Aw: Ron Coleman recalls “one of my proudest weeks of blogging”. [Likelihood of Success]
- Dewey Decimal System owner sues NYC’s Library Hotel [six years ago at Overlawyered — link fixed now]
Posts Tagged ‘Florida’
“Plaintiffs’ Firm Sued by Potential Client After Chair Collapse”
Lowering the Bar has the story of Robert Friedrich, who after being in a car accident took up the Palm Beach, Fla. firm of Fetterman & Associates on its offer of a free office consultation. “He left with more legal options than he had come in with, because during that consultation the chair he was sitting in collapsed and he hit his head on another piece of furniture in the firm’s conference room.” The resulting $2.2 million jury verdict was divided between the law firm and a furniture store; the law firm said the chair was defective and that the manufacturer should have been responsible.
State senate shootout in Florida
Next Tuesday Jacksonville-area Republican voters will vote in a primary to fill a state senate vacancy, with a leading candidate being John Thrasher, who was instrumental in helping the administration of Gov. Jeb Bush steer liability reform through the legislature in 1999. As a result, Thrasher has drawn frenetic attack ads from the state’s personal injury bar and its allies, including a group calling itself Conservative Citizens for Justice, which turns out to be led by a past president of the state’s AAJ affiliate, the Florida Justice Association. [Dan Pero, American Courthouse; Times-Union and more; Jacksonville Observer] In response, Jeb Bush has cut a TV ad for Thrasher pointedly directed at the lawyers. [Miami Herald]
Miami fire fee, cont’d: Adorno faces possible bar discipline
“Hank Adorno, head of the nation’s largest minority-owned law firm, violated nine Florida Bar rules when he engineered a $7 million class action settlement that distributed money to only seven people instead of all Miami taxpayers, the state regulatory agency for attorneys claims.” [Billy Shields, Daily Business Review and Law.com; earlier here and here]
August 7 roundup
- Hold on to your hat: Litigation Lobby ally and Grade A business-basher David Michaels — who founded a project purportedly advancing the cause of scientific integrity with money furnished by, of all groups, the silicone breast implant bar — named to head OSHA [Wood/PoL; more on SKAPP]
- City of Clearwater, Florida bans playing catch on beach or in park [Popehat]
- In wake of Kindle “1984” episode, watch for lawyers to start demanding remote line-item deletion of allegedly defamatory or infringing matter from books after publication [Moshirnia, Citizen Media Law]
- Amicus brief exposes more free-speech problems with that federal law banning depictions of animal cruelty [Volokh, earlier]
- “Crocs settles safety suits over escalator injuries” [Matthew Heller, OnPoint News, earlier]
- Was he planning to drive somewhere? MADD official objects to Obama’s appearing on TV drinking a beer [Sullum, Reason “Hit and Run”]
- Air crash lawsuit charges Oklahoma City didn’t do enough to keep Wiley Post Airport free of birds [NewsOK.com/The Oklahoman]
- Many dubious things in health care bill, but “mandatory end-of-life care discussions” not among them [C.B. Brown, Politico]
Two Florida men prosecuted for “gang hand gestures” on MySpace
Two Lee County, Florida men face possible prison sentences of five years because their MySpace pages show them making hand gestures that prosecutors say are associated with street gangs. “Their prosecutions are the first under a state law passed last year that criminalizes the use of electronic media to ‘promote’ gangs.” The bill’s sponsor, state legislator Rep. William D. Snyder, R-Stuart, says in response to charges that the measure violates the First Amendment by criminalizing expression: “none of our freedoms are absolute, and the freedom of expression is not absolute”. [Steven Beardsley, Naples Daily News, Jul. 30] (& welcome Reason “Hit and Run”, Coyote readers)
The civil litigation death penalty
There’s an old legal joke that goes: “If you’re weak on the facts, pound the law. If you’re weak on the law, pound the facts. If you’re weak on both the facts and the law, pound the table.”
Except the entrepreneurial trial bar has found an intermediate step: instead of pounding the table, pound the discovery requests. Persuade a judge that a discovery snafu was really a deliberate attempt at a cover-up, and get sanctions that prohibit the other side from defending itself. Because plaintiffs rarely have discovery obligations that are more than an infinitesmal fraction of a defendant’s discovery obligations, this can be a profitable strategy.
The strategy is not new–I saw it myself first-hand in the 1990s defending GM, and wrote a piece about a trial where John Edwards successfully used a variant. But as discovery gets more and more complex due to emails, voicemails, and instant-messaging, it becomes easier for the discovery snafu to happen, and it becomes harder for judges to distinguish between good-faith mistakes and bad-faith withholding of documents. You may recall a famous example in Florida where Morgan Stanley was precluded from introducing evidence about a transaction involving Sunbeam before the appellate court threw out the entire case.
A recent example of this sort of gamesmanship is going on now in Florida where a group of lawyers representing Ecuadorian shrimp farmers came up with a brand new implausible theory of their case–now alleging that runoff from a formulation of a Benlate fungicide that stopped being used in 1991 is what caused their damages in the mid-to-late 1990s, all so they can claim to a judge that DuPont’s failure to produce documents about this marginally relevant formulation (which was effectively identical to the other formulations, except it included two inert ingredients) deserved sanctions. And sure enough, the court ordered a civil death penalty: all of DuPont’s defenses have been stricken, even though there is no scientific evidence that fungicide runoff caused the virus that killed many Ecuadorian shrimp. (Aquamar S.A. v. DuPont, Case No. 97-020375 (Broward County, Fla.))
A similar case involving Goodyear and a civil death penalty sanction that resulted in a $30 million verdict is pending in the Nevada Supreme Court.
Florida and zero tolerance
Florida governor Charles Crist has signed SB 1540, a bill that “requires school boards to revisit their zero-tolerance policies” and is aimed at [Tallahassee Democrat:]
reducing the number of juveniles who are needlessly thrust into the system because of minor infractions — most commonly, petty disobedience.
Consider cases from several headlines: In March, a Lakeland boy was suspended from school for intentionally passing gas on a school bus. In Hernando County, an 11-year-old girl was suspended for bringing a plastic butter knife to school. A student in Brandon was suspended because a calculator he brought to school was equipped with a “knife-like object.”
Ken at Popehat has more discussion, and links to our zero-tolerance archive.
Former employee says she wasn’t paid
Rosalie Farnsworth made various charges against the publisher of a defunct South Florida magazine; now he says he’s suing her for defamation. [Broward Palm Beach New Times, its earlier report]
“Inmate sues to get vintage truck owned by couple he killed”
Florida death row inmate William Deparvine has a bona fide law degree, which has helped him keep going in his extensive litigation against the survivors of Richard and Karla Van Dusen. Deparvine was found guilty at trial of killing the Van Dusens for their vintage Chevy pickup, which he claims to have bought. [St. Petersburg Times via Obscure Store, whose headline is quoted above]