BASF Case Focused On Concealing Evidence

December 12, 2014 By
The world’s largest chemical maker and a prominent law firm have lost another court appeal in a class action lawsuit accusing them of concealing and destroying evidence in a batch of asbestos litigation. The federal Third Circuit has declined to “rehear” a September decision that, in effect, re-opened the case. Businessweek reports that the company was “… ordered to face claims it fraudulently hid evidence that its talc products contained asbestos as it sought to scuttle thousands of personal-injury lawsuits.” The company in question was actually acquired by BASF and that business unit mined talc that was used in everything from wallboard to children’s balloons. 
Image as reported in The Wall Street Journal 9/4/14 article, "Appeals Court Breathes New Life Into Fraud Case Involving BASF, Cahill Gordon."

Image as reported in The Wall Street Journal 9/4/14 article, “Appeals Court Breathes New Life Into Fraud Case Involving BASF, Cahill Gordon.”

 
Writing in The American Lawyer (a subscription site) Susan Beck reports that “… BASF, its asbestos litigation has morphed from being a negligible nuisance into an expensive, embarrassing problem. The company stresses that it inherited this situation from Engelhard, and has gone to great efforts to find out what happened. For Cahill, the litigation is also remarkable. Legal ethics expert Stephen Gillers of New York University School of Law says it’s not unheard-of for a law firm to be sued for fraud, noting that several were sued in the wake of the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s. ‘What is rare,’ he says, ‘is for a case like this to target such a prominent law firm.'”
 
Beck also notes that thousands of cases might be re-opened based on the evidence. The Wall Street Journal also offers background for free.
 
Filed Under: Community, Courts Budget, National Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Immigration Courts Face Obama Actions

December 11, 2014 By

President Obama’s executive actions on immigration will impact the civil courts system, but it’s hard to know how soon that will happen – or how much the impact will be. Southern California public radio station KPCC is reporting it as “promising news” for immigration judges “… who have long sought more resources for their busy courtrooms, says Bruce Einhorn, a former immigration judge who served in the LA courts for more than 15 years.”:

As reported in SCPR, “A judge hears the cases of immigrant teens in Los Angeles.”

As reported in SCPR, “A judge hears the cases of immigrant teens in Los Angeles.”

The KPCC reports says  that a typical judge in Los Angeles has about 2,500 cases on their docket, which means an average case takes more than two years to reach a decision, but that could change with Obama’s action. Einhorn, said it will take time to see the effects on the ground. One group that will likely not find relief are the thousands of child migrant cases that are working their way through the courts. As Take Two has been covering on the program, more than 7,000 children are being heard in Los Angeles alone. Since they arrived in the country within the past five years, they probably will not qualify under the new rules from Obama.

Read and listen to the report here: Obama’s actions could affect thousands at LA’s immigration courts.

Filed Under: Border Kids, Community, Courts Budget, National Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,

Bar Exam Failures Raise Concern

December 8, 2014 By
The LA Times is reporting that "a group of administrators from nearly 80 law schools, including University of LaVerne College of Law Dean Gilbert Holmes, has asked the National Conference of Bar Examiners to review how the bar exam is scored after a big drop in passage rates this year."

The LA Times is reporting that “a group of administrators from nearly 80 law schools, including University of LaVerne College of Law Dean Gilbert Holmes, has asked the National Conference of Bar Examiners to review how the bar exam is scored after a big drop in passage rates this year.”



Just when we need more lawyers for things like immigration cases, it turns out that fewer people are passing the bar exams. The Los Angeles Times reports that “… for the first time in nearly a decade, most law school graduates who took the summer California bar exam failed, adding to the pressure on law schools already dealing with plummeting enrollments, complaints about student debt and declining job prospects.”
 
The Golden State reflects a national trend. The LAT says that “… many other states showed similar declines this year. It’s unclear why the recent passage rates are so low, but they fell by at least 5 percentage points in 20 states.”
 
Law school officials are asking all sorts of questions, including what the failure rate means amid student debt and other pressures. Read the story here: Fewer law school graduates pass bar exam in California.
Filed Under: Community, Courts Budget Tagged With: , , ,

Asbestos Plaintiff Firms Said To Pocket $2B/Yr.

December 4, 2014 By
The National Courts Monitor, our sister website, is reporting on a new estimate that plaintiff’s firms earn a whopping $2 billion per year on asbestos cases. The estimate, by a defense-side attorney, comes in the context of litigation-community debate and raises questions about creation of “Perjury Pawns.”
 
Filed Under: Community, Courts Budget Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Tomorrow’s Immigration News Today: Devil In The Details

December 1, 2014 By
Not to equate the United States Justice Department with Lucifer himself, but the old saying that “the devil’s in the details” is holding up with President Obama’s immigration actions. You have to read with a particular eye, but a Washington Post report by  Juliet Eilperin and Jerry Markon notes that “… one of the provisions the Justice Department lawyers included, which they also pushed for during the creation of the 2012 program, was to make clear that federal immigration officials would still have the option of deporting individuals who might otherwise qualify for a deferral.”

Wait, what? With some 400,000 cases pending in the Justice Department’s own immigration courts, they also have the option of deporting people who would “otherwise” qualify for defferral? The WaPo also reports that the “… memo states that the new policy ‘provides for case-by-case determinations about whether an individual alien’s circumstances warrant the expenditure of removal resources, employing a broad standard that leaves ample room for the exercise of individual discretion by enforcement officials.’”

One point of the story is that some people who might qualify for protection under the Obama action will no self-identify to authorities. It’s the kind of uncertainty that has kept some “Dreamers” from stepping forward. From what we’ve seen in the past year, “trust the Justice Department” is going to be a tough sell, and a future headline will be “Few Take Obama Up On Protection Offer.”

You read it here first! And you can see the excellent WaPo work here.
Filed Under: Border Kids, Community, Courts Budget, National Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Happy Thanksgiving!

November 26, 2014 By

To make sure our team has some time to be thankful, the Courts Monitor has suspended posting until Monday, Dec. 1, when we will resume our daily ration of civil justice rationing. Happy Thanksgiving, and watch for our “Year In Civil Courts” series in December. — The Editors.

Filed Under: Community, Courts Budget

Another Young Voice For Civil Gideon In Minnesota

November 25, 2014 By
Move over New York Times, a student essay from Minnesota is adding another strong voice in support of a “civil Gideon” movement to provide legal assistance in certain civil cases. The Minnesota Lawyer website published the essay by Katelyn Gross, of the Hawley Secondary School, this week.
 
The work was part of an annual scholarship competition, and Ms. Gross makes points like this: “… when someone breaks into a home and steals an expensive television set, that individual is entitled to attorney representation; by contrast, a poor person whose housing is wrongfully being taken from him is not entitled to counsel, even though the result may be homelessness for an entire family… homelessness is much more disastrous for a family than jail is for that one individual, and yet that family is not entitled to legal counsel.”
 

She makes a strong case. Read more here. 

Filed Under: Community, Courts Budget Tagged With: , , , ,

NYT Boards The ‘Civil Gideon’ Train, Sort Of

November 24, 2014 By
Talk about an early Christmas gift: The New York Times has discovered the Civil Gideon issue! A Nov. 22 report focuses on a California program to assist people facing eviction, but it extends the conversation into the national crisis. For example, the newspaper says that “… free legal assistance in noncriminal cases is rare and growing rarer. A recent study in Massachusetts found that two-thirds of low-income residents who seek legal help are turned away. Nationally, important civil legal needs are met only about 20 percent of the time for low-income Americans, according to James J. Sandman, president of the Legal Services Corporation, a federal agency that finances legal aid groups.”
 
The story mentions the Eviction Assistance Center, the California legal aid effort that advises “… low-income people in civil cases such as child custody, protective orders against abusers, guardianship and, most commonly, evictions.” The story also takes a shot at explaining the debate, reporting that the “.. pilot projects are part of a roiling discussion in legal circles about what is often called ‘Civil Gideon,’ a reference to Gideon v. Wainwright, the landmark 1963 Supreme Court decision that established a right to counsel in criminal cases.” It also notes that, despite the name, the idea is not to provide help to all poor people, but only those facing challenges to basic human needs, like housing.
 
The piece is also a sort of directory for anyone seeking a list of service providers. For example: “We’re trying to level the playing field,” said Neal S. Dudovitz, the executive director of Neighborhood Legal Services of Los Angeles County, a group that manages the eviction center in the downtown courthouse. With funds from the Shriver project, as the experiment is known, supporting about 16 lawyers from four legal aid groups, the center is providing full or partial assistance to one-third of the 15,000 tenants who face evictions each year in this courthouse alone.”
 
 
Filed Under: Courts Budget, National Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,

Obama Said To Be Planning Big Immigration Move

November 13, 2014 By
While early reports do not focus on the more than 300,000 recent Central American “border kids” awaiting deportation hearings, it does seem President Obama is making good on his immigration policy promises. The New York Times reports that “… part of Mr. Obama’s plan alone could affect as many as 3.3 million people who have been living in the United States illegally for at least five years, according to an analysis by the Migration Policy Institute, an immigration research organization in Washington. But the White House is also considering a stricter policy that would limit the benefits to people who have lived in the country for at least 10 years, or about 2.5 million people.”
 
The NYT added that “… extending protections to more undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children, and to their parents, could affect an additional one million or more if they are included in the final plan that the president announces.” Immigration cases, thought by many to be criminal cases, are actually civil actions. For example, immigration “judges” are actually employees of the Justice Department.
 
But officials also said, according to the Times, that patrol agents and judges at the Department of Homeland Security, the Justice Department and other federal law enforcement and judicial agencies, “will make clear that deportations should still proceed for convicted criminals, foreigners who pose national security risks and recent border crossers.”
 
Filed Under: Border Kids, Community, Courts Budget, National Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Rolling Stone Blows Lid Off Financial Scandal

November 11, 2014 By
It did not take long for Matt Taibbi to return Rolling Stone to the top of your must-read list. His story on the financial coverup behind those huge civil lawsuit settlements is making the rounds. He reports, among many things, that “… six years after the crisis that cratered the global economy, it’s not exactly news that the country’s biggest banks stole on a grand scale. That’s why the more important part of Fleischmann’s story is in the pains Chase and the Justice Department took to silence her… she was blocked at every turn: by asleep-on-the-job regulators like the Securities and Exchange Commission, by a court system that allowed Chase to use its billions to bury her evidence, and, finally, by officials like outgoing Attorney General Eric Holder, the chief architect of the crazily elaborate government policy of surrender, secrecy and cover-up…”
 
The report focuses on a whistle-blower attorney, he calls her the $9 billion witness, with insider knowledge. It notes that the woman this year “… watched as Holder’s Justice Department struck a series of historic settlement deals with Chase, Citigroup and Bank of America. The root bargain in these deals was cash for secrecy. The banks paid big fines, without trials or even judges – only secret negotiations that typically ended with the public shown nothing but vague, quasi-official papers called ‘statements of facts,’ which were conveniently devoid of anything like actual facts.”
 
Filed Under: Community, Courts Budget, National Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,
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