It was the influential Walter Olson on Overlawyered.com who flagged the blogosphere et al. Yesterday, Olson broke open the story of how plaintiff lawyer Clifford Shoemaker had a subpoena sent to blogger Kathleen Seidel. On her blog Neurodiversity she has been drilling down to what seem to be the facts in the controversy over the cause of autism.
Worded vaguely and with no charges of harm, the subpoena is viewed as everything from a fishing expedition to bullying. Well the blogosphere has united around Seidel who pushed back with a self-drafted motion.
This is the most important legal and ethical story in the blogosphere since DrudgeReport.com outed Monicagate. Hourly, we are checking in on the latest developments.
Seidel has just published two in-depth posts examining Shoemaker's billing practices and habits of practice. It is possible that these posts are the sort of analysis that Shoemaker was trying to prevent.
Billing the Adversary
http://www.neurodiversity.com/weblog/article/165
Numerous decisions issued over the twenty year history of the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) document the extent to which the limits on attorney compensation have been tested by practitioners seeking remuneration from its taxpayer-financed coffers. The following review summarizes decisions involving the recently-sanctioned VICP specialist Clifford Shoemaker, Esq. -- a central instigator of the campaign to convince the public of the speculative, scientifically unsupported hypothesis that a significant number of cases of autism result from vaccine injury, co-founder of the Institute for Chronic Illnesses, and a founding member its Institutional Review Board, which sponsors and provides ethical oversight of medical research and experimentation on autistic children and adolescents conducted by his long-time colleague Dr. Mark Geier.
Inspecting the Outstretched Palm
http://neurodiversity.com/weblog/article/166/
The potential for procedural and billing improprieties by Vaccine Injury Compensation Program petitioners’ attorneys — especially those representing numerous clients with similar, speculative claims — is made painfully evident in Special Master Denise Vowell’s recent fee and cost decision in Carrington v. HHS, Case 99-495V (Fed.Cl.Spec.Mstr., June 18, 2008) (unpublished), posted to the U.S. Court of Federal Claims website three days ago.
Posted by: Liz Ditz | July 13, 2008 at 09:27 AM