The Tortellini

Going Under Again

Ah, just when I was getting back in the saddle again, so to speak, I'm taking leave of it again for a while. I'm actually going on vacation and won't have Internet access, so the blog will be dormant for a couple of weeks. I'll be back in August, when of course, the entire legal profession will be on vacation and I'll have nothing to write about except maybe whether Walter Olson can survive Rudy over the long haul..

...until then, cheers.

California class actions in the cross-hairs again

One of the main targets of the 2005 federal Class Action Fairness Act were lawsuits filed in California on behalf of screwed-over workers and other consumers. The state has fairly strong laws protecting both groups, and people have successfully used class actions to rein in companies like Wal-Mart that have done stuff like force employees to work off the clocks. But the federal act apparently hasn't gone far enough, so corporate groups in California have just launched a ballot initiative to finish the job... 

When ethics violations are just another opportunity to raise money

Remember Nathan Hecht, the Texas Supreme Court justice who went on the media circuit to defend his old pal and former White House counsel, Harriet Miers? Well, he ran into a little trouble with the State Commission on Judicial Conduct last year for shooting his mouth off, and ran up a bunch of legal bills in the process. Rather than simply pay them the way normal people would, Hecht asked many of the lawyers who practice in his courtroom to pick up the tab, raising nearly $450,000 for a "legal defense fund." (Could his defense really have cost nearly half a million bucks??)

Today, Texas Watch released a study looking at how well those donors fared before Hecht in court after they chipped in to the defense fund. Not surprisingly, they came out looking pretty good--except for the plaintiffs' lawyers, who for some insane reason also anted up. Famed tobacco lawyer Wayne Reaud's law firm ponied up $5K, and then went on to lose an employment case. The decision was unsigned, so I guess it's possible that Hecht actually voted in Reaud's favor and just didn't want anyone to know about it! But I suspect not even lots of money could help Hecht overcome his distaste for big-shot trial lawyers and their sad-sack clients. After all, the tort reform group Texans for Lawsuit Reform has been one of his biggest supporters.

All Those Texas Doctors..

There's been lots of hullabaloo over the rush of doctors heading to Texas to open up shop, thanks to the state's draconian medical malpractice "reform" of 2003. That Texas residents have to rely solely on the Texas Medical Board to protect them from out-of-state butchers and drug-addicts looking for safe haven is rather frightening, given how poorly it's done the job in the past.

The medical board has a huge backlog of license applications waiting for background checks. The board's background checks aren't exactly rigorous, though, as the board relies almost solely on self-reporting by the docs. That's how Dr. Nilon Tallant ended up treating Texas lawmakers as a volunteer "doctor of the day" in the state capitol last month, even though he had pleaded guilty to a felony charge after having sex with a 17-year-old patient in 1996. Tallant was a registered sex offender who'd lost his medical license for a few years, but Texas state legislators honored him as an upstanding member of the community. You can watch the TV expose on Dr. Tallant here. As the consumer group Texas Watch observed, if state legislators can't avoid bad doctors, how can average consumers?

When Lightening Strikes

Haven't read it yet, but Texas Monthly has a story this month on Eva Rowe, the woman who fought the giant oil company BP in a lawsuit over its deadly Texas refinery explosion that killed both her parents. It's apparently not an entirely pretty portrait--a study in what happens to people who suddenly get too much money--but interesting nonetheless. (Subscription required..)

Small business owners: Not shaking in their boots over fear of lawsuits

Business Week notices that small businesses aren't that worried about getting sued, $54 million lost pants suit notwithstanding...

Watch video, sign away your rights..

Medical malpractice insurers have come up with a devious new way of preventing injured patients from suing their doctors, by forcing people to sign binding arbitration agreements as a condition of receiving treatment from doctors they cover. The latest in this wave comes from a clinic in Florida that has helpfully made this video that patients can watch at home before they sign an agreement promising not to sue for future or past malpractice. Interestingly, ob/gyns covered under this plan get only $250,000 worth of insurance coverage per claim. The policy limit strikes me as a huge incentive for pissed-off lawyers to go after doctors' personal assets in serious malpractice cases if they manage to get around the contract. This may not be such a good deal for the physicians after all.

Milberg Weiss going down in flames?

Looks like David Bershad, the longtime name partner at Milberg Weiss just pleaded guilty to conspiracy to obstruct justice in the ongoing criminal prosecution of the legendary securities firm, charges his lawyer called "utterly baseless" this time last year...No word yet if he's agreed to testify against his former partners..

YouTube good for more than watching John Edwards fix his hair

The consumer group Public Citizen has apparently made history by using a YouTube video to help generate claims in a big class action settlement against the manufacturer of the drug Paxil, which marketed the antidepressant to kids even though it's known to increase suicide risk in young people. There's $48 million in the settlement pot, most of which will revert to the drug company if it's not claimed by August. Check out the video here.

Those Damn Pants

There's been so much news in the tort world, what with Robert Bork becoming a plaintiff and all, that I figured I'd come out of retirement for a few days to weigh in on some of it. First, those pants...

The latest news from the Washington Post is that D.C. administrative judge Roy Pearson Jr., now world-famous for suing his dry cleaner for $54 million for allegedly losing a pair of his pants, is now planning to appeal his decisive loss in court. This news should come as a surprise to exactly no one. Pearson, after all, once litigated a civil suit on behalf of some apartment building residents for more than 11 years. That's right. 11 years. By comparison, the pants lawsuit is only just getting started.

In the aforementioned civil suit, Pearson's tenacity seemed like Messianic devotion to his downtrodden legal services clients. But in retrospect, it looks like a symptom of problems to come. After two trials, in 1989, Pearson stunned the D.C. legal world and won a $15 million punitive damages award against a real estate developer that had used some sleazy tactics to force out low-income renters from the Park Tower, a D.C. apartment building it wanted to turn into condos. Before the city took it down, Pearson's administrative law judge bio prominently featured this enormous verdict as one of his judicial credentials.

The developers appealed the verdict arguing that Pearson had refused to let the only two white people available for jury duty sit on the panel. I haven't done the homework to find out how all this was ultimately resolved, but needless to say, the developer is probably deeply sympathetic to the dry cleaners!

Unlike some true-believers, I don't think the pants case is a good example of the system working. I think it's pretty much a disaster for anyone who cares about the integrity of the the civil justice system, mostly because it's finally given the tort reform movement a bona fide, sympathetic victim, something they've never really had in 20 years of trying to find one. I expect to see the Chungs making regular appearances in state legislative hearings supporting various measures to restrict citizens' rights to sue for years to come.

(Apparently they're going to be well-primed for it. A slick web site devoted to their upcoming fundraiser was created by APCO Worldwide.  APCO is the longtime PR firm of tobacco giant Philip Morris, and is responsible for creating the Astroturf groups, Citizens Against Lawsuit Abuse. No doubt APCO will help the Chungs stay on message. The Chungs, incidentally, don't seem to realize that their new friends in the tort reform movement are trying to get Pearson fired and disbarred--a move directly at odds with the Chungs' need for him to remain employed so that he can pay their legal fees, as the judge has ordered. But perhaps after the big corporate fundraiser this month, the Chungs won't need Pearson's money.)

As for Pearson himself, I don't have a single thing to say in his defense.It's an unfortunate truth that a pro se litigant with a law degree can wreak havoc with the legal system. What I find nearly as infuriating as his lawsuit is his landing a $100K a year job as an administrative law judge. Of course, the District government isn't exactly famous for luring world-class lawyers into its ranks, but things were supposed to be getting better since Marion Barry left the Mayor's office. 

Aside from his $15 million verdict in the Park Tower case, Pearson's legal career isn't stellar. The old DC government bio page said that after leaving Neighborhood Legal Services, Pearson worked as a contract examiner for the D.C. Office of Police Complaints, a famously toothless institution created to investigate police misconduct. But this wasn't exactly a full-time job. According to OPC executive director Phil Eure, the office has a pool of lawyers who handle citizen complaints, and Pearson was just one of those. In his years with the office, Pearson handled exactly one case (you can read about it here). Pearson's employability has been raised before, most recently in his divorce proceedings. But who knows? Maybe being tenacious is a good quality in a judge. Regardless, I keep secretly (or not so secretly) hoping that a rich trial lawyer will offer Pearson a whole lot of money to drop the pants suit and retire to the Bahamas or some place beyond the reach of the U.S. media. Everyone would be better off..