Posts Tagged ‘New York state’

$11 million verdict against pediatrician

Two sisters were repeatedly raped and sexually abused by their older half-brother. This is, a federal jury decided, the fault of their pediatrician, Dr. Patricia Monroe, who failed to report the abuse–though there was no evidence she was aware of the scope of it. Monroe’s attorney “says that’s because the girl refused to speak to Monroe and because the incident wasn’t reportable to Child Protective Services.” The decision will be appealed. (Chris Knight, “Monroe to appeal $11M verdict”, Adirondack Daily Enterprise, Sep. 3).

A message has been sent: make defensive reports to Child Protective Services, and parents will all be worse off when CPS overreacts.

Filed under: child protection, Child Protective Services, medical, New York state, third party liability for crime

February 18 roundup

Golfer’s ball bounces off yardage marker and hits him in eye, and he sues; not the Florida case we blogged last month, this one took place in New Hampshire [Manchester Union-Leader]
Who needs democracy, much easier just to let the Litigation Lobby run things: elected Illinois lawmakers keep enacting limits on med-mal awards, but trial-lawyer-friendly Illinois Supreme Court keeps striking them down, third round pending at the moment [Peoria Journal-Star, Alton Telegraph, Illinois Times, Reality Medicine (ISMS)]
“A sword-wielding, parent-killing psychopath can be such a help around the house.” [we have funny commenters]
Brooklyn lawyer Steven Rondos, charged with particularly horrendous looting of incapacitated clients’ estates [earlier], said to have served the New York State Bar Association “as vice president of its guardianship committee” [NYPost]
Updated annals of public employee tenure: Connecticut state lawyer who assumed bogus identity to write letter that got her boss fired drew a $1000 fine as well as a reprimand — and then got a raise [Jon Lender/Hartford Courant and more, earlier here and here]
Judge Bobby DeLaughter indicted and arraigned as new chapter of Dickie Scruggs judicial-corruption story gets under way in Mississippi; Tim Balducci and Steve Patterson, central figures in Scruggs I, each draw 2-year sentences [NMC/Folo and more, more, YallPolitics, more, earlier on Balducci, DeLaughter]
Disney “Tower of Terror” ride not therapeutic for all patrons: British woman sues saying she suffered heart attack and stroke after riding it several times [AP]
Convicted of torching his farm, Manitoba man sues his insurance company for not making good on policy [five years ago on Overlawyered]

Filed under: bar associations, Dickie Scruggs, Disney, golf, Illinois, New Hampshire, New York state, public employment, wills and trusts

New at Point of Law

If you’re not visiting my other site — or subscribing to it in your RSS reader, or following its Twitter feed — here’s some of what you may have missed lately:

Sen. Obama’s “I voted for tort reform” talk: maybe not so serious;
Assaults on arbitration and pre-emption are just the start of the Litigation Lobby’s big plans for next year;
A new featured column by Richard Epstein on the peculiarly named Employee Free Choice Act;
Manhattan Institute’s Trial Lawyers, Inc. project is out with a new report on West Virginia;
U.S. Department of Commerce: foreign investors fear our litigation climate;
Albany plaintiff’s firm Powers & Santola ladles out campaign money to judges it practices before;
Through the wringer? Judge Posner is quite severe on a clothes-dryer class action.

Filed under: arbitration, Barack Obama, card check, class actions, judicial elections, Manhattan Institute, New York state, Richard Epstein, Richard Posner, Twitter, West Virginia

Microblog 2008-10-30

Days of “Clean up your room or I’ll drop you off in Nebraska” threat may be numbered [NY Times; earlier] #
Bigger jury verdicts during the holidays? A bit of legal folklore is disproved (at least if you posit that the cases docketed at that time of year are a random selection) [Point of Law] #
NY budgeters, dependent on Wall Street tax revenue, built a public sector house of cards [McMahon/City Journal] #
Funniest Photoshop: “Toto, I have a feeling we are not in Alaska anymore” [Zincavage] #
Why they call it Euro-sclerosis [Coyote] #

Filed under: Europe, juries, Nebraska, New York state

Microblog 2008-10-27

“Energy independence is no more desirable than coffee independence, banana independence, or car independence.” [David Henderson, EconLog] #
L.I.R.R.: a disability certification outfit disguised as a railroad [Bogdanich, N.Y. Times] #
Even post-scandal, private attorneys for towns can still collar lucrative NY state pensions [Peddie, Newsday] #
Lining up for bailout bucks: automakers and even mass transit [Carney] #
Poll of worst law firm names (“Low, Ball & Lynch”) [Greatest American Lawyer; h/t @SCartierLiebel] #
List of legal newsfeeds on Twitter, now updated [JD Scoop] #

Filed under: autos, lawyers, Long Island, New York state, railroads, Twitter

October 24 roundup

Chemerinsky, other critics should apologize to Second Circuit chief judge Dennis Jacobs over bogus “he doesn’t believe in pro bono!” outcry [Point of Law and update]
New York high court skeptical of ultra-high contingency fee in Alice Lawrence v. Graubard Miller case [NYLJ; earlier here and here]
Panel of legal journalists: press let itself be used in attack on Judge Kozinski [Above the Law]
Unfree campaign speech, cont’d: South Dakota anti-abortion group sues to suppress opponents’ ads as “patently false and misleading” [Feral Child]
Even if you’re tired of reading about Roy Pearson’s pants, you might still enjoy Carter Wood’s headlines on the case at ShopFloor [“Pandora’s Zipper“, “Suit Alors!“]
Rare grant of fees in patent dispute, company had inflicted $2.5 million in cost on competitors and retailers by asserting rights over nursing mother garb [NJLJ]
Time to be afraid? Sen. Bingaman (D-N.M.) keen on reintroducing talk-radio-squelching Fairness Doctrine [Radio Equalizer]
“Yours, in litigious anticipation” — Frank McCourt as child in Angela’s Ashes drafted a nastygram with true literary flourish [Miriam Cherry, Concurring Opinions]

Filed under: Alex Kozinski, broadcasters, campaign regulation, contingent fee, Erwin Chemerinsky, Ireland, nastygrams, New York state, patent quality, pro bono, Roy Pearson, sanctions, Second Circuit, South Dakota

“Late filing syndrome”

That’s the explanation given by Charles J. O’Byrne’s lawyer for why his client didn’t file income taxes for year after year. I’ve never tried that one myself, but then, I’m not the chief aide to the governor of the state of New York, the way O’Byrne is. He has no plans to resign from his position. (Nicholas Confessore and Jeremy W. Peters, “Governor’s Aide Had ‘Late-Filing Syndrome,’ Lawyer Says”, New York Times, Oct. 23).

Relatedly or otherwise, Carolyn Elefant at Legal Blog Watch notes (Oct. 22) that Harpreet Singh Brar, known to Overlawyered readers for his abusive mass mailing of demand letters to California businesses,

came up with an even better defense to charges of failure to file tax returns on behalf of himself and his professional corporation: ineffective assistance of counsel. Sounds promising, except when you consider that Brar is an attorney who represented himself at trial. On appeal, he’s argued that he did not knowingly waive his right to counsel, and that he may have been under the influence of drugs and alcohol at the time of the waiver. Not surprisingly, the appeals court rejected Brar’s argument. (Source: Metropolitan News-Enterprise.)

Filed under: blue-ribbon excuses, New York state, s. 17200, taxes

“This should clear things up”

Courtesy New York magazine, which explains (Sept. 15) that the New York State Department of Transportation “created this flowchart ‘to help explain the complexities of the project development process to new Department staff, outside agencies, and the public.'” Full chart here.

Filed under: New York state

How trial lawyer urban legends get started

Public Citizen wrote a report about New York medical malpractice that said:

Physicians who made three or more malpractice payments between 1990 and 2006 – accounting for no more than 4 percent of New York’s doctors – were responsible for nearly half (49.6 percent) of medical malpractice dollars paid out on behalf of doctors in the time period.

This is technically true, but wildly misleading; we previously refuted this precise statistic as a natural statistical consequence of any randomly distributed set of payouts–and given that doctors in high-risk professions such as neurosurgery or ob/gyn are far more likely to be sued than dermatologists or gerontologists, the random concentration effect is going to be even more pronounced, so the Public Citizen statistic is meaningless without a showing of speciality-adjusted correlation between time periods–something no study has ever found.

But note how blogger Eric Turkewitz writes an op-ed in a small-town New York newspaper that isn’t even satisfied with simply misleading the public, and says something that is out-and-out false:

4 percent of the state’s doctors contribut[e] to half of the malpractice suits [emphasis added]

Not remotely true. “Nearly half of payments” has been turned into “half of malpractice suits.” Justinian Lane, who knows or should know that the latter statistic isn’t true, because his blog posted about the original statistic, then repeats the lie either thoughtlessly or deliberately:

Maybe doctors should discipline the four percent of doctors that make up half of all malpractice claims.

Will either of them retract the false claim with the same fanfare that they made it? Stay tuned. (They certainly won’t explain that there’s nothing damning about the accurate statistic–though I have been refuting this for over three years, Public Citizen and trial lawyers and their fans continue to regurgitate the data as if it means something.)

Filed under: Justinian Lane, lying with statistics, medical malpractice, New York state, Public Citizen, urban legends about lawsuits

Suit: your milkcrates were an attractive nuisance

15-year-old honor student and SADD member Lindsey Billman snuck out of a slumber party with three of her friends and had an alcohol-fueled night with two 18-year-old boys. Around 2:45 a.m., two boys and two girls had the clever idea of stacking milk crates to reach an air-conditioning unit that allowed them to clamber onto the roof of Anna S. Kuhl Elementary School. The two couples went to separate sides of the roof. Billman and Nicholas Moscatiello then had the further clever idea of doing whatever they were doing while sitting on a skylight, which didn’t support their weight, and the 33-foot-fall onto the gymnasium floor below killed Billman.

This is, alleges an Orange County, New York, suit filed by Lindsey’s parents, the fault of the school district and the city of Port Jervis, New York. After all, the district was “irresponsible” stacking milk crates by the school. A curious choice of words: out of the number of people irresponsible here, it seems to me that the district is at most a distant eighth. (Steve Sacco, “Parents suing Port Jervis, school in girl’s fatal fall through roof”, Times Herald-Record, Jul. 26; Adam Bosch, “1 teen dead, 1 critical in fall”, Times Herald-Record, Jan. 27). The attorney is Corey Stark, a 2001 law-school graduate in New York City who has single-handedly refuted the proposition that New York state needs more law schools. (Thought experiment: if the milk crates are an attractive nuisance, why isn’t the dairy liable?)

Filed under: New York state, personal responsibility, schools, skylights, trespassers