Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Posts Tagged ‘taxpayers’

Pro bono as profit center, cont’d

Just so you’re totally clear on the meaning of the term pro bono when you read it from now on:

McMinimee [Seattle Public Schools attorney Shannon McMinimee] says it’s “disingenuous” for the law firm, Davis Wright Tremaine, to go after money when the firm took the case pro bono. But firm spokesman Mark Usellis said “pro bono” means their clients don’t have to pay.

“The thing that’s really important to us in a civil-rights case is that Congress specifically and explicitly wrote into the law that if the government is found to have violated citizens’ civil rights, then the prevailing party should seek fee recovery,” he said.

Most governments can argue, as Seattle Public Schools is, that they don’t have much money. But going after the fees helps deter other government bodies from violating civil rights, Usellis said….

If the firm wins, the fees likely wouldn’t be covered by the district’s insurance carrier, McMinimee said. So the money would have to come out of the district’s $490 million general-fund budget.

(Emily Heffter, “Law firm wants school district to pay $1.8M”, Seattle Times, Sept. 6).

Filed under: , , ,

Illinois court: Taxpayers not responsible for porch collapse

In June 2003, there was a tragic porch collapse at an apartment building in Chicago; 13 people were killed and at least 50 more were injured. The quest for deep pockets began; as we discussed in August 2005, even though the porch was on private property, trial lawyers aimed their litigation guns at the city of Chicago, on the theory that Chicago taxpayers have more money than the building owner if city inspectors had done a better job, the accident wouldn’t have happened.

A trial judge bought that argument, but yesterday, in a victory for taxpayers, an appellate court reversed that ruling, holding that, contrary to the theory of the trial lawyers, the city is not a guarantor that nothing bad will ever happen within its city limits. The mere fact that the city inspectors failed to issue violation notices for the porch construction does not make the city financially liable for the collapse; if it did, then the potential to extend liability to taxpayers would be limited only by the imagination of the trial lawyer. Police fail to stop a driver who’s speeding, and he later hits you? Blame the city. Inspectors don’t make your neighbor cut down the dead tree on his property, and it falls on your house during a storm? Blame the city. The possibilities are endless.

The victims of the accident do have a legitimate case — but that legitimate case is against the building landlord, not taxpayers. But those deep pockets aren’t quite deep enough, so the trial lawyers aren’t satisfied with that answer:

But plaintiffs’ lawyers said that was not enough.

Pappas and his companies have about $17 million in insurance coverage, said Terry Ekl, who represents the family of Robert Koranda, who died in the collapse.

“Without the City of Chicago in the case, these families are not going to get anywhere near fair compensation,” Ekl said.

If the Appellate Court’s ruling stands, the plaintiffs would take up the issue with state lawmakers, Murphy said.

“We’re going to be having our clients go down to the legislature and say, ‘You can’t be letting this happen,’ ” Murphy said. “These children cannot have died or be injured in vain.’

Yep; they’re not doing it for their own bank accounts; rather, this is For the Children™.

Filed under: , , ,

Dog bites taxpayers

In 2002, a couple of Rottweilers attacked and seriously injured Marguene St. Juste, a woman in Delray Beach, Florida. Last week, the jury awarded this woman $3.76 million for her injuries. Routine — if expensive — dog bite case, right? The patented Overlawyered twist? The jury decided that the owner of the Rottweilers, who had allegedly repeatedly allowed the dogs to run free, was only 40% responsible for this tragedy. The other 60% of the blame — no, not the dogs, or the victim, or the doctors who treated her, or anybody obvious like that. Rather, the majority of the responsibility was assigned to the city of Delray Beach, Florida.

(The allocation of fault might call into question the value of defense attorneys; the dogs’ owner didn’t even bother to defend herself, and defaulted in the case, while the city defended itself vigorously. And yet the city bore the brunt of the verdict. Of course, a plausible alternate explanation is that the plaintiff simply picked on the deepest pocket, and the jury went along out of sympathy.)

The city was blamed based on the theory that the city knew that the dogs were running loose — the city disputed this, arguing that they never actually witnessed the dogs unsecured — and failed to impound them, as its city ordinance required. But even if the allegations against the city are true, how can it make the city more liable than the owner?

More importantly, why should it make the city liable at all? It doesn’t in other contexts; you can’t sue the police for failing to arrest a dangerous criminal, for instance. (It’s well-established that the police do not have a legal duty to protect you, absent special circumstances.) Once again, we see trial lawyers perversely arguing that an inconsistently-followed safety rule should make a defendant more liable than not having a safety rule at all. If Delray Beach had no animal control ordinance, it could not have been sued under these circumstances. But because it had one, taxpayers rare on the hook for up to $2.2 million. Now, we don’t expect trial lawyers to care about the incentives that their lawsuits create; after all, they’re just in this game for the money. But shouldn’t our legal system factor in these public policy considerations?

(I should note that there is one circumstance in which it is logical to punish a defendant for not following its safety rules: when an injured party took an extra risk in reliance upon the safety policy, and then the defendant failed to follow that policy. But that’s not the situation presented here. The victim wasn’t attacked by the dogs because of the policy.)

Filed under: ,

“Pro Bono” doesn’t mean cheap

One of the secrets of so-called “pro bono” work is that it often isn’t pro bono at all. Instead, it’s really contingency work: firms don’t bill their clients, but if they win, they recover their fees under various statutes, such as the Voting Rights Act, that require the loser — often the government — to pay the attorneys fees of the winner. These statutes are designed to incentivize law firms to take these cases — cases where the plaintiffs often can’t pay and where there’s no big monetary award at stake from which the attorneys can take a cut.

But if the attorneys would take the cases anyway, even if they didn’t get paid all that money, does it really make sense for the courts to award them all their fees? Last month, in a Voting Rights Act case, the Second Circuit said, “Not necessarily.” (PDF.) Rather, the courts should look at how much the plaintiffs would have to pay in the marketplace to convince lawyers to take the cases, and should award fees on that basis. The courts should consider whether these lawyers are really taking the cases “to promote the lawyer’s own reputational or societal goals” — and if so, the court should only award a portion of the fees. (One factor the Second Circuit glosses over is that many of the large law firms that take these cases — Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher handled this particular case — don’t really care about the fees; they really use these cases as a way to provide free training to their younger attorneys without having to risk cases involving their paying clients.)

(Gibson, Dunn’s credibility when making their fee request presumably wasn’t enhanced by the fact that they had previously tried to bill over $100,000 for 300 hours of work when “the entire argument section of the brief on this single-issue appeal occupied barely six pages.”)

But Adam Liptak (Time$elect, May 28) reports that many civil rights groups and other “public interest organizations” are up in arms over this decision, terrified that they might be forced to shop around for attorneys instead of getting taxpayers to pay for attorneys at the highest big firm rates for their causes:

In a flurry of legal filings last week, the lawyers, supported by two bar associations and 29 public interest organizations — including the Urban Justice Center, Public Citizen, the Natural Resources Defense Council and several affiliates of the American Civil Liberties Union — begged the court to reconsider.

“It really is a dangerous decision,” said David Udell, a lawyer with the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, which represents the public interest groups. “What the court does is say that legal work is less valuable when the lawyers’ hearts are in it.”

That’s not actually what the court said at all; what the court said was that lawyers shouldn’t get paid more by taxpayers than they would if they were hired on the open market.

Filed under: , , ,

Supreme Court to review disabled-ed case

As we’ve been noting for a long time (Mar. 24, 2006, etc.), it’s increasingly common for parents of kids with disability diagnoses, after deciding that the public schools are not doing a good job of educating their kids, to enroll the kids in private school programs and stick public school taxpayers with the resulting high bill, citing federal disabled-ed law. (Parents of non-disabled offspring, needless to say, do not enjoy legal options of this sort if they believe the public schools are failing their kids.) Now the Supreme Court has accepted for review a case in which, according to the New York Times’s account, a former chief executive of Viacom did not even give a public school program a try before enrolling his son in a private school and demanding that New York City pick up much of the resulting bill. The New York Times’s account is distinctly unsympathetic toward the parent, and quotes Julie Wright Halbert, legislative counsel for the Council of the Great City Schools, as saying: “Many wealthy, well-educated people are gaming the system in New York City and around the country.” (Joseph Berger, “Fighting Over When Public Should Pay Private Tuition for Disabled”, Mar. 21; Amity Shlaes, “After Viacom, Freston Makes Case for Special Ed”, Bloomberg, Mar. 16; Mary Ellen Egan, “A Costly Education”, Forbes, Apr. 9 (sub)).

Filed under: , , ,

Deep pocket files: Newark police chase

The outrage is so common, we may have to create its own category. This one is in Newark, New Jersey: three car thieves running from police in a stolen SUV swerved into a group of pedestrians. Taxpayers are on the hook for a $3.6 million settlement, a substantial chunk of which will go to attorneys. [AP/Newsday] The Newark police department has “changed its chase policy” as a result; no mention in the press coverage that now criminals know that they are more likely to escape if they engage in a dangerous high-speed getaway, they’re more likely to engage in a high-speed getaway that will endanger the public. Earlier: Feb. 28; Feb. 27; Jan. 9; Nov. 27, 2005 and links therein.

Filed under: , , , , , , ,

Update: San Diego poisoning

A judge has cut from $100 million to $10 million the punitive damages portion of an unusual verdict in a lawsuit arising from Kristin Rossum’s alleged murder by poison of her husband, Gregory de Villers. The distinctive feature of the verdict, on which we commented Mar. 27, was that the jury assigned 25 percent responsibility for the murder to Rossum’s employer, San Diego County, which employed her as a toxicologist and was said to be blameworthy for letting her steal drugs which she administered to him. (“Judge Cuts $90 Million in Damages in San Diego Murder Case”, AP/L.A. Times, Jun. 19)(via Childs).

Filed under: , , , , ,

Police sued over jail suicide

Illinois: “The mother of a Granville man who shot himself last year at the Spring Valley Jail has filed a wrongful death suit against the city, the police chief and a former police officer.” Robert “Steve” McFadin, placed in a holding cell after being charged with violating an order of protection against his estranged wife, wrested away the gun of former Spring Valley police officer Thomas Quartucci and beat him. When Quartucci fled the cell, McFadin used the gun to shoot himself. Quartucci, who was admitted to intensive care after the beating and remained on workers’ comp until retirement, is among the defendants in the suit, which “was filed on [Lori] Hafley’s behalf by Miskell Law Center of Ottawa and the Berkland Law Office of Marseilles. The suit alleges Quartucci violated procedure when he did not secure his loaded weapon before entering the cell. The suit also alleges actions taken by the officers at Spring Valley led to McFadin’s death.” (Erinn Deshinsky, “Mother of suicide victim sues police”, Peoria Journal-Star, Apr. 7). The suit seeks $15 million (John Thompson, “Mother sues Spring Valley, police”, La Salle News Tribune, Apr. 5; Dan Churney, “Police officers named in suicide suit”, Ottawa Times, Apr. 13).

Filed under: , , , , , ,

County 25% responsible for employee’s murder of husband

In a sensational 2002 murder trial with echoes of the film “American Beauty”, Kristin Rossum was found guilty of poisoning husband Gregory de Villers and trying to make his death look like a suicide. Now a lawyer for de Villers’ family has convinced a jury that Rossum’s employer, San Diego County, should be held 25 percent responsible for $6 million in resulting wrongful-death damages. Rossum had access to lethal drugs through her work as a toxicologist for the county, and had not been subject to background screening; she relapsed into methamphetamine use a week before the murder. “It is not the duty of the county of San Diego to prevent a wife from murdering her husband,” said Senior Deputy County Counsel Deborah A. McCarthy, who predicted that the county would succeed in overturning the verdict on appeal. “If this case stands, it will expand public liability in a way the state of California never envisioned.” (“Millions of Dollars Awarded to Family of Man Killed by Toxicologist Wife”, North County Times, Mar. 20)(via Childs). Update Jul. 2: judge cuts verdict.

Filed under: , , , , ,