Published By: Maxwell S. Kennerly, Esquire

Trial Lawyer

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Tort reformer Ted Frank and I have had our disagreements over the years. (See here and here.) In recent years, he has focused his work on filing objections to class action settlements through the Center for Class Action Fairness. Some of his work has focused on getting a better deal for class action members who, he alleged, weren’t receiving fair portions of the proposed settlement, but the bulk of his objections — at least to my knowledge — have focused on reducing the attorney’s fees claimed by the class counsel.

 

As Alison Frankel reported yesterday, it seems that, in the course of his contingent-fee work on behalf of people objecting to class action settlements, Frank has found himself in a situation he himself describes as “lurid, complex and Grishamesque.” The situation seems to have arisen from his personal goals as a lawyer being different from one of his client’s goals, and from his fee-splitting relationship with another firm, the very same issues he so frequently raises in his objections.

 

It would seem like a perfect opportunity for schadenfreude, but, in fact, all I can feel for him is sympathy — and his misfortune in the In Re: Capital One Telephone Consumer Protection Act Litigation presents a tremendous opportunity for tort reformers, politicians, the press, and the public to see just how difficult class actions, mass tort, and other large-scale litigation can be. In that case, Frank filed an appeal on behalf of a class member objecting to the fee claimed by Lieff Cabraser, and then everything went south. 
Continue Reading Ted Frank And The Real Risk Of Class Actions

It is a truism among trial lawyers that compelling stories win cases.

Jim Perdue, a trial lawyer in Texas, wrote a trial advocacy book literally titled Winning with Stories: Using the Narrative to Persuade in Trials, Speeches & Lectures. I’ve written several times before about studying the methods of the great storytellers of our times and of classical times and how juries respond to the emotions conveyed by counsel.  The cynics might say we are doing nothing more than scheming to manipulate the emotions of jurors — like when a judge wrongly let defense lawyers drive an inadequate security / wrongful death case completely off the rails by discussing the Reptile book — but trial advocacy isn’t about misrepresenting yourself to jurors. It’s about choosing the most persuasive form of advocacy among many honest options.

Cases don’t come to us with summaries attached telling us which points to emphasize and how to construct the presentation of evidence at trial.  Perhaps worse, the structure of trial, particularly the way in which each witness testifies fully before the next witness is called and the requirement that a foundation be laid for all testimony, is almost designed to prevent the jury from understanding what really happened.  I’m fond of telling young lawyers and clients to recall the last great book, play, or movie they read or saw — perhaps Inception or Hamlet or Harry Potter — and then imagine if they had to figure out what happened based on nothing more than long, convoluted question and answer sessions with each of the participants.  Would you have any chance of understanding what happened if you sat as a juror on the the posthumous trial of Hamlet?

We all know a trial lawyer needs to turn that jumble of evidence into a story, but what story should that be?

To that end, let’s turn to John Reed, a rather unusual writer who, for example, successfully constructed a “new” Shakespeare play by mashing up lines from Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, Othello, Romeo & Juliet and Henry V into a cohesive narrative. In the latest Rumpus he rails against the commercialization of fictional narrative, with a couple interesting observations for those of us outside of literature:

To this day, sin, suffering, redemption is the primary Western story. In movies, in television, in cross-cultural memoirs (which must accept the Western story to be culturally significant) and in fiction. Harvey Pekar, in his recent collection, Huntington, West Virginia on the Fly puts a percentage to equation: 99% of what we encounter is establishment narrative.

In West Virginia and the body of his work, Pekar understands that a story can be told of any of us, without forced structures or prerequisites—because every man, every woman’s life, is an allegory of our times, and in the broader sense, existence itself. …

The distinction—from life or from edict—happens to be the customary distinction of the literary v. the non-literary work. The logic:

—In literary works, the structure is derived from the content.

—In non-literary works, the content is derived from the structure.

…

Max Brand (Frederick Schiller Faust), a prolific pulp western writer of the 1920s and 30s, maintained that there were two types of stories: coming home, or leaving home. The assertion neatly correlates to the classical definition of comedy and tragedy, as well as a content-first v. structure-first division of the arts. The coming home story (usually comedic or “feel good”): the cowboy accepts and/or is accepted by society. The leaving home story (usually tragic or “dark”): the cowboy rejects and/or is rejected by society. Structure-first stories, i.e. coming home, tend to be about assimilation, while content-first stories, i.e. leaving home, tend toward dissent.

Deep stuff, perhaps a bit too deep for me — “Academia, outmoded and provincial, peddles geniuses and nihilists, ignores contemporary writers of far more immediacy, relevancy, talent and accomplishment” — considering that I cited Harry Potter earlier in this post, but there’s a lot we can learn from examining the way in which narratives are formed, particularly this distinction between whether structure drives content or vice versa, and the idea that all stories fall into a couple predictable forms.

One obvious analogy to draw is that the “evidence” is the “content” and so it should drive the “structure” of the presentation at trial — but the evidence is a jumbled mess of known facts, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns. The lawyer has to create some semblance of structure to even begin arranging the evidence for presentation at trial. The core narrative of sin, suffering, and redemption fits much of our work, with the negligence as the sin, the damages as the suffering, and the plaintiff’s lawyer asking the jury to redeem the tragic situation, but it doesn’t get you very far into developing a real narrative for your case.

And then there’s a potentially bigger problem.Continue Reading Trial Lawyers As Storytellers, The Narratives Versus The Numbers

If you’re a reader of this blog, you’re undoubtedly familiar with Bell Atlantic v. Twombly and Ashcroft v. Iqbal, a pair of Supreme Court cases which altered the pleading standards applicable to civil cases filed in federal court.

Defense lawyers have jumped all over those two opinions in an attempt to dismiss lawsuits — particularly complex commercial class actions, like antitrust cases — before any discovery can be taken. Every lawsuit, they claim, no matter how detailed and compelling, is "implausible" under Twombly and Iqbal. I taught CLEs to help other trial lawyers defeat those arguments.

Back when the Iqbal opinion first came out, I wasn’t impressed. Sure, the Supreme Court added the word "plausible" to the Rule 8 standard, but frankly I didn’t think Twombly or Iqbal would make Rule 8 and Rule 12(b)(6) any more dispositive than they already were. Before either of those cases were decided, if a judge read a plaintiff’s complaint and thought that the claim was "implausible," they would dismiss it under Fed.R.Civ.P. 12(b)(6) for failing to state a claim upon which relief could be granted. Twombly and Iqbal simply codified a practice that was already widespread in the federal judiciary.

That’s not to say I think the opinions do nothing — by way of their vague, ambiguous and amorphous language, they confuse a lot of judges into arbitrarily deeming certain allegations to be "conclusions" instead of "facts" (and even Judge Posner can’t figure out the "plausibility v. probability" distinction) — but the underlying legal principles are the same.

I said as much at the time. Time has proven me correct.

Almost exactly a year ago I posted Second Circuit Revives Digital Music Price-Fixing Case, Takes A Bite Out Of Twombly, noting a Second Circuit opinion which held:

Although the Twombly court acknowledged that for purposes of summary judgment a plaintiff must present evidence that tends to exclude the possibility of independent action, 550 U.S. at 554, and that the district court below had held that plaintiffs must allege additional facts that tended to exclude independent self-interested conduct, id. at 552, it specifically held that, to survive a motion to dismiss, plaintiffs need only “enough factual matter (taken as true) to suggest that an agreement was made,” id. at 556; see also 2 Areeda & Hovenkamp § 307d1 (3d ed. 2007) (“[T]he Supreme Court did not hold that the same standard applies to a complaint and a discovery record . . . . The ‘plausibly suggesting’ threshold for a conspiracy complaint remains considerably less than the ‘tends to rule out the possibility’ standard for summary judgment.”).

Defendants next argue that Twombly requires that a plaintiff identify the specific time, place, or person related to each conspiracy allegation. This is also incorrect. The Twombly court noted, in dicta, that had the claim of agreement in that case not rested on the parallel conduct described in the complaint, “we doubt that the . . . references to an agreement among the [Baby Bells] would have given the notice required by Rule 8 . . [because] the pleadings mentioned no specific time, place, or person involved in the alleged conspiracies.” 550 at 565 n.10. In this case, as in Twombly, the claim of agreement rests on the parallel conduct described in the complaint. Therefore, plaintiffs were not required to mention a specific time, place or person involved in each conspiracy allegation. 

The Second Circuit’s opinion was significant. The case was right up Twombly‘s alley — an allegation of an illegal agreement in violation of antitrust laws, the details of which were still known only to the defendants — and so the Second Circuit’s reinstatement of the case dealt a powerful blow to the defense lawyers who had been arguing that Twombly and Iqbal had slammed the courthouse shut on plaintiffs who couldn’t prove their whole case before even filing it.

The record companies in that case weren’t inclined to throw in the towel, so they filed a petition for certiorari to the Supreme Court arguing, as you would imagine, that the Second Circuit failed to follow Twombly and Iqbal.

A funny thing happened yesterday. Tucked in among pages and pages of summary orders at the Supreme Court was this:

10-263
SONY MUSIC ENTERTAINMENT, ET AL. V. STARR, KEVIN, ET AL.
The petition for a writ of certiorari is denied. The Chief Justice and Justice Sotomayor took no part in the consideration or decision of this petition.

The Second Circuit’s opinion thus stands firm. Even after Twombly and Iqbal, all a plaintiff needs to allege, even in a complex antitrust case, is “enough factual matter (taken as true) to suggest" the elements of the claim.

That’s the same as the Third Circuit recently held in In re Ins. Brokerage Antitrust Litig., 618 F.3d 300, 314 (3d Cir. 2010) and later applied to all cases, including complex cases, in W. Penn Allegheny Health Sys. v. UPMC, No. 09-4468, (3d Cir. November 29, 2010)(precedential).

In short, the Circuit Courts have taken a hard look at Twombly and Iqbal and have rejected the numerous attempts by big corporations to slam the courthouse doors shut on meritorious cases, and the Supreme Court hasn’t stopped those Courts from setting the record straight.

In celebration, below the fold are some plaintiff-friendly precedential opinions over the last year in various Courts of Appeals (in addition to the Second Circuit and Third Circuit opinions above). Continue Reading Another Twombly/Iqbal Victory for Plaintiffs: SCOTUS Denies Certiorari for Digital Music Price-Fixing Case

The American Tort Reform Association’s Annual Report on “Judicial Hellholes” is out again.

Whoops, I mixed up my link — that’s a link to reasonable commentary by the Center for Justice & Democracy. The actual misleading, faux-scientific report is here. My take is similar to The Pop Tort’s ode to the judicial hellholes list:…

Ronald V. Miller, Jr. at Maryland Injury Lawyer Blog notes:

The Insurance Journal reports a rise in legal malpractice claims. Incredibly, there has been no hand wringing about increased malpractice rates for lawyers or fears that lawyers will no longer be able to keep their practices open as their insurance rates rise. We have

…

On Sunday, the New York Times returned to third-party funding of lawsuits with “Investors Put Money on Lawsuits to Get Payouts:”

Large banks, hedge funds and private investors hungry for new and lucrative opportunities are bankrolling other people’s lawsuits, pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into medical malpractice claims, divorce battles and class

…

Of the over one million people injured or killed annually by preventable medical malpractice, only a fraction have their claims reviewed by the legal system. We can’t be sure how small that fraction is — since the health care industry spends millions of dollars every year convincing Congress to frustrate error-reporting — but we know…