Rev. Jeremiah Cummings of Orlando wants $50 million from Lionsgate for his unflattering portrayal on screen, saying Bill Maher and his filmmaking team did not level with him about the kind of movie they were making. However, as Matthew Heller notes, similar remorse suits over Sacha Baron Cohen’s “Borat” mostly flopped, with eight of nine thrown out before the discovery stage.
Posts Tagged ‘Florida’
February 1 roundup
- A “retired Reserve captain is threatening to sue her local California school board if the board’s members do not address her by her military title” [Navy Times, Popehat]
- Members revolt at Florida bar’s selling their email addresses to marketers; general counsel of bar suggests they maintain multiple email addresses [Daily Business Review]
- “Panel Upholds $17M Attorney Fee Award, Cites Bad-Faith Patent Litigation by Drug Companies” [NLJ; fees awarded to Takeda Chemical Industries against Mylan Laboratories and Alphapharm Pty. Ltd.]
- Much of what you think you know about the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act is wrong [Stuart Taylor, Jr./National Journal; Point of Law, more]
- Not only prejudicial, but a whiskery urban legend to boot: fictional “Winnebago tale” (man thinks cruise control function will drive RV for him, sues after crash) makes its way into an Australian lawyer’s courtroom argument [Rees v. Bailey Aluminium Products]
- Posner was scathing about the class action lawyers’ conflicts of interest in the Mirfasihi v. Fleet Mortgage Co. case, but Max Kennerly thinks the judge got the case wrong [Litigation and Trial, earlier]
- Fight erupts over fee split in Blue Cross eating-disorder class action settlement [NJLJ, earlier]
- “Many attorneys from both parties also marvel at the sheer number of lawyers Obama has picked so far” in staffing White House [Washington Post]
More on cosmetics giveaway settlement
Susan Taylor Martin writes in the St. Petersburg Times on problems with class-action settlements, including a recent one in Florida that seems basically to have pitted Florida drivers against Florida taxpayers (she quotes me on how this can empower lawyers to move money from our left pockets to our right pockets at a high overhead cost). She also reports on the national cosmetics giveaway that recently took place following a class-action antitrust suit (see Jan. 29, etc.) A highlight:
I also asked Saveri [San Francisco class-action attorney Guido Saveri, one of the lead counsel] if he thought the giveaway program had been rather loosely administered. Customers didn’t have to prove they were part of the class, and there was nothing to stop them from getting as many cosmetics as they could. The result: Stores quickly ran out and a lot of people who were members of the class didn’t get anything.
“I think it was very well administered,” Saveri said, a bit huffily. “Each person had to file a piece of paper that they were entitled to one product — whether you want to lie about it I can’t control that.”
Before we hung up I asked Saveri if any of his female relatives got free cosmetics. Turns out the giveaway was off limits to attorneys’ families.
But with $24 million, they can afford to shop at Neiman-Marcus. As for me, I’ll wait until L’Oreal goes on sale at my local CVS.
Back in November 2006, we called it a “no-blush, high-gloss, invisible-foundation antitrust class action”.
Dives into river on dare, jury awards $76 million
“Timothy D. Hoffman broke his neck when he sprinted down a dock and slammed headfirst into the bottom of the shallow river. Good luck collecting, though: The defendant, C&D Dock Works, filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy because of the incident.” According to those present, Hoffman jumped in on a dare to win money from co-workers; the owner of the dock works said there had been a rail at the dock’s edge. [Obscure Store; Orlando Sentinel]
More: commenters, and John Hochfelder, point out the bankrupt defendant’s effective failure to mount a defense. And Jacob Sullum has a post at Reason “Hit and Run”.
Ricochet off low granite tee marker
The golf accident in Hillsborough County, Florida resulted in a $1 million payout. Several legal bloggers discussed the case on Twitter and Nicole Black picked us up on her compilation site, LegalTweets (which is worth checking out generally).
Florida judge: stripper just his business partner
Well, that sounded plausible enough. Who knew there’d turn out to be more to the story?
New at Point of Law
Lots of good reading at my other law site:
- Hiring lawyers just to disqualify them from representing opponent? You mean there’s some ethical problem with that?
- Escaping East Texas’s patent-litigation Roach Motel;
- Gov. Crist to leave liberal majority intact on Florida Supreme Court?
- Lefty legal groups, including Center for Constitutional Rights and Alien Tort shops, reel as Madoff nukes foundation endowments;
- Check out new Ars Technica law and policy blog;
- Harvey Silverglate hopes Senators put Attorney General nominee Eric Holder on hot seat about notorious “Holder Memo”;
- Lawsuit-averse? Then avoid linking to Jones Day “like a hound dog avoids taking a bath” (BlockShopper case)
- Too bad NYTimes didn’t fact-check Bob Herbert op-ed on Chicago sit-in strike.
ATRA’s “Judicial Hellholes 2008”
The American Tort Reform Association is out with its annual ranking of the jurisdictions where it thinks civil defendants are farthest from being assured a fair trial, and they are:
- West Virginia
- South Florida
- Cook County, Ill.
- Atlantic County, NJ
- Montgomery and Macon Counties, Ala.
- Los Angeles County, CA
- Clark County (Las Vegas), Nev.
The list reflects the views of big-company managers and lawyers as to tort lawsuits; a poll of, say, doctors might result in different nominations (Brooklyn, Bronx, Long Island*, Philadelphia) and one of class-action or patent-infringement defendants would likely produce yet other lists.
ATRA has a supplementary “Watch List”, nicknamed by some of us “Heckholes”, of toasty but not quite infernal jurisdictions, on which it places the Rio Grande Valley and Gulf Coast of Texas, Madison County, Ill., Baltimore, Md., and St. Louis city and county and Jackson County, Mo. It also offers side essays on notable scandals among high-rolling lawyers, trial lawyer-AG alliances, and pro-plaintiff’s-bar lobbying efforts.
Some coverage of the report: Pero, ShopFloor (with this and this on AG alliances), Ambrogi, Genova, CalBizLit (“We’re Number 6! We’re Number 6!), TortsProf, Miller (Baltimore), and Turkewitz (cross-posted from Point of Law; also note this recent post).
* Commenter VMS makes a case that Long Island does not belong on such a list.
Liable for permitting customer to push overfilled shopping cart
November 4 roundup
- Thanks to guestbloggers Victoria Pynchon (of Negotiation Law Blog) and Jason Barney for lending a hand last week;
- Will the U.S. government need to sponsor its own motorcycle gang in order to hold on to trademark confiscated from “Mongols” group? [WSJ law blog]
- With a little help for its friends: Florida Supreme Court strikes down legislated limits on fees charged by workers’ comp attorneys [St. Petersburg Times, Insurance Journal]
- Stripper, 44, files age discrimination complaint after losing job at Ontario club [YorkRegion.com, Blazing Cat Fur via Blog of Walker] The stripper age bias complaint we covered eight years ago was also from Ontario;
- Federal judge green-lights First Amendment suit by college instructor who says he was discriminated against for conservative political beliefs [NYLJ] (link fixed now)
- Judge orders parties to settle dispute over noisy parrots after it reaches £45,700 in legal costs [Telegraph]
- How to make sure you’re turned down when applying for admittance to the bar [Ambrogi, Massachusetts]
- Questions at depositions can be intended to humiliate and embarrass, not just extract relevant information [John Bratt, Baltimore Injury Lawyer via Miller]