class actions

Real Life Imitates Fiction, In This Case, “The Firm”

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Remember how, in the film adaptation of John Grisham’s “The Firm,” the young lawyer Mitch McDeere (Tom Cruise)who is  trapped in a mob-owned law firm wiggles out of his dilemma in part by proving that the firm’s lawyers were routinely over-billing clients?

Well, the Boston-based Thornton Law Firm and the Labaton Sucharow law firm in New York were caught inflating their billings on a similar scale.

Judge Mark L. Wolf concluded that the two firms double-billed  for their attorneys’ work on a class-action lawsuit involving State Street Bank, and even billed for the work of other attorneys not employed at either firm. Thornton’s managing partner, Garrett Bradley,  listed his brother as an attorney on the case and charged $200,000 for his time even though Michael Bradley was barely involved. Uncovering this scandal was another triumph of the Boston Globe Spotlight Team, the investigative reporting division that uncovered Boston’s predator priest cover-up in 2002. Continue reading →

Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 11/2/18: Democratic Dinners, TV Weatherman Edicts, Truth As Racism, And More

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

Good Morning!

I see that the October jobs report this morning is spectacularly good, with 250,000 jobs added. It is amazing that so many Americans are going to vote against Republicans in the midst of such a strong economic surge following the end of Obama’s recovery-strangling policies. The lesson for future leaders, perhaps, is that the public cares more about a President constantly acting like an asshole than they do about what he accomplishes. From an ethics point of view, I would see that as a positive development, if I didn’t strongly suspect that the real reasons for apparent votes against self-interest are 1) that the news media isn’t reporting the economic news with anything like the enthusiasm it would if this were a Democratic administration, 2) that people really believe the ridiculous spin that this is somehow an Obama recovery, and 3) that so many young Americans have been indoctrinated into socialism that even as Venezuela crumbles, they are still buying the fantasy.

1. Next try: The Oprah-Jennifer Lawrence Dinner. This is pretty funny. Following the lead of other Democratic state organizations, The New Hampshire Democrats insulted the party’s two founders, Presidents Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, also two of the nation’s greatest leaders, by removing their names from the annual party dinner.  For 2017, the event was renamed…wait for it!…the Kennedy-Clinton Dinner! Yup, two serial sexual assaulting misogynists, assuming it’s Jack and not Teddy being honored, in which case it’s a negligent killer, for the Party of Women. What a brilliant choice! How can anyone not vote for a party capable of a decision like that? But for some reason, as the Harvey Weinstein Train Wreck rolled along, the new name came under criticism. Who could have foreseen that? So the dinner has been renamed again; now it’s called the Eleanor Roosevelt Dinner, after the cruelly-treated wife of another Democratic icon.

2. Who makes these rules? Why, Al Roker, that’s who! After he was called a hypocrite on social media for dressing up as “Doc Brown,” the Christopher Lloyd character in the “Back to the Future” films—Al, you will recall, helped get Megyn Kelly fired for saying that a white person could impersonate a black character using dark make-up without engaging in racially offensive conduct—tweeted,

“I’m going to say this one last time, but the folks who get it, understand and the ones who DON’T, won’t. I can be Doc Brown, and I wear the outfit and wig and not change my skin color if you’re white , you can be President Obama if you want. Just don’t color your skin!”

Wait: what about hair, Al? I’ve read that it’s racially offensive for a white person to wear a black-hair wig, like an Afro or Bob Marley hair. But it’s okay for you to wear a crazy old white guy wig?

Why, Al? For that matter, why isn’t wearing make-up that allows someone to actually look like the person or character he or she is portraying acceptable? Who makes these rules? Oh! Right! You do!

When I first saw that picture, I didn’t know who the hell Al was playing. I thought it might be Michael Jackson if he had lived, let himself go, and grew his nose back. Continue reading →

No, This Isn’t A Frivolous Lawsuit, Just A Really Dumb One That Makes People Hate Lawyers Even More Than They Already Do

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

In fact, it makes me hate lawyers, and just about everyone I know is a lawyer, including me. I am drowning in self-loathing.

Now pay attention. A class-action lawsuit filed in Fort Lauderdale federal court this month is based on the claims of Cynthia Kissne, and Leonard Werner that they shouldn’t have to pay for the cheese on their McDonald Quarter Pounders if the cheese is removed at their request. The lawsuit, filed by Andrew Lavin of the Miami-based Lavin Law Group, asks for 5 million dollars in damages for this injustice. The logic of the suit is that McDonald’s used to distinguish between the Quarter Pounder and the Quarter Pounder with Cheese, and charged a bit more for the latter. Now, however, the only version sold in the stores is the cheese version, but it is just called a Quarter Pounder. If you don’t want cheese, you say, “no cheese,” but you still pay the same price. The Horror. This is not an unusual practice in the industry, for obvious reasons. Burger King advertised that you could customize your Whopper, but removing stuff didn’t mean you paid less. Oddly, nobody sued. Continue reading →

No, You Lazy Conservative Journalists, A Court Did NOT Rule That The DNC AND Wasserman Schultz Rigged The Nomination Against Bernie

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Find another occupation where your stupidity and incompetence doesn’t make the public stupid and ignorant.

“Court Admits DNC and Wasserman Schultz Rigged Primary Against Sanders,” screamed the headline of the Washington Observor, and other sources, including conservative blogs, followed the theme. This was the essence of Fake News, and like most fake news, the result of bias and incompetence, plus unprofessional editors.

In June of 2016, a class action lawsuit was filed against the Democratic National Committee and former DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz for rigging the Democratic presidential primaries for Hillary Clinton and against Bernie Sanders. The plaintiff class was made up of Sanders donors and other, and immediately smelled like a publicity stunt. The theory was that the DNC violated its own charter, but the likelihood of prevailing was virtually nil from the start. I didn’t read a single authority who thought it had a prayer.

Sure enough, the lawsuit was dismissed last week in federal court on the grounds that the plaintiffs lacked standing and the suit was a guaranteed loser. Federal Judge William Zloch, dismissed the lawsuit, saying,

“In evaluating Plaintiffs’ claims at this stage, the Court assumes their allegations are true—that the DNC and Wasserman Schultz held a palpable bias in favor Clinton and sought to propel her ahead of her Democratic opponent.”

That means that for the purpose of the decision whether to allow the lawsuit to proceed, the judge assumed that everything the plaintiffs claim was true. It doesn’t mean that they had proved their case, or that the judge has ruled that the DNC and Debbie Wasserman Schultz did what is alleged. Law professor Jonathan Turley explains, Continue reading →

Morning Ethics Round-Up: 7/7/17

/ Jack Marshall / 44 Comments

Good Morning!

Well this has been the deadest week of traffic Ethics Alarms has seen for a long time. Thankfully those who have visited have kept the quality and quanity of comments high. Thanks, everybody.

1. I am pretty sure that if Donald Trump delivered the oratorical equivalent of the Gettysburg Address, most of the media would find some way to find it offensive and worthy of mockery. On Vox there is an essay titled “Trump’s speech in Poland sounded like an alt-right manifesto.” Sarah Wildman found President Trump’s  call for “family, for freedom, for country, and for God’” ominous, and was especially bothered by his rhetorical question of  “whether the West has the will to survive.”

This is where the Left is heading, apparently. Appealing to Western values and endorsing “family, for freedom, for country, and for God’ makes you a crypto-fascist. Add this to the list of  reasons Donald Trump is President of the United States. Again I ask, how do people like Wildman grow up here and end up like this, and more amazing still, have a widely read forum?

By the way, the odds of President Trump delivering an oratorical equivalent of the Gettysburg Address are about the same as the odds of Flipper singing The Major General’s Song. Continue reading →

Pokémon Go Ethics: Beware The Terms Of Service Agreement!

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

pokemon-go-starters

I had a hard time finding anything unethical about Pokémon Go, the smartphone GPS scavenger hunt game that sends players all over the landscape to find and trap those adorable Japanese monsters that caused a trading card craze and more a decade ago. (I assume that anything that seems really dumb is likely to have ethics problems. You’d be amazed how often I’m right.) It seems benign. The game can be good exercise, it’s engaging for people who have no more productive avocation, and best of all, it gives American something to obsess about not named Bill or Hillary. There are some troubling signs: administrators at the National Holocaust Museum and Arlington National Cemetery felt that they needed to ask visitors not to play the game while contemplating the murder of six million Jews and the fallen heroes of foreign ways—what is these spoilsports’ problem?—and some people are letting the game endanger themselves and others, leading to these morons falling off a cliff, causing this idiot to drive  his car into a tree, and prompting this in Arizona…

Pokemon go traffic sign

Continue reading →