Day on Torts

Joy and I got back from Phoenix last night after spending a long weekend there at a meeting of the Board of Directors of the National Board of Trial Advocacy, the parent of which is now known as the National Board of Legal Specialty Certification.

After the meetings ended Saturday afternoon we drove to Sedona with Steve Croley and Bridget McCormack to watch the sunset. Steve is the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Bridget is the Associate Dean for Clinical Affairs at the University of Michigan Law School. (Bridget also serves on the NBLSC Board.) They are great people, and we had a great time both in Sedona and at the Spirit Room in Jerome.

Steve is writing (another) book but I am not sure if I can mention the exact topic or not so I won’t. I will say that Steve is just the right person to write a book on this topic and I look forward to its publication.

The Vice President accidently shot another man – a lawyer – during a hunting trip this weekend. Read about the hunting trip here.

The owner of the ranch has placed comparative fault in play: the injured man “”came up from behind the vice president and the other hunter and didn’t signal them or indicate to them or announce himself.”

Mary Matalin’s take on it: “[The Vice President] felt badly, obviously. On the other hand, he was not careless or incautious or violate any of the [rules]. He didn’t do anything he wasn’t supposed to do.”

The AP just issued a story at 9:30 P.M. today that is titled “Cheney Apparently Breaks Key Hunting Rule.”

A quote from the article: “It’s incumbent upon the shooter to assess the situation and make sure it’s a safe shot,” said Mark Birkhauser, president-elect of the International Hunter Education Association and hunter education coordinator in New Mexico. “Once you squeeze that trigger, you can’t bring that shot back.”

Of course, you saw that analysis here before 7:00 A.M. this morning.

Here is a PDF of the brochure of a seminar sponsored by the ABA titled “2006 Emerging Issues in Motor Vehicle Product Liability Litigation.”

The seminar will be held April 5 – 7, 2006 at the Biltmore in Phoenix.

An insurance defense firm was hit with a jury verdict in a legal malpractice case last Thursday, February 2. 2006. The lawsuit arose after the now-plaintiff insurer got hit with an adverse verdict in a products liability trial.

The plaintiff in the malpractice action claimed that the underlying case was lost because the defense lawyer “spent woefully few hours preparing, failed to call critical witnesses and muffed chances to attack the plaintiff’s credibility.” More specifically, the evidence alllegedly “showed that [the defense attorney who actually tried the case] spent 20.5 hours preparing for the ladder trial, failed to elicit expert testimony that could have refuted the [original] plaintiff’s experts, failed to take advantage of expert testimony for defendants that got out on summary judgment and failed to exploit evidence that would have shown [the original plaintiff] to be a lying fraud.” In all, 21 errors were claimed.

I have seen some recent evidence of this kind of case as well. I sit on the Standards Committee for the National Board of Trial Advocacy and as part of my work on that committee I have to review lawsuits filed against board-certified lawyers. I just reviewed a big stack of them on Tuesday and can tell you that the type of lawsuits filed against lawyers are different today than they were just five years ago. Historically, the claims involved blown statutes of limitation, other missed deadlines and an occasional failure-to-disclose-conflict case. We now see more and more “strategy-related” claims.

My wife and I are headed to Phoenix today, this time for for a Board of Directors meeting for the National Board of Trial Advocacy. I was in Boston for a committee meeting of the group two weeks ago; this meeting is our annual mid-winter meeting customarily held (surprise!) at a location with warm weather. Our annual meeting will be held in Seattle in July.

One of the items on the agenda at the meeting is the potential adoption of a new “civil litigation advocacy” certification. This certification, if adopted, would be available to lawyers with substantial experience in litigation but who lack sufficient experience to receive civil trial certification.

Recognizing civil ligitation as a speciality is controversial, but in my opinion there is a real need to recognize demonstrated competence for ethical lawyers who have a litigation practice but lack sufficient face time in front of a jury. I drafted the original set of standards for the proposed certification, but Barry Nace of Washington, D.C. has improved upon them.