February 17th, 2016

Unicorn Sighting in New York

Guest Blog by Mike Greenspan
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Another day, another scam. This time it deals with three unicorns.

Frankly, it’s hard enough to be a plaintiff’s personal injury law practitioner fending off the relentless efforts of the “tort reform” movement, the cynicism of juries and the saturation of the market with attorneys. So when lawyers have to face competition from runners; ambulance chasers and the like, you can understand why so many of us are stressed out.

Today, we bring you our latest entry into our Hall of Shame, a trio of actual unicorns -Jose, Lisa, Mark, Marie and the rest of the gang over at Personalinjuryattorneyrocklandcounty.com. No, we won’t give this a link.

What? You’ve never heard of them? Funny that you should mention it, because neither had we.

Imagine that you were injured and you were looking for a well qualified attorney based in Rockland County, New York to sue the company you thought responsible. A quick Google search for a personal injury attorney in Rockland County brings up a number of results that unsurprisingly includes personalinjuryattorneyrocklandcounty.com because of the matching keywords.

You click on the site and see a banner inviting you to “Discuss your criminal defense and personal injury legal matters with skilled, experienced lawyers.” What follows is a seemingly impressive lineup of attorneys: Partners Jose Anderson, Lisa Wilson and Mark Thomas have each been practicing for over forty years.

Jose’s biography tells us that he has “ recovered tens of millions of dollars in verdicts and settlements for victims of personal injuries.” (How exactly does one become a “victim of personal injuries?”)

Glowing testimonials appear on the site such as this gem

From my initial contact with Lisa, I immediately develop huge respect for her. She was explicit with her information, as direct as can be. She explained what you would be up against, what to expect and what not to look out for.

With credentials and testimonials like those, you’d think that the seriously injured in that area would be jumping out of their hospital beds to call and get an appointment with these folks. There are even two offices to contact in case you wanted to do just that.

So what is the issue? Well, there a just a few wee problems that we thought to highlight:

1. New York Law prohibits attorneys from practicing under a trade name.

Yeah it is a bummer that lawyers cannot advertize under a trade name in New York like they do in other states such as Arizona, Florida or Louisiana so you won’t find kickasslawyers.com or “TheArizonaDUITeam” here in the Empire State (Rules of Professional Conduct 7.1 ). So right away, we have an issue with Jose and his buddies doing so in our neck of the woods.

2. New York law prohibits the portrayal of a fictitious law firm.

That big, fat, no no is right there in black and white in RPC 7.1(c)(2). This so called law firm is fictitious, because….

3. These “attorneys” aren’t licensed in New York.

Really? After all Jose supposedly graduated St. John’s Law in ‘71 and claims to be admitted to practice in New York since ‘72 and has even made it all of the way up to the Supreme Court!

Sadly, this is news to the Office of Court Administration who has no record of an attorney by the name of Jose Anderson nor is there a record of a Lisa Wilson, or a Mark Thomas being admitted to practice in New York – ever. Run a search yourselfand see. We do recall learning about something known as the unauthorized practice of law and how that is generally frowned upon by the authorities. This sure looks like the unauthorized practice of law to us.

When we said unicorns we weren’t kidding — these attorneys simply don’t seem to exist.

100% authentic unicorn poop

4. The registrant of the domain name is hidden

Yeah, that is another problem here because if you have a website in New York, the information is supposed to contain some important information and hiding the owner of the site is prohibited. That hasn’t seemed to bother Lisa and Jose (perhaps Mark, but who knows?). A search on whois.com reveals that the registrant used a service -whoisproof LLP to register the name anonymously. Now why would they do that? Hmm

5. The Phone Numbers go right to voice mail.

Try it for yourself. Call the New City number (845) 335-4345 or the Spring Valley number (845) 520-5075. See if you can in to see one of the trio grande of “ skilled and experienced attorneys .”

So somebody has taken a lot of time and effort creating and editing a website devoted to attracting potential personal injury clients while disguising their true identities. We say editing , because the website has undergone revisions since the summer of 2015 when it blatantly copied sections of text from legitimate websites of New York City area law firms and placed that text in its practice areas. That text and those references are no longer present on the site.

We sure would like to find out…

Who is returning the phone calls left on the website’s two phone numbers?
Is there someone who goes out and meets with the unsuspecting people who call looking for a lawyer?
What lawyer or law firm is signing up these people and undertaking to represent them in court?

February 16th, 2016

A SCOTUS Question – For presidential debates

Dear presidential debate moderators:

I offer up this question for our future presidential debates:

Over the last several decades, each time a Supreme Court judge needed to be replaced it became a matter of extreme partisan confrontation. We see this again today with the death of Justice Scalia.

People now live longer and presidents seek to fill the seats with ever-younger individuals, thereby making each seat more contentious.

How do you feel about term limits for Supreme Court judges (for example, 14 years) with the judges thereafter being returned to courts of appeals or district courts, at their discretion?

Wouldn’t the higher turnover for the seats make the issue less contentious, as well as open the seats up to more experienced people in their 50s and 60s?

February 14th, 2016

Scalia’s Most Important Decision

With the passing of Justice Antonin Scalia yesterday, the country immediately went into overdrive discussing his successor.

As it happens, one of the first posts on this blog discussed the worst Supreme Court decision ever, and Scalia was a part of it.

While many folks consider Plessy v. Ferguson, Dred Scott and Korematsu as the worst, there is one that, I think, clearly supersedes them.

And that is Bush v. Gore, for the simple reason that every other SCOTUS decision could ultimately be overturned by We the People. Scalia was one of the five votes in the per curium opinion.

Laws can be changed. The constitution can be amended. But what happens when the act of democracy itself is suspended?

In that case, then power has been removed from the citizenry.

There was, at the time, only one way to deal with the Florida debacle: Every legally cast vote must be counted. But Bush v. Gore suspended the act of counting votes.

And this, therefore, must stand as part of the Scalia legacy.
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P.S. — Scalia took his place in Turkewitz family history 10 years ago when he responded to a letter my brother wrote him regarding the issue of secession. You can read it here.

February 13th, 2016

The Huntington Post Office Did WHAT?!

Huntington Post Office, Long Island

This story comes to me from an incident this week at the post office in Huntington, New York, out on Long Island.

We all know about postal workers, don’t we? So let’s add this to the collection:

From Carol Schlitt:
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My youngest son, John, has Down Syndrome. He turned 20 today. After school each day he works in my office and walks to the local post office to take care of the mail.

He is excellent at his job and he loves doing it.

Yesterday, he told the postal workers that today was his birthday.

When he arrived at 4:45 this afternoon, everybody in the post office broke into “Happy Birthday” and presented him with a cake.

It seems remarkable to me that postal workers would do this. It made me regret complaints I’ve made about postal workers over the years. It also made my day that my son is so accepted and loved in our community.

I just wanted to share a “feel good” story and make us re-think some of the stereotypes that so many of us carry around.

February 12th, 2016

Time is On My Side

The AOL 2.0 floppy disk that I use as a drink coaster. Photo credit: me.

Yesterday, I listened to a livestream of a suicidal and paranoid member of the Bundy gang surrender in Oregon. He said he was holding a gun to his head as supporters frantically tried to reason with him as he stumbled through a slew of conspiracy theories.

Think about that — I’m in New York City listening in on a phone call with an armed and suicidal insurrectionist in a remote part of Oregon. What would Benjamin Franklin think? How long would it take for him just to comprehend such a concept?

What a short, strange trip this whole Internet thingy has been.

I first connected via Prodigy, circa 1992. When AOL took the world by storm with its proprietary site in 1993, I was 33. Using their instant messages, you could talk with someone from Prague, in real time, as if that person was sitting in your own building. It was amazing. Revolutionary.

I knew this was going to be huge when hourly charges for dial-up service went to unlimited in 1994, and the site was so overwhelmed that folks couldn’t connect. I still have an AOL 2.0 floppy disk. I use it as a drink coaster.

The World Wide Web followed shortly thereafter.

A huge milestone in its development was the 1998 release to the web by Ken Starr that dealt, in part, with the infamous cigar that Pres. Bill Clinton shared with Monica Lewinsky. I, and countless others, read it online immediately after its release. There was no need to wait a day for the newspapers to print it and distribute it for people to start having intense discussions.

Any semblance of the 24-hour news cycle that Ted Turner‘s CNN and its progeny hadn’t already taken down, was now gone for good.

My first crude website went up in 1999, and this blog followed in 2006. YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat and more all followed. Again, what would Ben Franklin think?

When I felt my midtown Manhattan building rumble in 2011 as I was sitting at my desk, I turned to Twitter, searched #earthquake, and knew within 30 seconds of the end of the quake that it had been felt from Georgia to Canada. Amazing.

We no longer wait, it seems, for anything.

Except for the law.

Much of what I do, I do the old fashioned way. It is slow and sometimes ponderous. It is the nature of litigation and trial. The world may move ever faster and faster with the explosion of technology, but the pace of the practice of law doesn’t really change.

There might be tinkering around the edges, but fundamentally it is the same today as when I started. Sure, I no longer need to bring a roll of quarters with me to the courthouse while on trial, I can electronically file complaints and motions, and I can bring my entire file to court with me on an iPad. That’s nice; it’s convenient. Of course, as Keith Lee wrote yesterday at Above the Law, technology is just a tool.

But while the expectations of jurors may change — something that law and order TV shows also contribute to — the reality is that the lawyer’s work hasn’t.

You still have to tell the story. And to do that you need to find the witnesses, do the investigations and plow through the records. You need to lay foundations for evidence, build your examinations upon important points, and know what it is you need to do, and where it is you need to go.

There may be a straight line that gets you from Point A to Point B, but just as often it is otherwise, rambling around from here to there to get to where you want to go.

Telling that story usually takes time. Time that jurors, especially younger ones, may not be attuned to.

What to do about this internal conflict between today’s expectations and old-fashioned lawyering? Relish the concept when you finally get to meet your jurors. Welcome them back to another era, and another pace, when things moved slower. If you want to get the job done. (Because you have no other choice.)

Back in September, 2007, I used an obscure quote by Mark Twain to describe the process of slowly telling the story. Given Twain’s mastery of storytelling, I figured he would be a good source.

And so, as the world races faster and faster in making raw information available, we turn back to Twain on the art and flow of storytelling:

Narrative is a difficult art; narrative should flow as flows the brook down through the hills and the leafy woodlands, its course changed by every bowlder it comes across and by every grass-clad gravelly spur that projects into its path; its surface broken, but its course not stayed by rocks and gravel on the bottom in the shoal places; a brook that never goes straight for a minute, but goes, and goes briskly, sometimes ungrammatically, and sometimes fetching a horseshoe three-quarters of a mile around, and at the end of the circuit flowing within a yard of the path it traversed an hour before; but always going, and always following at least one law, always loyal to that law, the law of narrative, which has no law. Nothing to do but make the trip; the how of it is not important, so that the trip is made.

That difference in the expectations of people also came into sharp view in the Oregon standoff, where I started this piece. There were some folks who wanted the buildings that the Bundy gang took over to be immediately stormed. Now! Now! Quicker! Faster!

The Department of Justice, however, took its sweet time. Because time was on its side. And it was a highly successful strategy.

Sometimes we need to move fast. But not always, and fast should not be the default. No matter what kind of technology comes spinning our way.

OK, cue up some Stones to close — though lord only knows what Ben Franklin would think of Mick:

https://youtu.be/QEqlBveP_Rg