While firearms manufacturers and dealers are shielded in part under the 2005 Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, which limits liability when their products are used in crimes, New York state passed a law last year designed to allow civil suits to be brought against the gun manufacturers. Unlike politicians, trial lawyers find ways to act […]
Once your lawyer receives and organizes discovery, the contents are evaluated closely – in and out of context. The stuff must be turned over, looking at it from every angle. In the movie, My Cousin Vinnie, Joe Pesci’s character teaches this lesson using a playing card. He shows the card to his young client with […]
In movies, a large truck will pull up to a lawyer’s office with hundreds of document boxes inside. This is a dramatization of a problem your lawyer first learned about in school. Large companies try to take advantage of their size by producing everything they can find in response to any good discovery request. The […]
A federal judge has awarded $5 million to a New Hampshire woman who suffered years of pain and scarring after a botched surgery at an Army hospital to repair an injury she received in childbirth. The link to the NH bench verdict is here,
“Your Honor, I distinctly heard someone at Mr. Thompson’s table say the word “cheeses”.” I thought I’d mumbled it under my breath. Apparently not. It was a bench trial and there was no jury so things had gotten a little loose after a day or two of everyone getting comfortable with one another. Maybe too […]
You can’t be afraid and do your job. Meryl Streep Bobby Bonilla used to smile every time he walked into the batter’s box. We do it like that.
I watched the American Bar Association’s recommendation of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s nomination to the Supreme Court. It all made sense. She’s highly qualified. We can all celebrate that she served as a public defender, tried civil rights cases, and served as a trial judge before being elevated. These are qualities that are historically underrepresented […]
The patient was supposed to get Versed, a sedative intended to calm her before being scanned in a large, MRI-like machine. But Vaught accidentally grabbed vecuronium, a powerful paralyzer, which stopped the patient’s breathing and left her brain-dead before the error was discovered. That was in a prestigious Tennessee hospital. The link is here. I had […]
Marketing can cover a lot of warts. Meanwhile, in the real world, people behave in line with our experience and the incentives put in front of them, even where it conflicts with what we know to be right and wrong. From the NYT, Mr. Williams said a State Farm claims adjuster told him that she […]
Bruce Lee said it: strip away the distraction of things you don’t need and you make room for what matters. This principle applies to business and life as well as it does martial arts. This exercise may feel unproductive (it is not) – you can’t distinguish the wheat from the chaff while multitasking or juggling […]
