Dickie’s Plea

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.

Pessimistic Law Students More Successful

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’

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

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

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.

Bride Sues Her Florist Over Color of Flowers

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.”

The Rule of Law vs. The Rule of Life

We very much thank Judge Maria Lopez for her submission to our blog. Check out her show in your neck o’ the woods.

~~~

Life isn’t fair. You get fired. Your dog gets whacked by a bus. You find a nasty lump. Your teenage daughter elopes with her dead-beat boyfriend. Your rich grandma kicks the bucket and leaves every penny to a shelter for one-eyed kittens. Que mierda.

With any luck, this doesn’t all happen in one day. But some of it, or something like it, does happen at some point in all our lives. It’s the Rule of Life, and we all have to find ways to shovel it aside and move on.

None of this has anything to do with the Rule of Law. As a lawyer, a courtroom judge, and a television judge, I know a lot about the Rule of Law. I went to law school to learn about the Rule of Law and spent 25 years in the legal system dissecting and applying it. During my fifteen years as a Massachusetts courtroom judge, I presided over hundreds of criminal and civil cases.

I’ve seen it all—from the horrendous to the absurd. I sentenced murderers, rapists, and drug dealers. A convicted double murderer will never see the light of day because I imposed on him two consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole. I presided over cases where horrible injuries occurred. There was the “products liability” case where the mishandling of a dangerous solvent at an ink factory caused an explosion that killed two workers and left others with disfiguring burns. In these kinds of cases the Rule of Law is important.

However, I’ve also seen and heard of many cases where The Rule of Law was used in silly ways, such as the woman who sued her former boyfriend for “quantum meruit” when he left her for some one else. He had promised her a life of trips on the QE II. And some of the slip and fall cases are a riot. No one thinks they should pay attention to where they ‘re going!

The Rule of Law is important. Laws make us feel safe. They set standards for human behavior and they impose consequences on nonconforming behavior. They provide certainty, predictability, and consistency. We need laws, especially in a society where diverse and unrelated human beings all have to muck in together somehow. In a democracy like ours—which aims for the “fair management of differences”—the Rule of Law appears to be the best answer. Without it we’d likely return to the days of blood feuds and fights between clans. We developed laws to avoid social disorder and to settle conflicts using reason rather than force.

As a judge it is my responsibility to apply the Rule of Law, and for the most part I like the results. But there have been situations where I’ve found that the Rule of Law doesn’t provide an adequate result. When is the Rule of Law not the answer? When the Rule of Life is the problem. And the Rule of Life numero uno is: Shit Happens. I call this a “rule” because you can always count on it happening.

Just as the Rule of Law provides for certainty, predictability and safety, the Rule of Life practically guarantees uncertainty, unpredictability and danger, especially the emotional kind. No matter how many possibilities the law covers, there will always be the unexpected, the unique, or the bizarre.

The problem is that many of us have become so rule oriented that we expect there to be a rule to solve every problem. We want things clean and simple—and pain free. As a society we’ve become intolerant of pain, or we look for ways to immediately alleviate it. We have pills for all sorts of discomforts—muscle aches, headaches, stomach aches. We go to chiropractors, acupuncturists, and masseuses.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not opposed to alleviating pain. The problem comes when we expect to have no pain or not have to tolerate some. We see pain as a problem to be solved, but one of the biggest pains in life is life itself. Am I going to get the promotion? Will my child get into the college of his or her choice? What should I do about my elderly father’s deteriorating health? Will I have enough money for retirement?

Things are better when they are clear and simple. And that is why I believe we, as a society, have turned to the Rule of Law to solve many of our life’s problems. Laws set the rules for behavior and consequences for breaking them. They empower us.

But, rules can keep us from looking at life with fresh eyes, with an open mind, without prejudices. As a trial court judge I struggled with this dilemma when sentencing criminal defendants. A person who steals food to feed her child is different from the person who steals a bottle of perfume. But the law treats it as the same crime: larceny. A person who causes a public disturbance because he has Tourette’s Syndrome is different from the person who causes a public disturbance because he’s drunk. Under the law, they are both engaging in disorderly conduct.

The court system is useful and often necessary—but it’s a mistake to think it will solve every aspect of your problem. It can’t completely repair emotional hurts between family members, for example. In fact, I believe that underlying many disputes between closely related individuals is a sense of being disrespected or mistreated. How do I know this? Because often when closely associated individuals sue each other, they throw in the kitchen sink. In the case of a sister suing sister for damages to her car, the plaintiff complains about lost earrings and the month the sister lived with her and did not pay for anything.

Okay sister, you win. You get the cost of repairing your car. Now what? You may have won money, but you didn’t rewrite history. Your sister is still the same person. Getting a judgment against her isn’t going to get her to treat you better, appreciate you, or love you more.

I believe that more often than not cases involving close personal relationships aren’t about the legal problem in the cases. They are about unresolved emotional conflicts. Family relationships especially are fraught with negligence, with people constantly hurting each other. Healing those hurts requires something called forgiveness, and the Rule of Law can’t help you with that.

People should think through the consequences of going to court when it comes to important personal relationships. The legal system is adversarial. Once you invoke that dynamic, the relationship will never be the same.

Early in the taping of my television show I had a case of a mother suing her daughter for money she’d given towards buying a car. The mother needed weekly dialysis treatments and expected her daughter to drive her there. The daughter thought the mother should take the van that the clinic provided. The mother was clearly hurt and angry about her daughter’s attitude. During the hearing I learned that there were grandchildren who had not seen their grandmother since the mother and daughter had stopped communicating. To me this was really sad. I don’t like to declare winners and losers in these types of cases because there are no winners. And there are ramifications for the whole family—in this case, the grandchildren were also suffering the loss of a relationship.

The Rule of Law was not going to resolve this situation. My focus during the hearing was to get the mother and daughter back on a track of mutual caring and understanding. I told them that I could make a legal decision in the case, but I couldn’t repair the relationship, which was what was really at stake here. I asked them if they knew how important the mother-daughter relationship was. I asked them to think about the things they had shared and about what they’d miss if they didn’t get past this conflict. And, most importantly, I asked them to think of the children. By the end of the hearing the daughter accepted her mother’s desire to be taken in the car to dialysis, and the mother forgave her daughter for not understanding. Following their tearful embrace, I dismissed the case. And, under the Rule of Law, the mother would have had to keep paying the loan on the car because she signed the note.

My point: legal action won’t resolve the pain that the Rule of Life causes. Emotional conflicts belong on a therapist’s couch or in a mediator’s office. In therapy, you have to look at your feelings and behavior. In the courts, it’s about what the other person did to you. Compared to therapy, the courts provide cheap and quick attention to emotional problems. Yes, court can provide people with vindication, what I call “blame and pay for pain.” But that’s not the same as a true resolution. The kind of vindication the legal system provides doesn’t promote healthy and mature human interactions.

We need to understand the limits of the Rule of Law and accept that it does not trump the Rule of Life.

Grisham Sued For Libel

By Martha Neil — ABA Journal

The best-selling author of numerous legal thrillers has been sued for libel over his first nonfiction work, The Innocent Man.

In an unusual federal libel conspiracy case, John Grisham, along with other authors and publishers, has been sued by a prosecutor and law enforcement officer over three nonfiction books published about two murders that occurred years ago, reports the Muskogee Phoenix. Two defendants were reportedly proven by DNA evidence to be innocent of one of the crimes after having spent 11 years in prison (one was on death row).

The plaintiffs contend their professional reputations were damaged by books by Grisham, Dennis Fritz (one of the exonerated defendants) and Robert Mayer, and say the defendants participated in a civil conspiracy “to commit libel, publicity placing a person in false light and intentional infliction of emotion distress,” explains the Journal Record, an Oklahoma City newspaper.

“The complaint states that in the author’s note to those who helped him with his book, Grisham thanks Fritz and states that he relied heavily on Mayer’s book. The filing refers to Fritz and Mayer as co-conspirators and alleges that there are knowingly false statements in all three works,” the Journal Record article continues.

Attorney Barry Scheck of the Innocence Project, which represented Fritz, also is named as a defendant in the suit filed by Gary Richardson, a Tulsa lawyer. Grisham reportedly sits on the board of the Innocence Project.

Wyatt Fiasco Looks Like Another Texas Oil Trial We Know…

Market Watch carries the story today…

NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — Texas oilman Oscar Wyatt pleaded guilty Monday to participating in a scheme that paid millions of dollars in kickbacks to the former Iraqi government between 2000 and 2003 to secure contracts linked to the United Nations oil-for-food program.

U.S. Attorney Michael Garcia said Wyatt, 83, made the plea nearly four weeks into his trial, the day before the government planned to rest its case against him.

Wyatt pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. The former founder and CEO of Coastal Corp. is scheduled to be sentenced by Judge Denny Chin on Nov. 27.

Though the crime is punishable by up to 20 years in prison, the plea deal calls for Wyatt to spend no more than two years behind bars. Wyatt will forfeit $11 million and begin his prison sentence by Jan. 2.

After the first Iraqi war in 1991, the United Nations proposed the oil-for-food program to allow the sanctioned country to use its vast petroleum wealth to feed its people.

Under the program, Iraq was allowed to sell a limited quantity of oil, with proceeds deposited into an escrow account held by the U.N. The money could only be used for humanitarian purposes, including food and medicine for the Iraqi people and reparations to the victims of Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait.

However, the regime of Saddam Hussein began charging kickbacks in 2000 for the right to purchase its oil under the U.N. program.

“Wyatt and other Americans elected to pay these illegal kickbacks in order to continue to participate in the business of selling Iraqi oil,” Garcia said in a prepared statement. “By participating in this scheme, Wyatt and others diverted millions of dollars that otherwise would have been available for humanitarian purchases.”

During the trial, which began Sept. 10, former Iraqi officials testified that Wyatt agreed to make payments through four front companies in Cyprus.

Steve Gelsi is a reporter for MarketWatch in New York.

Cupcake Leaves the Bakery

The ABA Journal Tells us More

Ex-Prostitute Leaves Law to Write Movie Script

Posted Sep 25, 2007, 08:42 am CDT
By Debra Cassens Weiss

Lawyer Cupcake Brown, once a prostitute and a drug user, is leaving Bingham McCutchen to write the movie script for her best-selling memoir A Piece of Cake.

A four-day crack binge nearly killed Brown, who turned her life around and graduated from law school in 2001, the Recorder reports in a story republished by New York Lawyer. She wrote the book over four years while working as an associate at the law firm.

“I enjoyed the practice of law, but I want to help people,” Brown told the legal publication. “I’ve just been inundated with speaking requests, but it’s hard to do when you’ve got billable hours and lots of responsibilities.”