What is your opponent going to do to prepare for your expert’s deposition? This article, "The Opponent’s Expert: Preparing for the Most Important Deposition in the Case," 59 Fed’n Def. & Corp. Couns. Q.145 (2008), answers that question.
A Wonderful Way to Spend A Saturday
It doesn’t sound particularly appealing.
Leave Memphis Friday afternoon. Drive to Nashville. Pack a new bag. Catch a flight to Charlotte. Race through the airport from Gate E35 to B3. Catch a flight to Mrytle Beach. Catch a 45-minute long shuttle to a North Carolina resort. Carry your bag up the steps to a second floor room at 12:30 in the morning. Get a few hours sleep and go to a windowless ballroom. Hang around a few hours to give a speech to a room full of people who had a similar ordeal to get there. All the while knowing that you have to reverse the process the next day in an effort to get home for a meal with the family on Father’s Day.
But the drudgery evaporated when I heard Lt. Col. V. Stuart Couch, USMC, speak at Saturday’s luncheon of the North Carolina Advocates of Justice Annual Meeting. Who is Col. Couch? He was the Gitmo prosecutor – a career prosecutor – who refused to prosecute a terrorist who had been subjected to torture. Read more here.
Covenants Not to Compete
Here is a link to a blog on covenants not to compete – a fascinating area of litigation.
Tennessee has a lot of law in this area, and a recent Tennessee Supreme Court case on the subject was essentially reversed by a new statute.
If you do this type of work you may find this blog of assistance to you.
New Business Tort Blog
B2B tort litigation is a growing phenomena, as big firm lawyers start to think outside of the box. Here is a new blog dedicated to the subject –Unfair Business Practices.
The blog focuses on unfair business and trade practices such as business conspiracy, breach of fiduciary duty, misappropriation of trade secrets and other proprietary information, fraud, tortious interference with contracts and other unfair business practices that are not neatly defined."
The blog is published by the Williams Mullen firm in Virginia.
Bloomberg Article on Medical Liability Reform
"Malpractice Lawsuits Are ‘Red Herring’ in Obama Health Plan" is the title of this article from Bloomberg.
Am excerpt:
While Obama vowed to address physicians’ malpractice worries in a speech yesterday, the annual jury awards and legal settlements involving doctors amounts to “a drop in the bucket” in a country that spends $2.3 trillion annually on health care, said Amitabh Chandra, an economist at Harvard University, in a telephone interview. Chandra estimated the cost at $12 per person in the U.S., or about $3.6 billion, in a 2005 study. Insurer WellPoint Inc. said in a report last month that liability wasn’t driving up health premiums.
More On Products Claims Against Chrysler and GM
The National Law Journal has this article on the future of products liability claims against Chrysler and GM. The United States Supreme Court has not yet ruled on the petition of consumers and plaintiffs’ lawyers concerning the Chrysler bankruptcy.
Chrysler has 160 pending cases and GM has about 300.
The T. J. Hooper Case
We all read it in law school, and here it is again. The fascinating opinion by Judge Learned Hand in In re Eastern Transportation Co. (The T.J. Hooper), 60 F.2d 737 (2d Cir. 1932) reminds us that just because just an industry ignores safety practices that are readily available does not mean that due care does not require the practice.
An excerpt:
Indeed in most cases reasonable prudence is in fact common prudence, but strictly it is never its measure. A whole calling may have unduly lagged in the adoption of new and available devices. . . . Courts must in the end say what is required. There are precautions so imperative that even their universal disregard will not excuse their omission.
NYT Reports President Is Talking About Restricting Med Mal Suits
Here is the article from today’s New York Times.
President’s Speech to the AMA
Here it is.
An excerpt:
Now, I recognize that it will be hard to make some of these changes if doctors feel like they are constantly looking over their shoulder for fear of lawsuits. Some doctors may feel the need to order more tests and treatments to avoid being legally vulnerable. That’s a real issue. And while I’m not advocating caps on malpractice awards which I believe can be unfair to people who’ve been wrongfully harmed, I do think we need to explore a range of ideas about how to put patient safety first, let doctors focus on practicing medicine, and encourage broader use of evidence-based guidelines. That’s how we can scale back the excessive defensive medicine reinforcing our current system of more treatment rather than better care.
Punitive Damages Study
The Social Science Research Network has an article available that is of interest to tort lawyers: The Decision to Award Punitive Damages: An Empirical Study. Here is the abstract:
Empirical studies have consistently shown that punitive damages are rarely awarded, with rates of about three to five percent of plaintiff trial wins. Using the 2005 data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics Civil Justice Survey, this article shows that knowing in which cases plaintiffs sought punitive damages transforms the picture of punitive damages. Not accounting for whether punitive damages were sought obscures the meaningful punitive damages rate, the rate of awards in cases in which they were sought, by a factor of nearly 10, and obfuscates a more explicable pattern of awards than has been reported. Punitive damages were surprisingly infrequently sought, with requests found in about 10% of tried cases that plaintiffs won. Punitive damages were awarded in about 30% these trials. Awards were most frequent in cases of intentional tort, with a punitive award rate of over 60%. Greater harm corresponded to a greater probability of an award: the size of the compensatory award was significantly associated with whether punitive damages were awarded, with a rate of approximately 60% for cases with compensatory awards of $1 million or more. Regression models correctly classify about 70% or more of the punitive award request outcomes, Judge-jury differences in the rate of awards exist, with judges awarding punitive damages at a higher rate in personal injury cases and juries awarding them at a higher rate in nonpersonal injury cases. These puzzling adjudicator differences may be a consequence of the routing of different cases to judges and juries.
Thanks for Torts Prof Blog for informing me about the article.