The Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation has begun ruling on transfer motions it heard on March 26 in San Diego. The Panel granted transfer and centralization in five MDL matters, denied one, deemed one moot, and declined to reconsider another.
The results:
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Transfers (transferee court in parentheses) MDL No. 2020 — In re Aetna, Inc., |
Blawgletter has worked at one place, a law firm, since getting a bar card in 1985. At some point, the firm tried to distill its approach to trial work into one document. The current version appears below:
How We Handle Cases
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In handling complex litigation, our firm is guided by two principles, both of |
Two insurance companies, National Travelers and ReliaStar, disagreed about whether Coinsurance Agreements between them had terminated. The arbitration that the Coinsurance Agreements mandated generated a finding of non-termination and a $21 million damages award to ReliaStar. The three arbitrators also ordered National Travelers to pay ReliaStar $3.8 million in attorneys' fees and expenses for conducting the
The equitable remedy of accounting exists for rare cases in which "accounts between the paries are of such a complicated nature that only a court of equity can satisfactorily unravel them." Dairy Queen, Inc. v. Wood, 369 U.S. 469, 478 (1962) (internal quotation marks omitted). The court may appoint a special master to review
Despite their flat-out refusal to comply with the District Court’s lawful orders, the Uzans now have the chutzpah to seek post-judgment, equitable relief from complying with those orders.
Motorola Credit Corp. v. Uzan, No.07-2076-cv, slip op. at 6-7 (2d Cir. Mar. 31, 2009) (per Jose A. Cabranes, J.) (affirming refusal to grant relief from judgment
A water intake system for a power plant. Note the screens.
Big power plants "remove" huge quantities of water from "various nearby . . . sources" — presumably including oceans, seas, lakes, rivers, creeks, brooks, and possibly even rills. They use the H20 to cool the heat that results from burning gas, coal, and other fuel. But
Anne Reed at Deliberations explains the U.S. Supreme Court's unanimous decision on "peremptory challenges" to potential jurors yesterday in Rivera v. Illinois, No. 07-9995 (U.S. Mar. 31, 2009). Bottom line: A judge's good faith error in rejecting a peremptory doesn't entitle you to a new trial.
That presumably applies not only in criminal
The New York Court of Appeals today upheld an agreement to pay a referring law firm "one-third of the entire fee recovered" in a medical malpractice case. The "entire fee" included the amount attributable to the efforts of a third law firm. That the referring lawyer may not have contributed one-third of the productive work didn't matter, the court held. Nor could
Adam Liptak usually writes about interesting stuff — interesting, at least, to lawyers. Today he takes the measure of a new study about American Bar Association ratings of nominees for U.S. court of appeals judgeships between 1985 and 2008.
The report, Bias and the Bar: Evaluating the ABA Ratings of Federal Judicial Nominees, summarizes
May a federal judge force a lawyer to keep representing an hourly client that refuses to pay?
The Sixth Circuit answered no — so long as the client gets "reasonable warning" and the lawyer's withdrawal won't cause the client "severe prejudice". Proskauer Rose met those requirements, the court held, because it notified the client, Richard Jonathan Blech, three weeks