The Oregon Supreme Court has ruled that a state recreational use statute does not bar a claim by a plaintiff who was injured while crossing the defendant’s land after engaging in recreational activity on an adjacent property. The facts: "Plaintiffs and their families drove on Highway 6 to a paved…
3. A Solid Knowledge of the Law of Civil Procedure. The adoption and expansion of the discovery section in the modern-day rules of civil procedure was intended to reduce the number of trials by providing a mechanism for the flow of information between parties to litigation. The idea was that…
Last Fall I wrote several posts ( here and here) on a one portion of the causation issue in legal malpractice cases. A summary of my view: I believe that a plaintiff in a legal malpractice case arising out of a claim that a personal injury case was mis-handled must prove…
The property and casualty insurance industry has reported after-tax profits of $44.9 billion for the first nine months of 2006, up 50.1% from a year earlier. If this path continues for the last three months of the year, it "would lead insurers to their best financial performance in nearly 20 years,"…
The Oklahoma Supreme Court has struck down a requirement that an affidavit of merit from an expert be filed with medical negligence lawsuits. The statute at issue "requires that a plaintiff alleging medical malpractice attach an affidavit to the petition stating that the plaintiff: 1) has consulted with a qualified…
The Federal Court for the Middle District of Tennesse has a local rule on expert witness that has been criticized for decades. The rule provides as follows "Expert witness disclosures shall be made timely in accordance with any order of the Court, or if none, in accordance with Fed. R.…
The Illinois Supreme Court held that it was not appropriate to certify a class of personal injury plaintiffs who received injuries as a result of chemical exposure after a train derailment. The holding: "Although proof of the cause of the derailment will be relatively straightforward, this alone will not establish…
The Court of Appeal of California has ruled that a lawyer may be sued for failure to warn a client that the failure to settle a claim against the client would put the client at risk for paying the adversary’s attorneys fees. The Court held that it was not appropriate to dismiss the…
The Tennessee Supreme Court has ruled that a parent corporation may be sued for intentional interference with a contractual relationship between a partially owned subsidiary and a third party. The Court had ruled in an earlier case that " a parent corporation has a privilege pursuant to which it can cause…
Merck won another Vioxx case in federal court, but when you hear the background of the plaintiff it is easy to understand why. According to an AP report posted on Law.com, the plaintiff "had other risk factors for his heart attack, including tobacco use, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes…