WTF do you know about anything? That was the whole point of my writing about my experiences in Louisiana--I was a young lawyer, in over my head, with partners who were all too happy to collect their exorbitant legal fees, getting schooled by the slimy local lawyers and a corrupt judge.
Pretty disgusting admittance, but when you're a lawyer, and only know how to invent lies, you don't know when you're putting your foot in your mouth.
You apparently don't know the difference between the english word "admission" and the nonsense word, "admittance" so I don't understand how you can even begin to try to insult me about being a lawyer.
Then use that system to MAKE A CASE. Are you so unadaptable that you can't use the local system against the locals? It's a lot easier to do that than it is trying to argue from big city precedent.
Be my guest and try to learn French civil law when you're three months out of law school, especially the parts that are still in French. And anyway, it's not like we walked in arguing "big city precedent" (of which there is no such thing). The point is that the Louisiana courts were entirely results driven--anything to help out the friends and family of the judge or to bring corporate dollars into this small town in Louisiana. States like Alabama, Mississippi, Texas, and Louisiana actually feed off the economic stimulus brought by huge plaintiff recoveries. Why is it do you think that the first Merck-Vioxx tort actions have been brought in Texas? And why do you think tort reform fails over and over again in these Red states?
You have to live with the locals to get a feeling for the venue. It's bad enough to be flying in and out as though you were some kind of "big time" operators from pretense land, but it's worse not to understand the purpose of the suit from the bottom up perspective.
I put in my time there. Over about a two year period, every other week was spent in either Houston, where the client was, or Louisiana. I lived a total of about 100 days in backward Louisiana. No matter what, you're never going to be treated as a local. We were the enemy.
<<These were the plaintiffs who lived on the lake, and, by the economic class structure of the town, were all white.>>
Listen to what you're saying. You're extrapolating. You have no factual basis for this claim. You have to investigate to make valid assertions.
All I had to do was open my eyes to know who lived on the lake. Every single person in that class of plaintiffs who lived on the lake was white. This makes sense because the most valuable property in the town was on the lake, and the whites were wealthier, more educated, and didn't like living where the blacks were. That's just a fact. We settled with them because they claimed economic damages for the loss of their lakefront land value. (Again, I'm not saying it was fair, but it made sense and fit in with our legal strategy that we would compensate only those that could claim concrete, economic, as opposed to emotional damages.) There was one black plaintiff who asserted he lived on the lake, but when I visited his property, he actually lived adjacent to the sewage treatment plant which overlooked the lake. Of all the blacks I deposed over the years concerning the case, there were a handful that were middle class, mostly postal workers. There were three wealthy blacks, the funeral home owner who served the black community, one of the plaintiff lawyers, and the mother of an NBA all star. As far as I could tell, they were not welcome to nor did they want to live in the wealthy white neighborhoods, i.e., on the lake. When you see real racial segregation, it doesn't take a genius to extrapolate where the blacks are allowed to live.
<<(I later found out in the settlement records that 3 of our own local lawyers put in claims under the settlement and received money. Hello?>>
Yes, hello? No lawyer would publicly admit this kind of thing, because you'd be dragged, not escorted, before the bar.
Of course it's unethical for the defendants' lawyers to collect plaintiff money; that was my point. But it also wasn't my problem; it was not me nor anyone from my law firm that was feeding at the trough. I suppose I could have turned them in to the LA bar, but it was antithetical to my client's interests, which was to get the settlement finalized and to keep their local counsel.
<<Anyone ever hear of conflicts of interest?) When we went out for dinner with our lawyers...(or sometimes with the opposing lawyers who represented the remaining (black) plaintiffs but were also white)>>
Speaking about conflict of interest, it may be all cosy and kosher to be palsy walsy with the opponents especially when you're trying to play footsie games, but you lose more than you gain by doing that.
Well on this point you're wrong. There's nothing improper with meeting, socially or otherwise, with the opposing lawyers, as long as neither one of you is selling out your clients. In fact, I had very good relationships with the opposing lawyers and it benefited in the end because we were able to forge a settlement.
<<We took that advice and, after that, we didn't lose a single motion or case.>>
You lost the case. Better stated, you prevented yourself from winning.
No, you're not making sense. You might not understand how class action cases work. In some class actions you bifurcate the liability and damages phases. In this case, we tried damages separately for each plaintiff in mini-trials and I got to try a number of them. We started "winning" them one after another, by knocking off the most serious claims (cancer, wrongful death) by disproving a link between the chemical and cancer, birth defects, or heart disease. Once we attacked and won on their damages, it shrank from a potential $1.5 billion class action to a potential $100 million case, which the lawyers settled for $30 million. To our client this was ultimately a victory; they reported in SEC filings that they faced $3 billion in liability for the spill and in the end they paid out about $780 million. (I could have been more clear that of the previous $750 million settlement, more than half of that went to the LA department of environmental quality and the EPA in penalties and cleanup costs, and only about $200 million went to the lakeside landowners (the white plaintiffs)).
Yes. The judge was walking you down the garden path to make sure you would settle while you thought he was engaging in impropriety. The judge was doing to you what you should have been doing to him, using the venue against him, using the fact that he was using you in a way contrary to jurisprudence.
Since you weren't there, I'm glad you have a clearer view of what he was doing than I do. No we weren't being manipulated by the judge; law practice in central Louisiana was completely out of touch with accepted ethical standards. In fact it is blatantly unethical for a sitting judge to have "ex parte" contacts with litigants, i.e., contacts with one party outside of the presence of the other party, especially when you actually discuss the case. We did our best to keep the conversation to social niceties, but we were clearly running the risk that everything that that judge did in the case could have been invalidated.
If you settled with others based on merit, but settled with an arbitrary sub group based not on merit, you're guilty of discrimination. Better clarify or retract this claim.
The law ain't fair. As I said before, we had a strategy of settling with landowners who had legitimate property damage claims, while we would fight tooth and nail against any unfounded medical or emotional damages claims. As it turns out, this cut precisely down the lines of the racial divide in this town. I'm not proud of the fact that we gave the whites a huge settlement and the blacks got the Walmart, but I didn't have anything to do with the way the town was racially segregated, and you have to play the cards as they're dealt.
You felt "tainted"? The law was the injured party here. The legal machinery engaged in a process that only could be called extortion. The same process can be used against you and your firm.
I guess you missed the whole point of what I wrote. This was my introduction to legal practice, and it woke me up to how amoral, extortionary, and unfair the civil legal system is--especially in Louisiana. I actually began to empathize with Fortune 500 companies that get hit with these specious lawsuits in buttf-ck Southern states and have to pay extortion to get out with their lives. And in the end, it's not even equitable, because the rich (whites, lawyers, landowners) get to feed at the trough, while the rest pick over the scraps.
Doughboy. |
