Law And More

Chimp-Attack Victim on "Oprah"

We who reflect on legal matters have to be cynical.  So, I suspected the most commercial motives for the chimp-attack victim to appear on "Oprah."  My hunch is that her legal team made this happen to solicit the push of public opinion behind her family's lawsuit.  They need the money for medical bills.  She's maintained in her awful condition at the Cleveland Clinic.  And, no one doubts there should be punitive damages.  Her former face is just that: Former. 

In order to pay the bills and make up for the suffering and disfigurement, the deep pockets have to be hit.  That includes the State of Connecticut which allowed the full-grown chimp to reside in a Stamford suburb.  There can be plenty others, from the maker of the drug that was in the chimp's system at the time of the attack to any middlemen who participated in the maintenance of the chimp.

Had there not been litigation, I wonder if the victim would have allowed herself to be seen in public?  To me having her on "Oprah" wasn't uplifting and inspiring.  It was a freak show.  So much for human dignity.

That $1.26 B award against PepsiCo vacated

It seemed absurd.  And another judge agreed.  Remember how the plaintiffs in a misuse of trade secrets case were awarded by one judge $1.26 billion against Pepsico because the company never responded to the lawsuit.  The legal administrative assistant in North Carolina, where the company is incorporated, failed to pass on the notification of the suit to the lawyers. It was a hectic day. The company's headquarters is in Purchase, New York.  Based on both those reasons, Pepsico asked for a review of the award, now that it is aware of the suit.

Last Friday, reports Emily Fredrix of the AP, a judge in a Wisconsin court tossed that decision.  The plaintiffs requested a jury trial.  Pepsico says it looks forward to defending itself in court.

HGH - Suing insurance companies to reimburse

Is short stature in medically normal children, particularly males, a disease?  That's the issue in a lawsuit by the family of Jeffrey Stern against the insurance company which won't cough up the $30,000 annually for HGH, the human growth hormone.

In NEW YORK Magazine, Stephen Hall reports on this controversy.  Hall points out at least six sophomores at Manhattan's elite Dalton School were taking HGH, in hopes of boosting their eventual adult height.  Hall himself is 5'6'' and perceives himself doing just fine in every aspect of life.

Those on the side of supposed common sense and bullish about ending needless lawsuits can rail against making shortness a disease and HGH a necessary treatment.  But parents of height-challenged children and perhaps the children themselves are going to wage a bitter fight in courts, Congress, and probably through online communities.  Research, at least the superficial kind, is on their side.  Studies show that tall people tend to be more successful.  That's all a plaintiff lawyer needs to go up against the insurance companies.

The main character in my novel "The Fat Guy From Greenwich" is 5'6", in a town of tall, trim WASPY kinds.  His career doesn't seem to suffer from that but his interior does.  Here are the first few chapters of that novel, to be published early winter Download FGFGchapters1,2.  My late father was 5'2'' - a condition, along with lack of education, he blamed his misery on.  I am 5' - a condition I blame my failure to be perceived and treated as The Professional Woman on.

This is America.  Research in Europe, notes Hall, shows height didn't make a difference in emotional health.  That's Europe.  Here height, for both sexes, gives a leg up. 

Never trained to "think" - Mutation of Trina Thompson Lawsuit

Scan the help-wanted for writers on Craigslist and you will find a growing number of advertisements for Bachelor-degree-level communicators who will be paid to research and ghostwrite undergraduate term papers, book reports, and reflective essays.  For those with specialized graduate degrees, there is also surging demand to perform those same kinds of tasks on the master-level thesis and the dissertation.

Given that this practice is obviously known, then why is it allowed to exist?  The lion's share of primitive plagiarism has been addressed with software such as copyscape.  But since this particular niche ghostwriting business is growing, there's a crying need to find a way, probably through technology, to halt it.

Until that happens, some parents or graduates with legal knowledge are bound to do a version of the Trina Thompson lawsuit of her alma mater Monroe College.  She didn't find employment after receiving her bachelor's degree and wanted her $70,000 in tuition back.

The permutation of Trina Thompson will be a demand for a refund of tuition and a allegation of negligence for allowing projects which are intended to teach research, critical thinking, and organization of arguments/points of view to be outsourced by the students.  Can't the professors pick up on this, simply intuitively?  And why haven't the administrators and professors structured such assignments so that they can't be outsourced?  For example, much like standardized tests, the project would be done in a period of several hours, with software to the outside email addresses blocked.

Full Disclosure:  I did do one such ghostwriting assignment.  It was for a 1680-word book review.  That required the ghostwriter, that is me, to:

• Read the book [I doubt if students are even doing that these days]
• Retrieve book reviews of the book from the Internet
• Select one major book review and explain that point of view of the author's text. 
• Reflect on the experience of reading this book.

The service is legal.  So, I figured why not at least try it.  I only tried it once.  The fee to me was $50 which broke down to about $5 an hour.  That game was not for me.  I hadn't remembered how really putting together academic work is so time-consuming.

These academic ghostwriting farms will shut down if there is no business.  There will be none if there are lawsuits, plenty of them.  Those complaints by consumers of higher education will allege that they were not adequately trained to do college-level retrieval of information, analysis, and exposition. 

The same student in a history course which submitted my book review as his also submitted several others ghostwritten by other vendors in the service.  Incidentally, to protect the consumer against being charged with plagiarism by the professor, the ghostwriters's manuscripts are run through copyscape.

Reflection: Ted Kennedy was crucified for much less.  He paid someone to sit in for one Spanish examination. 

Big Win for Craigslist - US Dist Judge Grady Tosses Dart's Lawsuit

Craigslist won.  The opponents of erotic advertising lost.  In Cook County, Illinois, Sheriff Tom Dart had made a lot of noise, including the lawsuit kind, about the erotic classified on Craigslist.  After all, those ads allegedly lead to the murder of a sex worker by Philip Markoff.

No dice, ruled U.S. District Judge John F. Grady.  He ruled, reports Andrew Greiner on "NBC Chicago":

"Sheriff Dart may continue to use Craigslist's Web sit to identify and pursue individuals who post allegedly unlawful content.  But he cannot sue Craigslist for their conduct."

What the powers-that-be in law should be focused on, particularly in this dicey economy, is ensuring safe environments for sex workers to deliver their services.

Bayer's Yaz, Yasmin - 129 Lawsuits filed as of 10/8/2009

The lawsuit filed by a Newark, California woman yesterday in federal court contends that Bayer's Yaz did not sufficiently warn of the risks.  The drug and its older version Yasim are the target of 129 lawsuits filed as of October 8, 2009, reports Kate Moser in THE RECORDER.  A birth control pill created from synthetic form of the hormone progestin - drospirenone - Yaz and Yasmin generated about $1.8 billion in sales in 2008.  The distributor McKesson is also being sued.

The 39-year-old plaintiff claims that she suffered a severe stroke after taking the drug for a month.  Her reason was to mitigate premenstrual cramps.  In addition to the failure-to-adequately-warn about risks, her attorney Michael Danko raises other legally interesting issues.  They should put BigPharma on alert.  For instance he questions why this drug was created when earlier ones weren't much different.  Moreover, was it based on the synthetic hormone drospireonone in order for Bayer to patent it.

The defense might, in turn, bring up the plaintiff's age.  Usually, that age puts her in a high-risk category for the use of birth control pills.  In addition, why did she select this medication when there are many others available for the relief of cramps.  Also, can a causal relationship be proved between the use of the drug for a month and the severe stroke? 

This will be fascinating litigation to observe.

Balloon Boy: Sins of the Father

Oh, there are going to be plenty of charges against Balloon Boy's Father, and perhaps the mother.  But, first things first: Child welfare has to remove Balloon Boy and his two brothers from that environment. 

If the parents have any sense of right and wrong, they will surrender custody permanently of the children.  The boys are adorable.  They will find a family way far away from the scene of the crime who will adopt all three.  

Let the children go.  

Omniscan - Will it derail GE's $17 Billion Health Business?

During an MRI, a contrast agent is injected so that the imaging of what's inside the body can be made distinct.  One of the those contrast agents - Omniscan - is sold by GE which now has a $17 billion health business.  That's lots more profitable than appliances.  And it could promote growth in a corporation that has been stuck in an old-economy mess of businesses. 

Now, Jeff Gerth reports in BUSINESS WEEK, Omniscan is alleged to cause harm to those with weak kidneys.  GE denies the allegation.  Of the 400 lawsuits filed in U.S. federal courts regarding contrast agents, about 300 are related to GE and 70% of them relate directly to Omniscan.

This could derail GE's great hope and hurt the overall corporate brand.  These pharmaceutical lawsuits can sure eat away at reputational capital.

U.S. SC - After review of Conrad Black conviction, will review Jeff Skilling's

The issue is the federal law on "honest services" fraud.  We already know that the U.S. Supreme Court will be reviewing that in "[Conrad] Black v. United States." 

Now we find out that, after that review in December, it will review a different part of that law in the conviction of Enron's Jeff Skilling, reportsTony Mauro in THE NATIONAL LAW JOURNAL.  In addition, there is the matter of pre-trial publicity and community passion in Houston.  Those factors might have created, explains Mauro, a presumption of jury prejudice. 

O'Melveny & Myers's Daniel Petrocelli, who represented Skilling in the original trial, is handling this review and appeal.  During that trial, Petrocelli used the strategy of simplification versus the more traditional approach of overwhelming the jury with complexity that could trigger reasonable doubt.

As most of us recall, the economy and spirit of Houston were decimated by the collapse of Enron.  For that very reason not many in Houston attended the Skilling trial.  Reporters covering it were surprised there had been so many available seats in the courtroom.

At stake, or course, is Skilling's appeal.

Paxil Test Case Goes Against Glaxo - 600 more pending

Glaxo suffered a major defeat in a state court in Philadelphia. 

After seven hours of deliberations, reports David Bario of THE AMERICAN LAWYER, the jury awarded $2.5 million to the family of Lyam Kilker.  He was born with heart defects after his mother took Glaxo's antidepressant Paxil during pregnancy.  The company did not warn doctors of the risks for pregnant women although there had been problems in animal tests. Jurors said what swayed them to grant the award was that the company did not perform adequate testing and study of this drug. Glaxo will appeal.  Pending are 600 other lawsuits dealing with birth defects.

The implications, on many fronts, of this are huge.  To begin with, BigPharma has another black eye.  This is an especially horrific one since it involves birth defects which perhaps did not have to happen.  Glaxo contends there is no evidence of a causal relationship between the drug and the birth defects.  This will remain a major issue in other lawsuits.

In addition is the issue of women taking any antidepressant during pregnancy.  Does the risk of birth defects outweigh the risks associated with clinical depression?  This question, to many consumer advocates, has not been properly answered.  As anyone who has taken any antidepressant knows, the medication is powerful. After all, it can assist in changing a mood disorder.

Third, what is the responsibility of the middleman - the is the medical doctor - in all this?  On "The Good Wife," the defense attempted to shift some of the liability to the medical doctor from the pharmaceutical company.  Should medical doctors try diverse non-medication ways to manage depression in pregnant women before prescribing it?  Or perhaps they should not prescribe it in any situation?

Both the pharmaceutical industry and the medical profession should be rocked by what the jury decided.  Come to think of it: So should women who are considering becoming pregnant or are pregnant.