April 27th, 2011

Barney Frank: Injured People Must Sacrifice Even More

Frank: The injured haven't suffered enough.

Rep. Barney Frank has decided to join the tort “reform” movement, asking that those who’ve been catastrophically injured should pitch in more to help with national financial troubles caused by others. In an article today in The Hill, he had this to say:

“I also am ready, as a liberal, to look at the whole question of malpractice and liability reform,” Frank said during an appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” program, according to a transcript. “People who are injured ought to be compensated, but I do think that that’s something that I would throw in if we had an otherwise overall compromise [on the national debt], because I recognize everybody’s got to give something to get this.”

In other words, those who have been most badly injured (the ones most likely to be most affected by restrictions on civil suits) haven’t sacrificed enough by virtue of their disabilities, diminished (or lost) employment, and destruction of lifestyle.

Now, according to Frank, they also need to give some level of immunity to those whose negligence caused them to be injured in the first place.

And somebody in his office ought to give him a copy of the recent study from Columbia Presbyterian/Cornell. That’s the one where the obstetrics and gynecology department lowered their malpractice costs by over 90% by improving patient safety.  You see, the best way to lower malpractice costs is to lower the incidents of malpractice. But if you choose immunity instead,  you will only end out killing patients by killing the incentive to improve.

See also: Why Medical Malpractice “Reform” Will Increase the Deficit, Not Reduce It (Joanne Doroshow @ HuffPo)

Photo by Martin Schoeller, The New Yorker

 

April 25th, 2011

iPhone GPS Data Will Open New Doors in Litigation (Updated)

Like having a private investigator in your pocket

When I heard the news last week while on vacation, the first thing that hit me was this: The courts have a new discovery issue for personal injury lawyers to deal with. That news, as you can guess from the subject heading, is that Apple iPhone users have their movements tracked by GPS so long as the device is on.

And while much of that data may have existed before, and been accessible particularly to the police, Apple will make it much easier to obtain. Why? Well, because there’s an app for that.

These are the basics:

The tracking seems to have begun in June 2010 with the iPhone 4 update to the OS and the data is stored on the phone but is automatically transferred to a computer when the iPhone is synched without the user’s knowledge.

So the info is on your phone, on your computer, and on Apple servers somewhere out there in the digital world.

Think this through for a minute with me, to see how the data can be used for a simple accident case:

It may tell you how long someone was driving before the accident. Important for a 10 minute trip and an intersection collision? Perhaps not. But if it was a truck or bus traveling for 12 hours? Now we have another story. Can it tell you how fast you were going in the 60 seconds before the accident? Many judges might well think that relevant information for a jury.

How long did that witness testify they were at the bar/restaurant before the accident? It better be accurate, because if the phone was on it will rat you out. And those phone are almost always on.

It can also be used for criminal prosecutions. And defense to support an alibi. Matrimonial is a no-brainer for the cheating spouse. It’s like putting a private investigator in your pocket.

iPhone GPS data litigation; coming soon to a courthouse near you. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

Updated: Well, that didn’t last long. Steve Jobs has admitted a mistake (why can’t politicians do that?) and a software update is in the works to make this go away.

 

April 20th, 2011

NY Appellate Court Bars Discovery of Facebook Materials

Yesterday, New York’s Appellate Division, First Department, reversed a lower court judge in refusing to allow broad discovery regarding Facebook and other social media sites. Discovery of data from social media sites is as hot a subject as can be found among litigants, and this is now the second of New York’s four appellate divisions to weigh in on the subject.  In November 2010, the Fourth Department similarly shot down a Facebook demand in McCann v. Harleysville Insurance.

Yesterday’s decision in Abrams v. Pecile resulted from semi-nude photos of the plaintiff that the defendant possessed, and an allegation of attempted extortion. According to the court, the:

plaintiff alleges that defendant, a former employee of plaintiff’s husband, retained, without permission, a copy of a CD containing seminude photographs of plaintiff taken by her husband during their honeymoon. Plaintiff further alleges that defendant refused to return the CD and photographs unless plaintiff’s husband paid defendant $2.5 million to settle her sexual harassment claims brought against plaintiff’s husband and his brother.

New York, it seems, is firmly putting the brakes on out-of-control discovery requests. There was no new disclosure standard used, with the court using the time-tested:

“the method of discovery sought will result in the disclosure of relevant evidence or is reasonably calculated to lead to the discovery of information bearing on the claims” … Nor has defendant shown that broad discovery concerning plaintiff’s finances, education, immigration status, and educational background is “material and necessary” (CPLR 3101[a]).

 

April 15th, 2011

Linkworthy

My RSS feed has almost 7,000 posts sitting in it. That’s what happens when you try to follow a lot of blogs and you also have work to do for actual clients.

But if I had more time, these are some of the things I would like to write about:

“Tort Reform” Exposed for What It Is – Immunity (The Pop Tort)

…Take what’s happening in North Carolina, which is now considering atrocious legislation that would provide immunity not only to negligent emergency room personnel, but to the entire pharmaceutical industry.  Forget that more preventable errors occur in an ER than in any other place in a hospital, or that in states like Texas where a similar immunity law was passed, ER’s have now become even more dangerous.  Meanwhile, no patient has any recourse if they or their child is permanently disabled, disfigured, brain-damaged or killed.  This bill would essentially make “negligence in the ER legal” in North Carolina, too…

Bill Precluding Punitives for Undocumented Immigrants (TortsProf): That’s right, in AZ there seems to be no difference between acting negligently and deliberately hurting someone, so long as the person you pick on doesn’t have the right papers. Hey, why not just put “kick me” on their shirts?

The HuffingtonPost Bloggers Class Action Lawsuit Won’t Go Anywhere (Litigation and Trial):

…But nobody hated the Huffington Post as much as its own bloggers, the folks who generated a ton of its content without compensation in a spirit of, I suppose, political activism, just to watch it be sold off to AOL for $315 million….

And Max Kennerly agrees with me on the all-important subject of what to wear to court:

…I wear what I wear because I do not want what I wear to get in the way of what I am saying…

The NYS Commission on Public Integrity tries to muzzle blogging lawyer Andrew Barovick.

Veteran NYPIRG lobbyist Blair Horner, one of New York’s most well-known good government advocates, has taken a position with the American Cancer Society of NY & NJ as vice president for advocacy

A personal injury law round-up at Torts Prof.

And I barely made a dent in my RSS feed….I need more hours in the day….

 

April 5th, 2011

Lawyers and Advertising (The New Frontier)

I broach the subject of lawyer advertising every so often, because there seems to be so many different things to write on the subject. It covers constitutional law, ethics and plain old good (bad) taste.

Ethics and constitutional issues butted heads in recent years over New York’s new attorney advertising rules, which went up to the Second Circuit in Alexander v. Cahill, about which I’ve written often as it tracked its way through the judicial system.

Ethics also comes into play with deception, as evidenced by one Joseph Rakofsky, a New York lawyer with scant experience, but whose website sung his praises in oh so many ways. Then he got a real client. Defending a murder case. Which of course, he was utterly incompetent to do and after being exposed in the Washington Post, the story is now buzzing around the blogosphere (Gamso; Bennett; Elefant; Greenfield; Tannebaum; Mayer; Koehler, Above the Law).

And in the plain old bad taste department, I’ve written of lawyer advertising on a funeral home website and, in what I previously thought was the ultimate captive audience spot, over a urinal. All of this  is part of a never-ending race to the bottom, as Scott Greenfield describes it.

Which brings me today to The Buffalo News, and an op-ed by Jeffrey Freedman, and the next round of bad-taste advertising, and the fact that there was an even more captive audience that I hadn’t even thought of, but others, apparently have:

…Captive ads, in case you missed it, is the new Metrodata Services advertising program that allows defense attorneys, bail bondsmen and anyone else who would like to advertise to the captive audience of the recently arrested on big screen TVs in the Holding Center….

So if you thought standing at a urinal and seeing an ad in front of your nose made you a captive audience, then this brings us to the next level: An audience that is captive in the most literal sense of the word, in the local lock-up.

Freedman wonders where this will ultimately lead:

Erie County Medical Center is a potential gold mine of space. Picture the possibilities for hospital gowns. Give patients a choice: Viagra or Cialis today, Mr. Smith?

And just imagine elevators and waiting rooms papered with the faces of compassionate, personal injury attorneys. “We don’t charge a fee unless we win your case.”

I thought that when lawyers dug down deep to advertise at a funeral home website, that this was as low as they could go. But perhaps there are new avenues to be explored in bad taste.