August 6th, 2007

Former Client Running Ads Against Hogan and Hartson

This has nothing to do with New York personal injury law, but I like mysteries. And one legal mystery may have been solved.

Some folks had heard radio ads calling for clients disgruntled with Hogan and Hartson to call a number to complain (See Above the Law and Overlawyered), particularly if clients felt that a junior associate had handled a case where a partner had been retained.

Now, according to New York Lawyer (free sub.), Hogan’s chairman, J. Warren Gorrell Jr., has stated:

“This is a fee dispute with a former client. They’re causing an unusual level of harassment to make their case. But if there were much of a case, I think they would have gone a different route.”

The name of the unhappy mystery client, that apparently thinks he was over billed, remains unknown to the public.

July 19th, 2007

Office Closed Due To Mid-Town Explosion

My office is closed today. Sitting just one block south and one avenue west of yesterday’s steam pipe explosion, my office has been placed in a frozen zone by the police. Telephone voice mail still works.

The frozen zone appears to be rather large, encompassing several square blocks of some of the world’s most expensive real estate in the Grand Central station area. Some asbestos has now been found in the debris.

When I exited Grand Central this morning in hopes of getting in to the building, I found the eastern and main southern entrances closed, and 42nd Street closed and in the process of being jack-hammered in parts by one of the many, many Con Ed crews jack-hammering in the area.

Taking a circuitous route south to my building at 40th and Park Avenue, I found the scenes on the right that I snapped with a cell phone camera. I was unable to determine when I would be able to get back in to the office. For some that might be a cause for celebration. But it isn’t if you’re the one paying the bills.

And yet…it could have been much, much worse.

July 18th, 2007

Your Bar Exam Answer Sheet Is Gone — Now What?

My bar exam responses were lost. Not all of them, mind you, just the 200 multi-state multiple choice answers I scored on that computer sheet with a pencil. It was July 1985 and the place was a passenger ship terminal on Manhattan’s west side. I was one of 500+ people who got the bad news a few weeks afterward. The answer sheets just disappeared. As in gone. Vanished. The crime (or act of negligence) was never solved. The answer sheets were never recovered from the Hudson River or local garbage dump, wherever it is they went.

With newly graduated law students preparing for next week’s test, and the folks at Above the Law asking for bar exam anecdotes, I thought I would share mine.

I found out about the missing answer sheets while backpacking around Europe, a reprieve from law school and the stress of the exam. My buddy Murphy had been told, when he called his folks, “Tell Eric to call home right away. It’s important.” I was relieved to hear that the problem was only the bar exam that I had slaved over.

I was given four choices:

Take the whole exam again in February 1986;
Take just the multi-state again in February 1986;
Take a special make-up exam in September 1985; or
Cancel the whole thing.

I opted to come home early for the special make-up exam, since the studied material was still relatively fresh in my mind. Then the law-gods intervened.

A week after making my choice, I called home again and found out from my dad that my question booklet had been found. Not the answer sheets, just the booklet. And in the booklet I had circled answers before transferring them to the answer sheets.

Why mark up my booklet? Because when I took the exam 22 summers ago, I had listened to my bar review prep guy, John Pieper, who had told us that, to save time, we should answer the questions 10 at a time and then transfer the answers over.

So the bar reviewers looked at my booklet and could figure out 194 of my 200 answers. I was then offered a fifth option: Did I want them to score up a new answer sheet for me? Which meant that I started off with six wrong. (I later learned that this option was given to about two dozen people, if the examiners could figure out 180 or more answers from the booklets.)

That day I called home and was given this choice, I had gone summer-skiing in Zermatt. On a glacier. With a perfect view of the Matterhorn off to my left. And I was relaxing afterward with a cold beer. Coming home early to re-study didn’t, for some reason, really appeal to me. Dad, I said, let’s do it.

And that’s how I passed the bar exam.

(Eric Turkewitz is a personal injury attorney in New York, receiving the good news on the bar results in December 1985 and being sworn in on the 25th day of February, 1986 in the Eastern District of New York)

July 17th, 2007

Bork’s Attorney, Randy Mastro, Picked For Giuliani’s Justice Advisory Committee

Rudy Giuliani unveiled his “Justice Advisory Committee” today, revealing that Randy Mastro, the Gibson Dunn attorney handling Robert Bork’s slip-and-fall case against the Yale Club, is on the list.

Judge Bork — the former SCOTUS nominee, conservative favorite and tort “reformer” — has been widely ridiculed and lampooned for not just bringing a routine personal injury action for “in excess of $1,000,000” for injuries that appear to be rather limited, but having also asked for punitive damages. The original complaint also included flat-out frivolous claims for attorneys fees and pre-judgment interest, neither of which can be obtained in New York.

So this raises two questions for Giuliani: First, do you want someone on your Justice Advisory Committee that has not only just brought a case with frivolous claims in it, but done so on behalf of a tort “reformer?” Will this reassure conservatives, who are already skittish over Giuliani’s social positions and have concerns about his judicial appointees if elected President?

And second, as I pointed out in Bork Amends Lawsuit, Keeps Claim for Over $1,000,000 Plus Punitive Damages, do you want someone picking judges that failed to draft a simple personal injury complaint, even when extreme caution was needed for a high-profile client? And then failed to correct all the errors in the amended complaint even after a hurricane of bad press? He was not only out of his depth on this case, but more importantly, apparently didn’t seek adequate counsel on how to correct the mistakes. Will that type of throw-caution-to-the-wind conduct appeal to conservatives?

Mastro, by the way, is Giuliani’s former Deputy Mayor. He might have fine political skills, and even have terrific skills in his particular areas of expertise. He might be a great guy to have a beer with. Having never met him, I wouldn’t know. But having laid bare less than stellar legal skills in a routine case with a high-profile client, and having made frivolous claims in court on behalf of that client, is this the guy conservatives will want on a judicial selection committee?

New York Motion and Trial Practice Rules Amended

For the New York practitioners who frequent here (all others will be bored):

Effective July 3rd there are new rules for motion practice and the time limits for service of cross-motions and papers. The rules can be found here: New Rules for Motion Practice

Effective 1/1/08 – new rules for service of a trial subpoena that changes the method of service.