Coyote Blog

WSJ, via Libertarian Leanings:

One of the worst places, in
term of frivolous lawsuits, was Jefferson County. It became renowned as
the lawsuit capital of the country, with more plaintiffs than
residents. This is the infamous county where one pharmacist was named
in more than 1,000 lawsuits. In one legendary case against a
pharmaceutical company that sold the diet pill Pondimin (part of the
weight-loss combination known as fen-phen, which was later banned), a
Jefferson County jury awarded $1 billion to the family of a woman who
had taken the drug.

But four years ago, Mississippi transformed itself
from judicial hell hole to job magnet, a story that is instructive for
other states trying to attract jobs in turbulent economic times. The
lessons here are especially timely, because the pro-growth tort reform
trend that was once spreading across the country may soon reverse
course....

Almost overnight, the flow
of lawsuits began to dry up and businesses started to trickle in.
Federal Express invested $1 billion in a new facility in the state.
Toyota chose Mississippi over about a dozen other states for a new $1.2
billion, 2,000-worker auto plant. The auto maker has stipulated that
the company would pull up stakes if the tort reforms were overturned by
the legislature or activist judges.

That hasn't happened. About 60,000 new jobs have
arrived in four years "“ not a small number in a workforce of about 1.3
million "“ and a sharp improvement from the 30,000 jobs lost in the four
years before Mr. Barbour took office. Since the law took effect, the
number of medical malpractice lawsuits has fallen by nearly 90%, which
in turn has cut malpractice insurance costs by 30% to 45%, depending on
the county.

TJIC links to this great story about the engineer for the Citicorp building who realized, after the building was erected and occupied, that he had made a mistake that could make the building unsafe in high wind loads.  He raised his hand, called a penalty stroke on himself, and got the thing fixed when many others might have rationalized away taking action.  Fortunately, he was respected for doing so:

Before the city officials left,
they commended LeMessurier for his courage and candor, and expressed a
desire to be kept informed as the repair work progressed. Given the urgency
of the situation, that was all they could reasonably do. "It wasn't a case
of 'We caught you, you skunk,'" Nusbaum says. "It started with a guy who
stood up and said, 'I got a problem, I made the problem, let's fix the
problem.' If you're gonna kill a guy like LeMessurier, why should anybody
ever talk?"

I continue to worry, though, that we are actively aligning incentives against having a quality, open engineering dialog.  In any engineering discussion, I don't think there has been a good safety dialog unless someone takes the position that the design (or drug, or whatever) is still unsafe.  Someone needs to advocate the position that the plan is unsafe even if that position is a straw man.  An open process encourages everyone to raise potential issues, even if these issues turn out not to be problems.

Unfortunately, in court, the very existance of such a discussion is used as evidence of liability.  Plaintiff's lawyers wave internal memos at juries showing them that concern existed about safety.  The very healthy definition of a good safety engineering process - a concern and discussion about safety - is turned into evidence of its lack.  More here.

Despite seeing all kinds of major problems in tort law today, I have never been a huge proponent of many tort law reforms (though I support loser pays).  I don't see why my ability to pursue legitimate damages in court should be curtailed.  What all these tort law reforms never get at is this:

A Glendale jury on Friday cleared an emergency room doctor of
negligence and liability in John Ritter's death, holding he did
everything he could to save the comic actor. ... Jurors, who voted 9 to
3 against liability for Lee and Lotysch, said they were torn between
sympathy for Ritter's wife and children and their conviction that the
doctors were blameless.

The fact that the jury is at all conflicted on this point represents a huge miscarriage of justice, but this goes on every day in court.  In fact, if the doctors had worked for Exxon, you can bet Exxon would have been paying despite being blameless.

What patients (and juries) really seam to want is bad outcomes insurance rather than malpractice insurance.  This is in part born out by the fact that researchers can usually find little statistical relationship between truly bad doctors and the size of court malpractice payouts.  Maybe the answer to malpractice insurance is to convert it to a workers-comp-like no-fault insurance systems that pays off on bad/unexpected outcomes following a fixed schedule and keeps everything out of court.  The reduction in legal costs alone would be staggering.

The lawyers want $695 million

OK, perhaps it is a guilty pleasure, but I enjoy downing a couple of Mike Hard Lemonade's on a hot afternoon.  Now, it seems, the Food Nazi's at the Center for Science in the Public Interest want to stop me"

Public Citizen's blog announced that CSPI
plans to sue the beverage sellers, asking for disgorgement of profits
from flavored malt beverages, unless they agree to take them off the
market. Their theory? By making flavored alcoholic beverages that taste
good, they are effectively marketing to children. (Because, after all,
adults don't like beverages that taste good.)

The AP does a great job in this story reporting absolutely everything but the most important fact:

The Supreme Court has refused to offer help to Hurricane Katrina
victims who want their insurance companies to pay for flood damage to
their homes and businesses.

Wow, those insurance companies suck, and they have the Supreme Court in their pocket.  The only teeny-tiny fact missing is that the people suing had policies that very explicitly did not cover flood damage.    They sortof acknowledge this but say the insurance companies should pay anyway, because the flood was caused by a broken levee and that somehow is not really the same kind of flood, sort of.  Or whatever. 

From Overlawyered:

I was very amused by Brockovich's remark "It is no coincidence that
thousands on Avandia now have heart attacks." Really? Thousands of
people who saw Erin Brockovich in the theaters have had heart
attacks, and many others have had strokes. Some even contracted cancer!
Coincidence, or has Ms. Brockovich put movie royalties ahead of safety?

I think the term "judicial restraint" is often used in another context, but for me, it aptly describes how the Third Circuit avoided calling this guy a f*cking moron.

I have not been able to read a Grisham lawyer novel since "the Runaway Jury,"  which was an absolutely amazing ode to the joys of jury tampering.  Seldom does one see an author treat so many abuses of due process and individual rights so lovingly, all because it is OK to take away a defendant's right to a fair trial as long as the defendant is an out-of-favor corporation.  (On the other hand, Grisham's "the Painted House," about growing up on a small cotton farm in the south, is wonderful).

Grisham's biases in the Runaway Jury become clearer to me now that I now he pals with Dickie Scruggs, notorious Mississippi tort lawyer who is soon to be sharing a cell next to Jeff Skilling, that is unless they can delay his investigation until Jon Edwards is attorney general.

Anyway, it seems Grisham may be up for the bad timing award:

With what might seem like startlingly bad timing, Scruggs chum/novelist (and campaign donation co-bundler,
if that's the right term) John Grisham is just out with a new fiction
entitled The Appeal, whose thesis, to judge by Janet Maslin's oddly favorable review in the Times,
is that the real problem with the Mississippi judicial system is that
salt-of-the-earth plaintiff's lawyers are hopelessly outgunned in the
task of trying to get friendly figures elected to judgeships to sustain
the large jury verdicts they win. One wonders whether any of Maslin's
editors warned her about recent news events -- she doesn't seem aware
of them -- that suggest that the direst immediate problems of the
Mississippi judiciary might not relate to populist plaintiff's lawyers'
being unfairly shut out of influence. Of course it's possible she's not
accurately conveying the moral of Grisham's book, and if so I'm not
likely to be the first to find out about it, since I've never succeeded
in reading more than a few pages of that popular author's work. By the
way, if you're wondering which character in the novel Grisham presents
as the "hothead with a massive ego who hated to lose," yep, it's the
out-of-state defendant.

If you would prefer a novel that make villains of tort lawyers and treats Mississippi as a trial-lawyer run legal hellhole, my novel BMOC is still on sale (and actually selling pretty steadily) at Amazon.

Because of the all-to-prevalent theory (which may become even more common if Jon Edwards becomes our next AG) that every accident must be the fault of the nearest person with deep pockets, I wasted an hour today.

I visited the NFL experience today with my son.  The NFLX is a kind of football-themed fair or amusement park that the NFL sets up near the site of each Superbowl  (HA HA NFL -- I said it.  I said "Superbowl" and not "the big game."  Come and get me).  After waiting in a reasonable line to enter, we found that to play the games (e.g. throw the football through a hoop) every participant (read 10,000+ people) had to individually fill out and sign a liability waiver and get a wristband attesting to the fact.  There were about 16 clerks at work, but it still was about an hour-long wait. 

It struck me that the NFL could have come up with a much better process.  Why not have people with Internet access (about everyone, since almost 98% seemed to be there with tickets they bought on the internet) print out the waiver and bring it with them already filled out?  The manager on-site claimed that Arizona state law and the Arizona AG required that the process proceed the way it did.  I give that explanation about a 50-50 between being correct and just covering their butt for something stupid.

Anyway, once signed, we had a good time at the event, and it was well worth the effort.

More absurd legal theories from the RIAA:

[I]n
an unusual case in which an Arizona recipient of an RIAA letter has
fought back in court rather than write a check to avoid hefty legal
fees, the industry is taking its argument against music sharing one
step further: In legal documents in its federal case against Jeffrey
Howell, a Scottsdale, Ariz., man who kept a collection of about 2,000
music recordings on his personal computer, the industry maintains that it is illegal for someone who has legally purchased a CD to transfer that music into his computer.

The industry's lawyer in the case, Ira Schwartz, argues in a brief
filed earlier this month that the MP3 files Howell made on his computer
from legally bought CDs are "unauthorized copies" of copyrighted
recordings.

"I couldn't believe it when I read that," says Ray Beckerman, a New
York lawyer who represents six clients who have been sued by the RIAA.
"The basic principle in the law is that you have to distribute actual
physical copies to be guilty of violating copyright. But recently, the
industry has been going around saying that even a personal copy on your
computer is a violation."

In the earlier days of this blog, I used to post links to a lot of insane lawsuits.  The lawsuits just keep coming, but I have lost the energy to keep posting such stupidity.  And besides, Overlawyered does such a good job and seems to have infinite patience. 

But it was worth noting a silly shareholder suit that the media actually seems to have sniffed out for what it is:  Pure garbage.  For those who are not aware, there are a group of law firms who immediately file suit against any company whose stock drops by more than a few percent.  Bill Lerach, soon to be taking up residence in jail, used to keep a whole bullpen of folks on a sort of retainer to hold shares in numerous companies, so he instantly had someone close at hand who could file suit when any stock drops.  And since stocks go up and down, often in ways that the company itself has no control over, this leads to a lot of lawsuits.

Recently, the maker of Crocs sandles apparently had an IPO, had its stock price shoot up, and then had its stock price fall back when the company could not sustain its previous torrid growth pace.  Al Lewis of the Denver Post takes it from there:  (HT Overlawyered, of course)

Anybody who purchased stock in
Niwot-based Crocs Inc. between July 27 and Oct. 31 should not join the
class-action shareholders lawsuit that was recently filed against the
company and its stock-dumping executives.

Instead, they should look themselves in the mirror and admit two things:

      

I look ridiculous in these plastic shoes.

      

Anybody
who would pay an average of more than $60 a share for a company that
makes ugly plastic shoes deserves to take a hit in the stock market.

He continues:

Crocs and its officers also allegedly
misrepresented or failed to disclose their distribution problems in
Europe and their rising inventory levels, the lawsuit alleges. They
also failed to disclose that sales of their hole-riddled plastic clogs
were suddenly becoming more of a seasonal item. Imagine that! Sandals
seasonal? Who knew?

By the way, if you really want your head to explode, take a minute a think about shareholder lawsuits.  A group of shareholders are suing the company for a fall in the stock price.  Who do you think pays?  Why, current shareholders!  Though I do not accept the "logic" of these suits, if one were to accept their logic, then the most guilty party is the stockholder who sold the plaintiffs their stock just before the drop.  But these folks are exactly who will NOT owe any money on the suit.  They are no longer owners.  The people who will pay will be the owners of the stock at whatever time the suit settles, likely many people who bought in after the plaintiffs did.  The only real winner when the shareholders pay themselves such a verdict are the lawyers, who rake off 30%.  More on this bizarre situation here.

Update:  I will have to think about this more, but it kind of reminds me of a prisoners dilemma game in which the prosecutor gets a monetary bonus that increases with longer prison terms.

It's been a while since I posted any tort pr0n, so here are a couple of juicy onces:

From West Virginia:

Joe Meadows was drunk. Very drunk. 0.296 percent blood-alcohol content
drunk, 12 or 13 beers worth. Fortunately, he didn't drive in that
state. Unfortunately, he chose to sleep it off by resting under a
parked 18-wheel truck. More unfortunately, the driver, Doug Rader, who
didn't check to see whether there might be drunks lying under his truck
at 1:40 a.m., ran over Meadows. Rader had EMT training, and was able to
save Meadows's life, but Meadows lost a leg, and sued both the truck
company and the store that owned the parking lot. A Kanawha County jury
decided that Meadows was only a third responsible for his injury, which
means he "only" gets two thirds of the three million dollars they
awarded.

And from Florida:

"A police officer has sued the family of a 1-year-old boy who nearly
drowned because she slipped and injured a knee responding to their
9-1-1 rescue call." Andrea Eichhorn, a police sergeant in Casselberry,
Florida, responded to the pool accident, and now "claims the boy's
family left a puddle of water on the floor, causing her fall during the
rescue efforts. She broke her knee and missed two months of work." So
she's suing the Cosmillo family. "It's a situation where the Cosmillos
have caused these problems, brought them on themselves, then tried to
play the victim," says her attorney, David Heil. Joey Cosmillo, the
infant in question, suffered severe brain damage and lives in a nursing
home now.

West Virginia and Florida -- who'd have thought it?

This may be my new favorite tort:  (via Overlawyered)

A Pennsylvania man has sued search giant Google
for $5 billion, claiming that when his Social Security number is turned
upside down, "it is a scrambled code that does spell the name Google."
The handwritten complaint filed in the U.S. District Court in Scranton
alleges that the U.S. Justice Department "is heading the investigation
into allegations of crimes against Humanity" involving Google's
founders and that the plaintiff's "safety is in jepordy."

Up next, the owner of Social Security number 71077345 sues Shell Oil for the same reason.

Unfortunately, in other tort news, this is not a laughing matter.  It is just plain stupid AG megalomania:

For a while now, lawyers in Minnesota, Oklahoma and elsewhere have been suing companies that make over-the-counter cold remedies containing ephedrine and pseudoephedrine on the grounds that they were aware
some buyers were using the drugs as raw material for illegal
methamphetamine labs. Now such litigation appears to be gaining
momentum in Arkansas, where many county governments have signed up to
sue Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, and other companies. "If successful,
it could open up litigation against manufacturers of other produce used
in making meth, such as drain cleaners and acetone."

One local judge discusses the case in a way that sounds like a commercial for the Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes:

"What more could we have done with a million dollars a year for our
county? Would that have meant a half dozen more police officers? Would
that have meant a better solid waste program? Who knows, what could
your county have done with an extra million dollars," asked Judge Bill
Hicks of Independence County, a backer of the suits.

Chris Horner reports that the next mass-state-AG-tort, modeled after their fairly succesful efforts against tobacco companies, will be against oil companies over global warming:

A little birdie recently chirped about some
usual-suspect state attorneys general preparing a litigation strategy
document for/with environmental pressure groups, providing a roadmap
for cooperatively replicating the tobacco litigation of a decade ago in
the "global warming" context, substituting that projected catastrophe
for cancer and "big energy" for tobacco companies.

The point of
such exercise would not be to litigate the matter to conclusion "” ever
more challenging what with forced corrections of the temperature
record, recent exposure of the woeful reliability of our own world's
most reliable surface measuring network, and of course no global
warming in a decade (or, we now know, since 1900 for that matter) "” but
to extract massive settlements from the energy industry to further fund
the trial lawyers, greens and the greens' pet projects. Just imagine
the anti-energy campaign that this model would yield! And at no cost,
really, except to anyone who uses energy and/or invests in these sleepy
"granny stocks". Oh, and the economy.

He goes on to include a copy of the memo making the rounds of the AG offices.   This will certainly be a circus, and generally an expensive time-waster that will just serve to line the pockets of tort lawyers and the politically connected.  If things turn out like the tobacco settlement, the oil companies may jump on board early, since the tobacco settlement has turned into a state-enforced oligopoly for the major tobacco companies.  On the bright side, this might be an opportunity to subpoena the details of a bunch of climate work that is currently kept secret.

Via Overlawyered:

Score another one for personal responsibility: 29-year old St. Louis
Cardinals pitcher Josh Hancock killed himself in April when he drove --
faster than the speed limit, drunk, on a cell phone, and not wearing a
seat belt -- into a tow truck stopped on the side of a road. Obviously,
we ought to blame... everyone except Josh Hancock for this. Three and a
half weeks after the accident, his father has filed suit
in St. Louis against: the restaurant where Hancock was drinking, the
manager of the restaurant, the tow truck driver, the towing company,
and (!) the driver of the stalled vehicle that the tow truck was
assisting, for having the temerity to get his car stuck on the side of
the road.

So far, he hasn't sued the Cardinals or Major League Baseball, but, while praising the team, his lawyer pointedly refused to rule out suing them.

Absolutely hilarious interaction between TJIC and an attorney looking for class actions in all the wrong places.  Extra marks for gratuitous Conan reference. 

And while we are on the subject of class actions, note this case in Overlawyered  where the class itself received a sum total (not average per person, but cumulative total) of $2,402 while their lawyers received $1,000,000.  Once a useful tool for redressing fraudulent behavior, class actions now have become primarily either 1) a profit-making-through-extortion tool for lawyers or 2) a way to legislate without actually going to the legislature. 

Patterico has a link to this interesting account of a week in the life of Jarek Molski, who makes a living from filing ADA suits (emphasis added):

For example, in Molski v. El 7 Mares Restaurant, Case
No. C04-1882 (N.D. Cal. 2004), Molski claims that, on May 20, 2003, he
and significant other, Brygida Molski, attended the El 7 Mares
Restaurant for the purposes of dining out. Molski alleges that the
restaurant lacked adequate handicapped parking, and that the food
counter was too high. After the meal, Molski attempted to use the
restroom, but because the toilet's grab bars were improperly installed,
he injured his shoulders in the process of transferring himself from
his wheelchair to the toilet. Thereafter, he was unable to wash his
hands because of the lavatory's design.

Although this complaint appears credible standing alone, its
validity is undermined when viewed alongside Molski's other complaints.
In Molski v. Casa De Fruta, L.P., Case No. C04-1981 (N.D. Cal. 2004),
Molski alleges that he sustained nearly identical injuries on the exact
same day, May 20, 2003. In Casa de Fruta, Molski alleges that he and
significant other, Brygida Molski, patronized Casa de Fruta for the
purpose of wine tasting. On arrival, Molski was again unable to locate
van accessible parking. Once inside, Molski again found the counter to
be too high. After wine tasting, Molski again decided to use the
restroom, and again, injured his upper extremities while in the process
of transferring himself to the toilet. Thereafter, he was once again
unable to wash his hands due to the design of the lavatory.

This was, apparently, not the end of Molski's day. In Molski v.
Rapazzini Winery, Case No. C04-1881 (N.D. Cal. 2004), Molski once again
alleges that he sustained nearly identical injuries on the exact same
day, May 20, 2003. Molski, again accompanied by Brygida Molski, claims
he visited the Rapazzini Winery for the purpose of wine tasting. Again,
Molski complains that the parking lot lacked adequate handicapped van
accessible parking. Upon entering the establishment, he discovered that
the counter was too high. After tasting wine, he again needed to use
the restroom. In the course of transferring himself from his wheelchair
to the toilet, he injured himself yet again. Thereafter, he was again
unable to wash his hands due to the lavatory's design.

The Court is tempted to exclaim: "what a lousy day!" It would be
highly unusual "” to say the least "” for anyone to sustain two injuries,
let alone three, in a single day, each of which necessitated a separate
federal lawsuit. But in Molski's case, May 20, 2003, was simply
business as usual. Molski filed 13 separate complaints for essentially
identical injuries sustained between May 19, 2003 and May 23, 2003. The
Court simply does not believe that Molski suffered 13 nearly identical
injuries, generally to the same part of his body, in the course of
performing the same activity, over a five-day period. This is to say
nothing of the hundreds of other lawsuits Molski has filed over the
last four years, many of which make nearly identical allegations. The
record before this Court leads it to conclude that these suits were
filed maliciously, in order to extort a cash settlement.

For several years, I have been wondering why punitive damage awards like this one, that punish a company for various misdeeds, don't create a double jeapardy situation where defendents must pay over and over for the same "crime" (since the next individual suing also gets punitive damages).

Here's the problem:  A jury in Texas already hit Merck with $259
million in punitive damages*.  This number was based on a lot of
testimony about Merck's sales and profits from Vioxx, so it was
presumably aimed at punishing Merck for "errors" in their whole Vioxx
program.  So if that is the case, how can Merck end up facing a jury
again coming up with a separate punitive damage award for the same
"crime"?  Sure, it makes sense that Merck can owe actual damages to
individual claimants in trial after trial.  But how can they owe
punitive damages for the whole Vioxx program over and over again?
Aren't they being punished over and over for the same misdeed,
violating their Constitutional protection against double jeopardy?

In the recent Supreme Court decision involving a judgment against Philip Morris, the SCOTUS didn't really take this issue on, but did take on a related issue, arguing that punitive damage awards that take into account damages against more than just the defendant violate due process, since these other damages were not tried on the facts in that case.

Today, in a decision involving an astonishing $79.5 million punitive
damage award to the widow of an Oregon man who died of lung cancer
after smoking Marlboros for 42 years, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled
that a jury in a civil case may not punish a defendant for harm to
people who are not parties to the case. To do so, the five-justice
majority said,
violates the defendant's right to due process because he cannot defend
against hypothetical damage claims by people who are not involved in
the lawsuit. Furthermore, the Court said, "to permit punishment for
injuring a nonparty victim would add a near standardless dimension to
the punitive damages equation." Although this makes sense to me, the
Court's proposed solution"”that juries may consider harm to nonparties
in judging the "reprehensibility" of a defendant's conduct but not to
"punish a defendant directly" for that harm"”seems untenable.

A few weeks ago I wrote about the changing relationship between attorney and client:

It used to be that clients would suffer some sort of injury and seek
redress in the courts.  To do so, they would hire an attorney to help
them.  The attorney was the hired help, compensated either hourly or
via a percentage of any awards.

Today, the situation is often reversed.  It is the attorney who is
identifying lawsuit targets for class actions and shareholder suits,
and then seeking out clients who can maximize his chances of success.
Clients, who typically make orders of magnitude less than the attorney
in class actions (think 50-cent coupons and $8 million attorney fees)
are selected because they are sympathetic, or give access to a
particularly plaintiff-attractive jurisdiction, or, in cases such as
ADA suits in California, because they have effectively become partners
with the attorney in serial torts.

At that time, the issue was Bill Lerach suing his clients for dropping him as attorney (Because, after all, it was really his lawsuit and not theirs).  This time, the issue is in a class action against Microsoft (emphasis added, via Overlawyered)

Judge Scott Rosenberg ruled Friday that Microsoft attorneys could
not ask the named plaintiffs about their relationship with attorney
Roxanne Conlin. The company's lawyers wanted to question the
plaintiffs, arguing that Conlin had referred to them during jury
selection as "just regular people who bought software" and who
volunteered to step forward to sue Microsoft.

The lawsuit was brought by Joe Comes, a Des Moines businessman who
owns a chain of pizza restaurants, and Patricia Anne Larsen, a retiree
from northwest Iowa, and two business _ Riley Paint Inc. of Burlington
and Skeffington's Formal Wear of Iowa Inc. of Des Moines.

Microsoft attorney David Tulchin said Larsen has been a friend of
Conlin's since 1982, when Larsen held fundraisers for Conlin's failed
run for governor. In 1999, Conlin represented Larsen in an employment
discrimination case against Larsen's former employer, Eaton Corp.

Tulchin said Comes has been Conlin's son's best friend since high school.

Microsoft attorneys claimed Conlin recruited these friends to act as
plaintiffs in the case so she could sue the company and that her
comments during jury selection opened the door for Microsoft to
challenge the plaintiffs' motivation in filing the lawsuit.

Who would even imagine such a thing?  In this class action, as in many, the class members will probably get coupons while Conlin makes millions.  Or, as Microsoft observes:

Tulchin claimed that Conlin and her co-counsel, Richard
Hagstrom of Minneapolis, have the most to gain in the lawsuit

Attorneys like Conlin know they are vulnerable on this

Conlin said Microsoft wants the jury to believe that class-action
lawsuits are attorney-driven cases brought for money when in reality
they are a way for individuals with small claims to come together to
take on large, powerful companies.

"Businesses like Microsoft have poisoned the public view of these
forms for seeking redress by spending billions of dollars to spread
propaganda. Now they seek to collect on their investment by improperly
suggesting to the jury that the plaintiffs are not real plaintiffs,"
she said.

You think?

Overlawyered today provides a link to this article in Roger Parloff's blog at Fortune

The nation's leading class-action lawyer, Bill Lerach, is currently in
an ugly scrape in federal court in Dallas, where the sole lead
plaintiff in a high-profile shareholder suit against Halliburton (HAL)
no longer wants Lerach or his firm to act as its co-lead counsel. (I've
posted about it before here and here.)
To recap, the fund has said that it is concerned about all the
distractions and the sleaze factor now surrounding Lerach and his prior
firm, Milberg Weiss Bershad Hynes & Lerach (which Lerach co-ran)...

The squeamish plaintiff, the Archdiocese of Milwaukee
Supporting Fund, has asked that Lerach Coughlin be replaced by David
Boies and his firm, Boies Schiller & Flexner, which firm has
indicated that it is ready, willing, and able to assume the role.

Needless to say, Lerach is fighting the uppity plaintiff to keep control of the case.

Parloff goes on to question some of Lerach's statements in the case.  However, I want to make a different point.  This points out fairly clearly that Lerach and other top litigators have adopted a whole new theory of litigation and of the relationship between lawyer and client.

It used to be that clients would suffer some sort of injury and seek redress in the courts.  To do so, they would hire an attorney to help them.  The attorney was the hired help, compensated either hourly or via a percentage of any awards.

Today, the situation is often reversed.  It is the attorney who is identifying lawsuit targets for class actions and shareholder suits, and then seeking out clients who can maximize his chances of success.  Clients, who typically make orders of magnitude less than the attorney in class actions (think 50-cent coupons and $8 million attorney fees) are selected because they are sympathetic, or give access to a particularly plaintiff-attractive jurisdiction, or, in cases such as ADA suits in California, because they have effectively become partners with the attorney in serial torts.

So if you wonder why Lerach is suing his client for not using his services, and if that makes you wonder who is working for whom, now you know.

Update: By the way, this reversal of the relationship between attorney and client is one of the recurring themes in my novel BMOC.

Ted Frank at Overlawyered is posting links to his favorite Overlawyered stories of 2006, month by month .  Don't miss the link to yours truly in March.  update:  Hey, I'm in February too.

I have written on this before on the context of Vioxx, but is it really rational public policy to have juries be allowed to effectively ban products, products that both legislatures and regulatory bodies have explicitly or implicitly deemed as legal?  Ted Frank takes this on at Overlawyered in a nice follow-up post on a $31 million jury verdict against Ford:

SUVs are designed to have high clearance to traverse rugged terrain.
This raises the center of gravity and affects the handling: it's a
known tradeoff of the laws of physics. There are a wide variety of
tests of varying degrees of scientific merit one can use to suggest a
vehicle is "too prone" to roll over, and plaintiffs have the benefit of
cherry-picking which tests to apply to which vehicles. You'll find lots
of lawyers complaining that the Bronco II allegedly responded poorly in
"J-turn tests", where the steering wheel is turned 330 degrees in one
third of a second and held there for another 4.67 seconds. Ford
designed the Explorer to pass the J-turn test to take away this claim,
and the trial lawyers started using different methodologies to claim
that the Explorer was too prone to roll over.

Empirically, however, the Bronco doesn't roll over more than several
other SUVs on the market, which is why NHTSA, in both the Bush I and
Clinton administrations, refused to recall the Bronco when the
plaintiffs' bar asked it to. When I say Ford was held liable for
producing an SUV, I'm not spinning: it was because it was held liable
for producing an SUV.

Moreover, a vehicle should be viewed in totality: an auto that is
more likely to roll over may be safer in other particulars that more
than compensate for that increased propensity. So I question the
premise. One can't change the rollover propensity without creating a
different vehicle entirely. The vehicle should be viewed holistically,
and holistically, the Bronco is a safe car when used as designed.

Perhaps we as a society would be better off taking the nanny-state
step of banning SUVs, forbidding people from wildnerness driving
because too many drivers don't know how to drive SUVs in highway
conditions, but that's a decision that not only would end the American
auto industry, but should be made other than by a 12-person jury of
laypeople. This vehicle rolled over because the driver drove off the
road.

I had similar thoughts about the Vioxx cases:

Anyway, the point of this post is that this verdict represents a very dangerous assault on individual choice.  Recognize that there are many, many activities in life where individuals are presented with the following choice:

If I choose to do X, my life will be improved in some way but I may statiscally increase my chance of an early death.

You
may react at first to say that "I would never risk death to improve my
life", but likely you make this choice every day.  For example, if you
drive a car, you are certainly increasing your chance of early death
via a auto accident, but you accept this risk because driving allows
you to get so much more done in your life (vs. walking).  If you ride a
bike, swim, snow ski, roller blade, etc. you are making this choice.
Heck, everyone on the California coast is playing Russian Roulette with
an earthquake in exchange for a great climate, beautiful scenery, and
plentiful jobs.

The vast majority of drugs and medical therapies carry this same
value proposition:  A drug will likely improve or extend your life in
some way but carries a statistical chance of inducing a side effect
that is worse than the original problem, up to and including death.
The problem is that we have structured a liability system in this
country such that the few people who evince the side effects can claim
more money in damages than the drug was worth to all the people it
helped.  For example, if a drug helps 999 people, but kills the
thousandth, and that thousandth person's family is awarded $253 million
in damages (as in this case), the drug is never going to be put on the
market again.  Even if the next 1000 people sign a paper saying we are
willing to take the one-in-a-thousand risk to relieve the pain that is
ruining our lives, they still are not going to get the drug because the
drug companies know that some Oprah-loving jury will buy the argument
that they did not understand the risk they were taking and award the
next death another quarter of a billion dollars....

By the way, have you noticed the odd irony here?  Robert Ernst (the
gentleman who died in the Vioxx case) is assumed, both by the FDA and
the litigation system, to be unable to make informed decisions about
risk and his own health.  But a jury of 12 random people who never
experienced his pain can make such decisions for him?  And us?

Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution said it even more succinctly:

How did we arrive at a system in which 12 random Texans are assigned
responsibility for evaluating the scientific merits of statistical evidence of
this type, weighing the costs and benefits, and potentially
sending a productive blue-chip American company into bankruptcy protection?

Via Overlawyered, this is the hilarious account from a Doctor Hebert about finding out that he was suing Cisco.  He was a little non-plussed by this:

Did I want to sign up for the largesse, it inquired. It politely
offered me the option of declining, saying, "IF YOU DO NOT WISH TO BE
INCLUDED IN THE CLASS AND YOU DO NOT WISH TO PARTICIPATE IN THE
PROPOSED SETTLEMENT DESCRIBED IN THIS NOTICE, YOU MAY REQUEST TO BE
EXCLUDED." (The capitalization is theirs. I am not usually that
annoying.) Well, THANK GOD, I said. I can opt out of a lawsuit that was
filed in my name without my approval if I should have, well, you know,
scruples.

Except, as lawyers like to say, don't neglect to
read the next sentence. And the next, and the next, and the next, and
the next. Somewhere in there is the  gotcha. "TO DO SO, YOU MUST SUBMIT
A WRITTEN REQUEST FOR EXCLUSION THAT MUST BE RECEIVED ON OR BEFORE
OCTOBER 31, 2006."

All right, now. I got the letter on
November 13, 2006. Admittedly the U.S. Post Office is slow, but I'll
give them credit for getting a letter from the West Coast to
Mississippi in less than 14 days. Unfortunately, the letter was mass
mailed and thus bypassed the local post office. It bore no postmark. In
other words, I got the letter two weeks too late to opt out of the
lawsuit, and I had no postmark to prove it was intentionally mailed out
late to prevent me from refusing to participate. The old expiration
date trick. That was slick, Mssrs. Lerach, Coughlin, Stoia, Geller,
Rudman, Robbins, Levin, Papantonio, Thomas, Mitchell, Echsner, &
Proctor -- real slick.

He is even more non-plussed to learn that he is in line for a check for $0.90, while the lawyers are in for $23.9 million.  I feel his pain.  I, for example, have been informed on several occasions that Visa and Mastercard, among others, are being sued in my name, though I never engaged anyone to do so.

Update:  Another huge fee for the attorneys, 50-cent coupons for customers class action is in the midst of an ugly fight over attorney billing rates - ironically in a cosmetics lawsuit alleging overpricing.

Among the alleged abuses were
bills of $195 an hour for work by paralegals who were paid just $30,
claims that attorneys and paralegals worked 24-hour or even 72-hour
days, and charges of $90 an hour or more for cleaning desks and
filing....

                           
                           
                              

According
to records filed with the federal court, individuals at one legal group
representing the class, the Law Offices of John Burris in Oakland,
billed as much as 72 hours in a single day for document review and, in
dozens of instances, billed for 24-hour days.

Of course the attorneys had a strong rebuttal to these revelations:

The lawyers accused of overstating their hours and expenses responded
by strenuously objecting to Judge Armstrong about the public disclosure
of their billing records, which the attorneys said were confidential.

Yet another nutty jury has decided that it should be national policy to have warning signs every few feet on a railroad to warn trespassers against danger:

Jeffrey Klein and Brett Birdwell were 17 "when they trespassed onto
railroad property and climbed atop a rail car" because they wanted to
see the view from there. They were shocked by a 12,500-volt wire and
severely injured. The incident took place in Lancaster, Pa. but through
the miracle of forum selection the lawsuit against Amtrak and Norfolk
Southern landed before a jury in Philadelphia, a locality notably more
favorable for plaintiffs than Lancaster. An attorney said the railroads
should have posted signs for the benefit of trespassers warning of the
overhead hazard and also should have had the electricity turned off at
the time.

This is by no means the first such verdict.  I featured another here:

By the way, the exact wording on the complaint against the railroad is even better than I thought:

"The
[engineer] did not stop the train in a timely manner, and failed to
yield the right of way to a pedestrian walking along the tracks in
plain view"

A freight train's topping distance is measured in miles, even with full emergency braking.

She and her attorney's further argue:

that
the railroad was negligent for failing to post signs warning 'of the
dangers of walking near train tracks and that the tracks were actively
in use

Lets leave aside the obvious point
about individual responsibility, and ask what would happen if this were
the legal standard, to have such signs.  To make sure someone saw one,
you would have to have one say every 30 feet.  Since there are just over 200,000 miles of freight railroads in the North America that works out to a bit over 35,000,000 signs that need to be posted.  At $100 per sign this would cost $3.5 billion.