I’m a trial lawyer for injured people and businesses at The Beasley Firm. Founded in 1958, we have recovered over $2 billion for our clients through hundreds of verdicts and settlements in excess of $1 million. We’re listed in Super Lawyers, Best Lawyers in America, U.S. News’s Top Lawyers, [...]
Aristotle and Jay-Z Explain Legal Advocacy
The New Yorker recently reviewed Jay-Z's book explaining his discography ("Decoded") alongside “The Anthology of Rap,” a nine-hundred-page compendium published by two English professors who argue that rap should be considered a form of modern poetry. I won't touch that argument; poets and English professors are notoriously violent. But one part of the article bears particular relevance to advocates: Too often, hip-hop’s embrace of crime narratives has been portrayed as a flaw or a mistake, a regrettable detour from the overtly ideological rhymes of groups like Public Enemy. But in Jay-Z’s view Public Enemy is an anomaly. “You rarely become ... Continue Reading
A Look Behind The Scenes Of A Multi-Million Dollar Personal Injury Verdict
[Update: Judge Massiah-Jackson upheld the verdict and overruled the defendants' post-trial motions. Now comes the appeal to the Pennsylvania Superior Court.] As The Legal Intelligencer hinted last night: A Philadelphia jury returned a $27.6 million verdict Monday in favor of a woman and her husband who said she was injured while taking part in a promotional video for an artificial knee implant. Philadelphia Common Pleas Court Judge Frederica A. Massiah-Jackson presided over the trial in Polett v. Public Communications Inc. The judge confirmed that the jury awarded $26.6 million to plaintiff Margo Polett and $1 million to plaintiff Dan Polett ... Continue Reading
Judges On The Quality Of Legal Representation: Briefs vs. Oral Argument and Experience vs. Intellect
A few months back, Judge Richard Posner and Professor Albert Yoon posted their draft of What Judges Think of the Quality of Legal Representation, their forthcoming paper in the Stanford Law Review. Legal scholarship is prone towards omphaloskepsis and metadiscourse, so it's refreshing to see a paper coming out based on real, honest-to-goodness empirical data: Posner and Yoon's survey of 666 federal and state judges, including both appellate and trial judges. There's a lot to unpack from the study, so I'm going to do it in several posts. Before we get to the data, there are two long-standing preconceived notions about the ... Continue Reading
Judges, Juries And The Gestalt Of A Trial
Bench trials, in which the judge decides both the facts and the law, are often considered to be less demanding than jury trials, but as I finally come to the surface for air after several days submerged in the preparation of a "Proposed Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law" for a bench trial that began last October, I must say that bench trials are, in many ways, more demanding than jury trials. In a jury trial, after all the testimony has been heard and all the evidence has come in, the judge instructs the jury on the law — ... Continue Reading
Ready, Fire, Aim: How Not To Threaten Sanctions Against Opposing Counsel
[UPDATE: The lawyer called me and asked to "restart" our relationship, including by removing the more provocative elements, so I did. Water under the bridge.] Yesterday I received an email which said: Pursuant to New Jersey Rule of Court 1:4-8, please allow this correspondence to serve as notice that Defendants intend to file a Motion for Sanctions as the claims filed by [my client] against Defendants [his clients] are frivolous and in violation of NJ Rule 1:4-8(a). More specifically, [my client]'s claims include allegations of Fraud (Count I), Conspiracy (Count II), violations of the New Jersey Wage Payment Law (Count ... Continue Reading
“A Judge’s Guide to Neuroscience” — A Cautionary Tale
Modern society has two means by which it assesses truth or falsity: science and law. Just as Einstein recognized "there is no logical path to the [elemental laws of the universe]; only intuition, resting on sympathetic understanding of experience, can reach them," Holmes taught "the life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience." Scientists and lawyers have learned to value pragmatic experimentation over logical deduction; call it the victory of Aristotle over Plato. (Scientists and lawyers also share a love of semicolons.) But they don't always reach the same conclusions, particularly not on matters of the mind. ... Continue Reading
Why Can’t Copyright Trolls Be Compelled Into Agency Hearings Or Arbitration?
[Update: I somehow missed Ron Coleman's earlier take on the article, but it's required reading if you're interested in the subject. Coleman and Walter Olson both seem on board with, as Olson words it, "steering rights owners into agency complaints or arbitration as an alternative, or at least precondition, to court action."] Via Kevin Drum, Wired's Threat Level has a profile of Steve Gibson, CEO of Righthaven, a company which has applied the much maligned — but often quite lucrative — "patent troll" model to copyright litigation on behalf of publishers: Borrowing a page from patent trolls, the CEO of fledgling Las ... Continue Reading
The Wikileaks Arrest, Bernie Madoff, and Misconceptions of Justice
Trial lawyers traffic in justice. When the American Trial Lawyers Association decided that decades of insurance industry funded propaganda attacking "trial lawyers" had paid off, they changed their name to the American Association for Justice. (Frankly, I would have preferred they changed their name to The Justice League of America, but I suppose that would create trademark issues.) Even when we're not making justice (or injustice, depending on your perspective), we're talking about it. Two weeks ago I contributed to a debate at The Jury Expert over the ethics of using David Ball's and Don Keenan's Reptile to persuade juries. It's ... Continue Reading
The Seventh Circuit’s First Report On Electronic Discovery and The Candor of Counsel
At Electronic Discovery Law: Last month, the Seventh Circuit’s Electronic Discovery Pilot Program Committee released its report on phase one of its Electronic Discovery Pilot Program. Initiated as a “multi-year, multi-phase process to develop, implement, evaluate, and improve pretrial litigation procedures that would provide fairness and justice to all parties while seeking to reduce the cost and burden of electronic discovery consistent with Rule 1 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure”, the first phase of the program ended on May 1, 2010, after a seven month period in which the committee’s Principles Relating to the Discovery of Electronically Stored ... Continue Reading
Is Neuroscience The Next Big Thing For Trial Lawyers?
Trial lawyers — both defense-side and plaintiff's-side — are always looking for an edge. Every aspect of the trial has to be planned in advance, with multiple levels of contingency planning for when testimony, rulings or evidence goes awry. That's a given, but it's not enough. There's a whole cottage industry of jury consultants built upon trial lawyers' insecurities, some reputable, some not so much, all of it quite pricey. Most of it strikes me as pointless. Sure, a mock jury or consultant review can expose weaknesses in your case and reveal the importance of issues that you hardly considered ... Continue Reading
