The San Francisco Chronicle reports that the city attorney is suing a leading credit card dispute resolution service, accusing it of favoring industry and stacking the system against consumers in debt collection cases.
The suit, filed by the office of City Attorney Dennis Herrera late last month in San Francisco Superior Court, alleges that National Arbitration Forum, one of the nation’s biggest dispute resolution companies, is biased in favor of debt collectors. It says the forum “is actually in the business of operating an arbitration mill, churning out arbitration awards in favor of debt collectors and against California consumers.”
The complaint cites forum statistics showing that of 18,075 cases brought before one of its arbitrators from January 2003 to March 2007, a total of only 30 resulted in victories for consumers.
The suit touches on a matter that’s become an increasing concern for consumer groups in recent years - the push by financial services companies and other businesses to impose mandatory arbitration as a substitute for lawsuits to settle disputes with customers.
If I did the math right, consumers win approximately .16 of the cases and the credit card companies and banks win…uh…99.84 of the cases. Amazing.
Excellent piece in yesterday’s Los Angeles Times describing how arbitration is supplanting jury trials. Here’s an excerpt:
“Tort reform is a game of bait-and-switch in which ordinary citizens have been snookered by carefully orchestrated and relentless propaganda into seeing a phantom boogeyman in the much-reviled “trial lawyer” who brings “frivolous lawsuits” to “runaway juries” that render “out of control verdicts” in “judicial hellholes,” making insurance rates and the costs of all goods and services go up. Well, none of those expenses have gone down, have they? All the while, the real target was the justice system set up by our founders to protect the average citizen, and now it is in serious peril.”
A lawsuit filed Friday by a former St. Louis Rams player and others seeks millions of dollars in damages from the alleged taping of Rams practices by the New England Patriots before the 2002 Super Bowl.
The Patriots won the game 20-17 in the Superdome.
The $100 million suit, filed on behalf of former Rams player Willie Gary in U.S. District Court in New Orleans, names the Patriots, team owner Robert Kraft and head coach Bill Belichick.
Some smart professors at Baylor Law School were skeptical of all the anecdotal “evidence” used by the business and insurance lobbies to push for more restrictions on the rights of injured plaintiffs, so they decided to poll Texas trial judges about “frivolous lawsuits” and “runaway juries.” Here is their conclusion, based on over 300 responses from judges across the state:
“The survey results confirm that most Texas trial judges do not see significant numbers of frivolous filings by people who have no business suing, and plaintiffs with legitimate suits are much more likely to be under compensated than to receive any windfall. Two primary goals for tort jurisprudence are for the victim to receive full compensation and to deter the tortfeasor, and when victims are not fully compensated and tortfeasors are not deterred, neither goal is met.”
Attorneys from the Fort Worth personal injury law firm of Laird & Cummings, P.C., are reminding everyone who may be traveling on interstate highways to stay safe and smart this holiday season.
Families traveling north to celebrate the holidays with love ones this year should be particularly aware of weather-related dangers on the roads. Take precautions, and check the weather before you leave.
“The difference in road conditions can be very tricky for drivers who aren’t used to driving on icy roads or in severe weather,” says attorney John Cummings, partner in the Fort Worth personal injury law firm of Laird & Cummings, P.C. “When you combine bad driving conditions with the fact that tractor trailer drivers are trying to make it home for the holidays themselves, you can see the dangerous combination.”
Nearly 5,000 people were killed in crashes on U.S. roads involving large trucks in 2006, according to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration.
The National Transportation Safety Board and other respected highway safety research groups have found that nearly 40 percent of big truck crashes are due to fatigue. Studies show that extended periods without sleep can slow reaction times by as much as 50 percent, which is the same as having a .05 percent blood alcohol level.
Laird & Cummings, P.C., is a Fort Worth, Texas, personal injury law firm that represents individuals and families in cases involving personal injury, wrongful death, trucking accidents, medical malpractice, construction site accidents, products liability and business litigation.
Historically in Texas, there were no particular rules regarding the division of fees among lawyers or the payment of a referral fee from one lawyer to another for forwarding the case. In 2005, however, the Texas Supreme Court enacted new referral fee rules which do away with “pure” referral fees (those where the referring lawyer has no role in the case other than forwarding it to another lawyer). Now, referral fees in Texas must be based on either a “proportion of services” basis or a “joint responsibility” basis.
In a “proportion of services” situation, each lawyer performs substantial services on behalf of the client with respect to a particular legal matter. Each lawyer who participates in the division of the fee is required to perform services beyond simply being hired by the client and forwarding the case to another lawyer. There must be a “reasonable correlation” between services performed and the sharing of the fee between the referring lawyer and the handling lawyer.
In a “joint responsibility” situation, the referring lawyer assumes an ethical and perhaps financial responsibility for the representation. The referring lawyer must make a reasonable investigation into the client’s legal matter and refer the matter to a lawyer reasonably believed to be competent to handle it. The referring lawyer must monitor the matter throughout the representation, respond to client questions and keep the client informed of progress in the case, and assist the handling lawyer when necessary. “Joint responsibility” does not mean joint control, and the referring lawyer is not required to attend deposition or hearings or trial, or be copied on all pleadings and correspondence.
Importantly, attorneys must obtain the client’s written consent in advance regarding the basis for the referral and the division of fees. The complete rules pertaining to referral fees in Texas may be found in Rule 104 of the Texas Disciplinary Rules of Professional Conduct.
In our practice handling personal injury and wrongful death cases on a contingent-fee basis, we find that referrals on a joint responsibility basis are most common and most akin to the traditional referral fee arrangements our referring attorneys have enjoyed over the years.
More and more these days, witnesses are presented at trial through video deposition excerpts, either by necessity because they are unavailable at trial (out-of-state witnesses, treating physicians, etc.) or by choice (to streamline the case or in situations where an adverse witness’s testimony will never get better than it was at deposition).
Some tips:
• Keep the video edits as short as possible, 15 minutes or less if possible. Don’t just pop the entire video in and hit “play.”
• Hire a good video editor. Get the edits on VHS and DVD formats.
• Have a copy of the edits and a written page/line designation to give to the court reporter for the record. It will save him or her from having to record the testimony at trial.
• Ask the judge in pretrial to instruct the jury that they will see and hear video deposition testimony, which is meant to speed the trial and which is to be given the same weight as if the witness was live at trial.
• Ask the judge to point out that the lawyers have edited the videos with the judge’s approval (here in Tarrant County, at least, the parties have to exchange designate portions of the depos they wish to use at trial and the court rules on objections to those designations prior to trial). Often the editing causes the image on the screen to jump around a bit or cut off a word or two. I had one juror tell me after trial that this made her suspicious that the attorneys were trying to pull a fast one on the jury by splicing the testimony. Get the judge to explain this before your jurors draw that conclusion in their minds!
• Think about the timing of showing your video depos. Consider interspersing them in between live witnesses. Be careful about showing them right after lunch or at the end of the day.
• As much as possible, coordinate your video edits with those to be shown by the other side. Jurors don’t like hearing the same testimony again when the defense offers their tender right after the plaintiff shows his.
• When taking the deposition, keep in mind that the jury may later see the video and they may compare your dress and demeanor during deposition with that at trial. For example, if you tone down your usual jewelry when you’re in trial, don’t forget to take off that flashy watch during the depo. Don’t be a jerk in deposition and then a choirboy in trial.
• In a lengthy trial, take a still shot of the witness’s face from the video depo and blow it up or show it on an ELMO during closing argument to remind the jurors of the witness.
Clearly, there is no substitute for a live witness. However, when done right, video depos can be effective and time-saving, so long as they are not too long and are not overused.
For the trial lawyers out there, here’s a great new book by Rick Friedman and Patrick Malone: Rules of the Road: A Plaintiff Lawyer’s Guide to Proving Liability. This book emphasizes how jurors are called upon to make a collective decision about subjective concepts like “reasonableness,” and how defense lawyers use complexity, confusion and ambiguity to derail the plaintiff’s case. By developing several irrefutable “rules of the road” during discovery and at trial, the plaintiff lawyer provides the jurors with objective evidence against which to measure the defendant’s actions. And if done right, the defendant and the defense witnesses must either agree with the rules or look foolish for disagreeing with them. Powerful book. It describes and explains a method that many successful plaintiff lawyers have learned through trial and error. It’s no secret that jurors are highly skeptical of personal injury cases (the recent “$54 million pants lost by dry cleaners” case is the new “McDonald’s hot coffee” case that comes up in every voir dire these days), so anytime a tool comes along that helps lawyers working for consumers, grab it.
