Articles Posted in Legal News

This week has been an all-time record for traffic on the Maryland Personal Injury Lawyer Blog. Is this because of lawyers needing to know my thoughts on the nuances of handling personal injury cases? No. [EDITOR’S UPDATE: There is a verdict: click here for a blog post on this case’s VERDICT.]

For those of you just tuning in to this nonsense, Administrative Law Judge Roy Pearson is suing his dry cleaner for millions of dollars after they lost his pants. On the stand this week, Judge Pearson — I tried, I can’t do it — Mr. Pearson cried on the stand as he recalled the horror of losing the pants from his precious blue and maroon suit.

Mr. Pearson claims to have owned exactly five suits, all Hickey Freemans which do not come cheap, one for each day of the work week. But after putting on a few pounds, his suit rotation system crashed when he picked up his newly altered suits from the dry cleaner and could not find one pair of pants.

The Maryland Personal Injury Lawyer Blog moves back to Florida again this week where a partner at McDermott Will & Emery, and the head of its bankruptcy department, told a federal judge she was “a few french fries short of a Happy Meal.” I have now received an email on this story from 5 different attorneys, including my brother-in-law in Arizona.

Actually, the full quote is “I suggest to you with respect, Your Honor, that you’re a few French fries short of a Happy Meal in terms of what’s likely to take place.” This is probably directed to the way the details of the bankruptcy plan would unfold. Although she later su sponte calls for a show cause hearing why the lawyer should be permitted to continue to practice before her, the judge did not stop the hearing to address the issue. She asked the counsel to proceed. When reading a transcript, the tone is lost. We do not know how this really happened.

The way to avoid this issue in the first place is for lawyers to remember there is a trancript being generated. It is also a wonderful idea for lawyers, particularly in this kind of venue, to save Jerry Seinfeld-like efforts. Every time you get a laugh or someone thinks you are witty, someone else thinks you are silly or disrespectful. For the latter, this is Exhibit A.

[EDITOR’S UPDATE: There is a verdict: click here for blog on the good news of a VERDICT in Pearson v. Chang.]

If Roy Pearson did not exist, advocates of tort reform would invent him. Mr. Pearson is an administrative law judge who sued his neighborhood dry cleaner for misplacing his pants. Two years, over 1000 hours of Mr. Pearson’s time, thousands of pages of legal pleadings, and discovery later, Pearson continues his battle against the dry cleaner. His complaint seeks $65,462,500 from the dry cleaner, including compensation for such things as “mental suffering, inconvenience, and discomfort,” for the value of the time he has spent on the lawsuit, and, my favorite, for leasing a car every weekend for 10 years because there is no dry cleaner close to his house. If you didn’t get that the first time, this is over a single misplaced pair of pants.

America Online (AOL) is running an article titled “Most Outrageous Lawsuits.” It appears in the money and finance section of AOL and was also prominently displayed on the AOL home page. As a frequent user of AOL (I really love their product) for the last 11 years, I keep seeing this article over and over.

The “crazy lawsuits” AOL describes come directly from groups like Citizens Against Lawsuit Abuse (CALA) and the American Tort Reform Association (ATRA), groups who see personal injury lawyers as the great Satan whose sole mission is to destroy corporate America while lining our pockets with millions of dollars.

These groups rely on a false premise: that the American public cannot be trusted and American juries give out ridiculous awards that unsubstantiated by the evidence or even common sense. The groups that vilify personal injury lawyers are entitled to their opinion and they are not wrong that frivolous lawsuits sometimes get filed. What it does not entitle them to is their own facts. But they often make up their own facts, manufacturing insane lawsuits and verdicts that never happened.

Phillip J. Closius was named as the new dean of the University of Baltimore School of Law today. Dean Closius is the former dean of the University of Toledo College of Law. He is a former practicing attorney who teaches and conducts scholarship in the areas of Constitutional, First Amendment and Sports Law.

Dean Holmes made a lot of progress in his tenure at the University of Baltimore. Hopefully, Dean Closius can build off Dean Holmes’ work to take the University of Baltimore School of Law to the next level. I started on the adjunct facility at UB in 1998 and now teach at the University every semester. I have seen a lot of progress in recent years in the quality of students and the resources we have, and I hope that the new dean can keep this ball rolling.