Dickie’s Plea

Posted on March 17, 2008
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The WSJ Law Journal has notes on Mr. Scruggs plea that are very interesting…

Richard “Dickie” Scruggs, a founding father of the modern mega-tort class-action industry, pleaded guilty yesterday to trying to bribe a judge. It is notable but perhaps unsurprising in this particular week, when we have already seen one famous figure, New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, brought down by his own sense of invulnerability to the law or common sense.

In the 1990s, Mr. Scruggs famously got corporate defendants, and whole industries, to make mammoth settlements in lieu of fighting the thousands of plaintiffs the Mississippi tort lawyer had gathered into a class-action lawsuit. Mr. Scruggs was a legal entrepreneur, who figured out that the combined weight of endless plaintiffs and bad publicity would force even the richest corporations to plead for a settlement. It was his further insight that his percentage of the take, aka contingency fees, would make him and his associates rich as Croesus. The trappings of wealth that attended the class-action plaintiffs bar are the stuff of legend.

Now it is Mr. Scruggs who has thrown up his hands and entered a plea. He may face five years in prison. Specifically he has pleaded guilty to attempting to bribe Lafayette County, Mississippi, County Circuit Court Judge Henry L. Lackey. Mr. Scruggs was seeking a court ruling in his favor in a mass settlement in cases culled from Hurricane Katrina. At issue were $26.5 million in disputed legal fees. Judge Lackey called in the FBI.

The question buzzing through legal circles yesterday was why a guy that rich and that good at beating money out of corporations would put the whole game at risk this way. We’ll sum it up in one famous, potent word: hubris. After the personal ruin seen in the Spitzer and Scruggs cases this week, it is hard to blink at the irony here. They made their mark yelling that the rich and famous were subject to the laws of mere mortals. Once larger than life, both men have shown why that’s still true.

Happy New Year

Posted on January 1, 2008
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Well, it’s been a long nice year and we accomplished a lot with our little law movie. We hope your 07 was great and that your 08 will be even better.

Along the trail this morning, we noticed this little site that shows just how funny all this law stuff can be.

IAMLAWSUITABUSE.ORG

Bar Prep Schools Have All The Fun

Posted on December 14, 2007
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Our friend Drew Combs over at the LA Business Journal tells a nice story we already know…

High Prices, High Stakes for Law Grads
By DREW COMBS - 12/10/2007
Los Angeles Business Journal Staff

When the California bar released the results for the summer exam last month, there was good news: The 56 percent pass rate was a five-year high.

That meant a lot of champagne bottles were popped open by the 4,570 new attorneys who passed.

But it also meant about 3,600 people who failed will have to try again. Increasingly bar prep schools, many based in Los Angeles, are selling them deluxe instructional packages costing as much as $12,000. And, in a break from the past, the schools are also marketing these top-dollar packages to first-time test-takers.

It’s a growth sector because the stakes have gotten higher. Law school tuitions have soared and graduates are burdened by as much as $80,000 in debt. Some have jobs at elite law firms, where starting salaries have risen to $160,000 in Los Angeles – and their continued employment is contingent on them passing the bar exam.

What’s more, the California bar exam is generally considered one of the toughest in the nation. As a result, there are more than two dozen companies and bar preparation consultants in the L.A. area offering courses.

Santa Monica-based bar review company Barwinners introduced a “platinum package” three years ago. Since then, the program, which includes a spot in the standard bar prep class plus one-on-one sessions with company founder Shari Karney, has grown into one of the company’s most successful services, even though it costs double the $6,000 price of the standard eight-week course.

“It always fills with both first-time takers and repeaters but increasingly more first-time takers want to do everything they can to make sure they have to take the exam only once,” said Karney, who limits enrollment in the program to 20 people a year.

Karney, an attorney, has included the services of a hypnotherapist in the platinum package because “law school can be a traumatic experience and a lot of people carry that into the bar.”

Companies have become more aggressive in packaging these premium services.

“Your exclusive one-on-one tutor will focus on you and guide you through a practice-intensive, custom-tailored bar review course,” state the ads for National Bar Review, a Beverly Hills-based company.

One of its programs is specifically targeted to those taking the bar for the first time. Company owners did not return calls seeking comment.

More expensive

Most of the prep companies, especially with regards to premium courses, cite pass rates of over 80 percent. It’s difficult to verify the claims, however.

Richard Sander, a professor at UCLA Law School who has researched the bar review industry, was doubtful of the correlation between bar passage and review courses.

“Bar preparation courses have a marginal impact on bar passage at best,” he said. “How students do in law school is much more important than a bar prep course. Every study has shown that law school grades are the preeminent predictors of whether someone will pass the bar.”

Still, there’s a demand, especially for the deluxe packages and even the market leader has recently been touting their own high-priced courses.

Bar/Bri Bar Review, a unit of Thomson Corp., is the most popular bar prep company in California, and many other states. The company declined to comment for this article. It has been leery about press attention in the wake of a $49 million settlement reached in July in a class action that alleged it conspired with Kaplan Inc., another test prep company, to monopolize the bar prep market.

But according to a California-based executive with Bar/Bri, who asked not to be identified because he was not authorized to speak to the press, the company has been actively promoting its premium offerings, which add thousands of dollars to the basic course’s $3,550 price tag, in response to the marketing and packaging efforts of smaller competitors.

The top Bar/Bri package, called the “platinum course,” has a price tag of $10,000. It includes 21 tutoring sessions in addition to several of the company’s more traditional course offerings.

According to Bar/Bri’s Web site, it is designed for “a student who may lack the substantive foundation and skill set necessary to pass the bar.”

The executive said Bar/Bri’s platinum course, along with the more individual-focused packages offered by competitors, is “not appropriate for a first-time taker.”

He added: “The overwhelming majority of first-time takers will have no problem passing the bar with a basic course.” The pass rate for first-time takers of the July bar exam, the most recent test, was 69 percent.

Smaller industry players argue they are responding to market demand for services that are more tailored to individual strengths and weaknesses.

“I started the platinum program because more and more students, including first-time takers, were saying they wanted to meet with me privately,” said Karney of Barwinners. “We are seeing students that had college planners. They got tutorial help for the SAT and they have come to expect individual attention. They want their bar preparation to be more than sitting in front of a television all day.”

While Bar/Bri offers live lectures, most of the customers for its standard bar review watch video lectures.

Bar tutors who do not offer traditional courses have also seen an increase in the percentage of first-time takers using their services.

“I have gotten more first-time takers than I ever have in the past,” said Anita Stuppler, a Los Angeles-based prep consultant, who individually tutors 30 people each year, about 10 of whom have never taken the bar.

She said that as recently as a few years ago, all of her customers were repeat takers. “Some people are going with the insurance idea that more is better.” Stuppler, whose rates are as high as $300 an hour, views her tutoring services for first-time takers as a supplement to a more structured course.

Each year about 13,000 people take the California bar, which is held in July and February, but it is not clear exactly how many sign up for a structured course, let alone premium services such as an individual tutor.

The state bar doesn’t regulate prep courses.

“We don’t get involved with bar review courses at all,” said Gail Murphy, senior executive for admissions of the State Bar of California. “We assume that many of the people that take the bar take a bar review course but I know of applicants who have passed the bar without taking any course.”

The bar exam takes place over three days, with six hours of testing each day, and includes both multiple-choice and essay questions on topics such as property law, contracts and torts. A portion of the exam also reflects the actual practice of law by having test-takers compose memos or complete some other simulated legal tasks.

The ranks of those who didn’t pass on their first try are illustrious. Former California Govs. Jerry Brown and Pete Wilson had to take the exam more than once. Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa never passed it, despite four attempts.

The market for premium prep courses is comparatively small and represents less than 10 percent of total bar-takers each year, according to one industry expert.

Karney said that while her services are expensive, not passing the bar can be much more costly.

“Sometimes when a person doesn’t pass they lose their job. They also have to go through the whole ordeal of studying and taking the bar exam again.”

The Long Tail Diaries

Posted on November 23, 2007
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A little while ago, we put together a small diary of our summer trying to wrestle Amazon for Chris over at the Long Tail and we thought you’d enjoy it this long weekend. We believe 100% in The Long Tail and how license rights holders like ourselves have just as much power as the big studios. Hopefully, you have been as successful with your movies or books.

DETECTIVE WORK COUNTS:

It was mid-summer and our festival pipeline had run dry for the time being. It was time to get moving on our DVD release and we attacked the challenge seriously. We wanted to sell units and knew the Long Tail model was the way to go.

Our marketing strategy was formed along with much input from Brian Terwilliger, producer and director of “One Six Right,” a niche documentary (just like ours) about a well-revered occupation (just like ours) with participants that are very me-driven (just like ours): Ours are lawyers. His are General aviation (GA) pilots and how their airports are diminishing greatly under the hand of suburban crawl.

Brian drove his entire business on post-filters – people that knew of the movie from shop-talk exposure in places pilots love most. His first attempt at launching the DVD went badly. He decided the exposure and volume gained by switching to Amazon more than made up for any margin he sacrificed. We heeded his sage advice.

We collected lots of opt-ins and began building lists of emails that related to our niche. They included lists of law schools and their faculty and students, State, County and local bars, people who had seen our movie at festivals and screenings, friends of the team, and anyone involved in the indie-film market. We also built and/or updated other important post filters like Wikipedia and our MySpace page. We kept our blog fresh. We also planned to pay Amazon to leverage their recommendation system on our behalf.

Shortly before the launch we were featured in the American Bar Journal, which led to the doubling of pre-orders for the week following. Soon after, we got a call from Ebert & Roeper, who decided to feature our film. Woah. This fortuitous series of events sure took some of the risk out of continuing our Long Tail experiment, but we pressed on just the same.

We switched from Amazon Advantage to their CreateSpace opportunity because we decided that replication on our own would be a bad investment at this juncture considering the reviews and such coming in.

We were assured by both Amazon and CreateSpace that our original Amazon page would take CreateSpace-fulfilled orders and the pre-order lock would be released so customers would get the “shipping now” notice as they arrived.

As the Ebert & Roeper review played on a weekend our site visits (unique visitors) began to climb from 274 the Friday before the review to 1644 the following Monday (72 hours). More importantly our Amazon ranking within all DVDs and Documentary/Crime surged. We went from 1854 to 114 on all DVDs. Our orders became fodder of the day. 27 that Friday to 97 Saturday to over 175 that Sunday. This may sound like nothing to the likes of Warner Bros. but it was a great indicator of our future.

By that Monday we were headed into the 500 range in sales when all of a sudden, our Amazon page listed the title as unavailable.

Panic ensued.

Both ends of Amazon had no answers. I hit the refresh button on my browser 439 times in two days. Our ranking sank to 1842 in about 4 hours. Our tail was not wagging.

I went on a mission to call every person at Amazon I could find with every trick I knew. CreateSpace worked hard to find the answers but it seemed that their bridge to Amazon was a bit muddled. We kept getting promises for fixes “overnight”. It never happened.

Our web visitors were angry. The rage of emails from customers began to wear us down.

By the 50th hour, we had Amazon back but without the great discount from before. This made us new enemies. As in any long tail scenario the folks that look, then buy or buy, then look were probably lost.

As for the actual sales data, we went from a very spiked tail head of over $3,600 in revenues over two full days to a mere zero for 50 hours and then, after a large email launch that Thursday, we were able to catch up and make another 200 sales in 30 hours for about $1,800 more. Examining the graphical analysis, our trend line got a big kick in the gut. We would have been able to daisy-chain the initial review sales spike with our email launch at the 900 or 1,100 mark rather than the 500 mark and push it much farther. Clearly, a glitch this size takes double or triple your initial efforts to regain the momentum a big post-filter like the review offered us. How many times people look before buying was the question of the day.

Many of their individual departments that received our emails have quickly become great micro-communication agents. We are getting a lot of “bulk” orders and now many of our stars are coming to the table for more possible mentions in their circles.

So, the long tail maintains what it promises: a continuous sales opportunity. Our team is outstanding and there has been a great deal of massaging and tweaking of the literally hundreds, if not thousands of different pitches we make in any month’s time to an endless and hungry base. It continues every day. After all… it’s a Long Tail.

Pessimistic Law Students More Successful

Posted on November 16, 2007
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The ABA’s Debra Cassens Weiss says this in a recent post:

Lawyers are often the exception to the rule. It’s no different, researchers are finding, in studies of optimists.

A study by Duke University researchers found that, on the whole, optimistic people do better in life, the Wall Street Journal reports (sub. req.). They work more hours, save more money, pay credit card bills more promptly, are less likely to smoke, and are more likely to remarry after divorce. (Those who were overly optimistic, however, didn’t make such good judgments.)

Martin Seligman of the University of Pennsylvania, who studies positive psychology, says most optimists do better in life than merited by their talents alone.

But with lawyers, the opposite is true.

Seligman’s survey of law students at the University of Virginia found that pessimists got better grades, were more likely to make law review and got better job offers.

“In law,” he told the newspaper, “pessimism is considered prudence.”

Busy Lawyer Compares His Life-Stylist to ‘Outsourced Wife’

Posted on November 9, 2007
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By Debra Cassens Weiss of the ABA Journal

A partner at a New York law firm doesn’t want to reveal his name, but he did tell the New York Times he is a client of lifestyle manager Allison Storr.

The 39-year-old Storr helps her clients by arranging parties, tracking down the right hairstylist, finding trendy places to visit, choosing the right wardrobe and even finding potential friends.

“Ms. Storr calls herself a personal manager, but her duties go far beyond that,” the Times says. “Her clients, all of them men, pay monthly fees of $4,000 to $10,000 to have her be their personal decider in nearly all things lifestyle-related.”

The law partner told the Times that Storr helped organize a successful ’80s theme party at his house in the Hamptoms for about 200 friends on a $5,000 budget. He thinks of her as an outsourced wife. “The nice thing is that when I ask her to do something, she gets it done and there’s no negative feelings,” he said.

An interior designer who helps one of Storr’s clients describes her unusual business this way: “Allison collects people and shares them.”

Those Gals In Connecticut Have All The Fun

Posted on November 5, 2007
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Here’s one for the law funny pages.

Female uses Bare Naked Ladies song for harrassment of male colleague

In Students’ Eyes, Look-Alike Lawyers Don’t Make the Grade

Posted on October 30, 2007
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By ADAM LIPTAK — NY TIMES

A bunch of law students at Stanford have started assigning letter grades to their prospective employers, which pretty much tells you who holds the power in the market for new associates. It’s not easy to persuade new lawyers from the top schools to accept starting salaries of only $160,000.

The students are handing out “diversity report cards” to the big law firms, ranking them by how many female, minority and gay lawyers they have.

“Many of the firms have atrocious, appalling records on diversity,” said Michele Landis Dauber, a law professor at Stanford and the adviser for the project, called Building a Better Legal Profession. The rankings are at www.betterlegalprofession.org.

In New York, Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton got the top grade, an A-minus. At Cleary, the project says, 48.8 percent of the associates are women, 8.7 percent are black, 8.3 percent are Hispanic and 4.5 percent are openly gay.

Herrick, Feinstein, by contrast, got an F. Its numbers: 37.7 percent women, 4.9 percent black, 1.6 percent Hispanics, and no openly gay people.

In Washington, no firm got an A. But seven scored in the D range, including Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher; Kelley Drye Collier Shannon; Baker Botts; and Mayer Brown.

The numbers were provided to a central clearinghouse by the firms themselves. “Our process is simple,” the student group said in explaining its methodology. “Cut, paste and rank.”

Firms in the top fifth received A’s, in the second fifth B’s, and so on. Overall grades were arrived at by averaging grades for partners and associates in five categories: women, blacks, Hispanics, Asians and gay people.

The firms with low rankings did not dispute the basic numbers, with one exception. Herrick Feinstein said it reported that it had no openly gay lawyers “because, at the time of the filing, we did not ask for that information.” There are, the firm said in a statement, openly gay lawyers working there, “including one on the diversity committee.”

The students have ambitious plans, including asking elite schools to restrict recruiting by firms at the bottom of their rankings. They also plan to send the rankings to the general counsels of the Fortune 500 companies with the suggestion that they be used in selecting lawyers.

“Firms that want the best students will be forced to respond to the market pressures that we’re creating,” said Andrew Bruck, a law student at Stanford and a leader of the project.

Roger Clegg, the president of the Center for Equal Opportunity, a research group that supports colorblind policies, said the whole thing was pernicious.

“Diversity is all too frequently a code word,” he said, “for preferential treatment on the basis of race, ethnicity or sex, or lower standards, or being opposed to assimilation.”

Vikram Amar, a professor at Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco, added that law firms might well be violating employment discrimination laws in the process of trying to improve their rankings.

“As bad as their numbers are,” Professor Amar said of the firms, “the relevant applicant pool of law students with top grades is more white and Asian still.”

Whatever their consequences, the numbers the students have collected offer a fascinating snapshot of the profession.

In New York, a third of the big firms had no black partners, and an overlapping third no Hispanic ones. Half the firms in Boston had no black partners, and three-quarters no Hispanic ones.

“This is 2007,” Professor Dauber said. “If you can’t find a single black or Hispanic partner, that’s not an accident.”

The students also found relatively few female partners in New York, ranging from 7 percent at Fulbright & Jaworski to 23 percent at Morrison & Foerster. Those numbers are “a bit of a canary in the coal mine,” said Deborah L. Rhode, another Stanford law professor. “The absence of women as partners often says something about how firms deal with work-family issues.”

I asked the firms with particularly poor rankings for comments, and most of them responded, generally with quite similar statements. The issues are serious and difficult ones, they said, but they are working hard to make progress.

Some questioned the grading system. Paul C. Rosenthal, a partner at Kelley Drye, called it “totally ridiculous,” for instance, because the firm’s Washington office received an A for the number of black associates and yet a D overall.

Others pointed to offices at their firms with better numbers, to particular partners of color, to expanded recruiting efforts and to “affinity groups” and “diversity coordinators” and a “diversity protocol.” None questioned the essential premise of the report, which is that numbers matter.

The report cards seem to be having an impact. Mr. Bruck said a second-year student at Stanford had recently turned down an offer from one firm “as soon as he saw that it got an F on our diversity report card.” Professor Dauber said the student, who is white and male, “is the poster boy for our effort.”

But the student did not get into Stanford by being stupid enough to pick a fight with a prominent law firm at the start of his career. He would not discuss the matter.

They never cease to amaze us…

Posted on October 27, 2007
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KANSAS CITY, Missouri (AP) — A jury on Friday decided that a woman convicted of killing an expectant mother and cutting her baby from her womb should receive the death penalty.

Lisa Montgomery wiped tears from her eyes as a jury said she should get the death penalty.

Jurors deliberated for more than five hours before recommending the sentence for Lisa Montgomery.

Prosecutors say a judge will sentence Montgomery, but is obligated to abide by the jury’s recommendation.

Montgomery, 39, was convicted Monday of kidnapping and killing Bobbie Jo Stinnett on December 16, 2004, in the victim’s home in the northwest Missouri town of Skidmore. She was arrested the next day in Melvern, Kansas, where she was showing off the newborn as her own.

Montgomery wiped her eyes with a tissue as the jury announced its sentencing decision. Her attorney, Fred Duchardt, had his hand on her shoulder.

Prosecutors argued that Stinnett’s killing and mutilation is the kind of crime for which capital punishment is intended.

Showing jurors photos of the bloody crime scene, the prosecution told jurors Thursday that Montgomery deserves to die because of the heinousness of her crime, and because computer evidence — including Internet searches on performing Caesareans — shows the crime was premeditated.

Federal prosecutor Roseann Ketchmark said Montgomery had violated Stinnett in the “most wicked way possible,” then failed to seek medical attention for the infant, who was four weeks shy of her due date.

Defense attorney Fred Duchardt, who claims sexual abuse during Montgomery’s childhood led to mental illness, asked the jury to spare his client’s life. He said emotional abuse from her mother and sexual abuse from her stepfather “killed Lisa’s soul.”

“I’m not ashamed to ask you all for mercy,” Duchardt told the jury. “I ask for it on behalf of Lisa and all the people who love her.

Bride Sues Her Florist Over Color of Flowers

Posted on October 21, 2007
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It’s been all over the web and now we’re makin’ sure that the fans of ALWIAB see this poignant little ditty on out of control lawsuits. Maybe the bride should plan Thanksgiving with the pants lawsuit guy…

A Bride Sues Her Florist Over Pastel Hydrangeas
By ANEMONA HARTOCOLLIS (NY TIMES)

The wedding bouquet has barely faded and already an Upper East Side bride has regrets — not because she married, but because of the flowers.

The bride, Elana Glatt, says her florist committed a series of faux pas at her wedding on Aug. 11. In the most “egregious,” Ms. Glatt says in a lawsuit alleging breach of contract, the florist substituted pastel pink and green hydrangeas for the dark rust and green hydrangeas she had specified for 22 centerpieces.

The florist, Stamos Arakas, owns Posy Floral Design at 145 East 72nd Street. He said that he and his wife, Paula, had done their best to match the color of the hydrangeas with a picture Ms. Glatt had given them, but explained to her that because of the vagaries of nature and the lighting at the reception, the colors might not look exactly the same.

Not only was the color wrong, Ms. Glatt said in the lawsuit, filed on Friday in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, but the hydrangeas were wilted and brown, and arranged in dusty vases without enough water.

Their pastel colors clashed with the linens, favor boxes, wedding cake and décor at Cipriani 42nd Street, the luxurious restaurant where she and her husband, David, held their reception, Ms. Glatt said.

“The use of predominantly pastel centerpieces had a significant impact on the look of the room and was entirely inconsistent with the vision the plaintiffs had bargained for,” Ms. Glatt, a lawyer who practices under the name Elana Elbogen, said in the lawsuit, which she filed on behalf of herself, her husband and her mother-in-law, Tobi Glatt, who paid for the flowers.

Elana Glatt said they had reluctantly paid for the flowers in advance, with a cashier’s check for $27,435.14. She accused the florist of a “bait and switch” scheme, and asked for more than $400,000 in restitution and damages for, among other things, “unjust enrichment” by the florist. In a litany of “distressing and embarrassing” offenses, the lawsuit says the florist substituted cheaper orchids than promised in the bridal bouquet and provided the equivalent of $5 roses from a street vendor, but charged $55 to $65 for those arrangements.

Elana Glatt yesterday said, “It was a lovely wedding,” except for the flowers.

Mr. Arakas, said yesterday that he had many satisfied customers. He said that he provided the flowers for Ms. Glatt’s sister’s wedding the year before, and that he did not ask Ms. Glatt to sign a contract because he trusted her.

He said that before filing the lawsuit, Ms. Glatt sent him a series of e-mail messages demanding a $4,000 refund. He said he and his wife ignored the e-mail messages because “we thought they were so insulting they didn’t dignify a response” and because it “felt like extortion.”

“My father used to tell me, ‘Don’t deal with lawyers,’” Mr. Arakas said. “Maybe he was right, God bless his soul.”