Maryland Lawyer Blog

Apple faces a lawsuit over an allegation that its iPad easily overheats and turns off.

"The iPad does not live up to the reasonable consumer's expectations created by Apple insofar as the iPad overheats so quickly under common weather conditions that it does not function for prolonged use outdoors, or in many other warm conditions," according to the lawsuit filed in federal court in Oakland last week.

It seems to me if your iPad does not work, Apple should get you a new one. But that really should not be a federal case since no one I know that has an iPad has this problem.

I like that lawyers can file lawsuits to protect consumers from bad products even when the damage to the individual consumer is low and merely economic because it discourages companies that are willing to allow bad products on the market. What I don't like is that most of the cases that I read about seem ridiculous.

The Maryland Court of Appeals agrees with the CSA, reversing a Calvert Court trial court's finding on no ambiguity in a waivers (yes, with an "s") of subrogation clause in a form contract governing the construction of a restaurant.

You can find the opinion here.

Did you know that Maryland's Constitution requires that every 20 years the state’s voters must decide whether the Maryland General Assembly must call for a Constitutional Convention?

I think we need a Constitutional Convention to pick more things on which we don't get a chance to vote. Like whether we should have a rule requiring voters to vote to have a Constitutional Convention and whether the general public should decide who will be our judges.

It is not that the public could not make a good call as to who should be our judges. And if we lived in Mayberry, it might not be a bad idea. The problem is, I would estimate less than 1% of us - and less than 5% of lawyers - are really in a position to make the call as to who would make the best judge amongst the candidates. Why? Because we all have many other things to do. We have a hard enough time making informed choices in presidential elections and for governor and the general public does not have the information or the interest to make informed calls on judges.

One more thought. I have no problem with lawyers who chose to run for election. The game is the game, as Omar Little would say. There is nothing wrong with availing yourself to the existing process and I have been in front of many elected judges that were extremely good judges. I just think we should change the process.

• Article on Constitutional Convention Vote in Maryland
• More Thoughts on Judicial Elections (my thoughts four years ago)

As I have written before, I think celebrities completely screw up the perception of lawyers and, by extension, personal injury clients. Why? Because people in the spotlight have a lot of access to lawyers who want to represent a celebrity and see their names in the papers so they will take the case, no matter how ridiculous. With cash, celebrities can afford to hire a lawyer in non injury cases. Celebrities also often have the mentality that they can get what they want if they keep demanding it, leading to the litigation process. I'm overgeneralizing but certainly there is something that drives these cases.

Pop Crunch (via Overlawyered) provides a list of the 15 worst celebrity lawsuits of all time.

The Washington Post has an editorial today that sums up the concerns of many over what is perceived as a politically charged Supreme Court:

Why does the supposedly nonpartisan Supreme Court split so often along ideological lines, with the four conservatives locked in combat against the four liberals and the eclectic Justice Anthony Kennedy determining which faction wins?

And why do all of the justices so often find in the Constitution a mirror image of their own political and policy views on issues as diverse as abortion, race, religion, gay rights, campaign finance, the death penalty and national security?

The justices strenuously deny voting their own policy preferences. So, are they insincere?

I think the answer to this question is no. I think the justices truly believe that they are largely calling 'balls and strikes" as Justice Roberts famously put it. The problem with the Supreme Court justices is the same problem you and I have when trying to be objective: we tend to construe facts most favorably to the way we want things to turn out.

An Illinois man has filed a lawsuit on behalf of his son claiming that Southwest Airlines failed to protect his teenage son from an older female passenger who made sexual advances and offered him illegal drugs during a flight to Orlando in 2008. Apparently, the boy was so frightened by the experience that he refused to return home by himself.

I was 14 once. (True story.) I don't remember a single 14 year-old who would be so freaked out by such an encounter that he would be emotionally harmed. Some 14 year-olds would be thrilled out of their minds; others would be a little disgusted. But I don't remember any who would be traumatized by the whole thing.

But let's just say he was. Then why on earth would the father exacerbate the son's trauma by filing a lawsuit.

How do the lawyers who file these cases feed their families? If Southwest has any guts at all, the settlement offer in this case will remain at zero.

The Baltimore Sun reports that a lawsuit by Maryland residents and a few nonprofits against the owners of a steelmaking plant I've never heard of. The lawsuit claims Severstal North America failed to clean up benzene they are producing that has contaminated local properties. According to the lawsuit, "samples have revealed benzene contamination that is 100,000 times greater than what is considered safe." The lawsuit seeks enforcement of a 13-year-old court order that requires a meaningful cleanup of the facility.

Montgomery County continues to search for ways to improve the administration of cases, setting a new case management system in civil, criminal, juvenile and family law cases.

The Maryland Court of Special Appeals today decided Meyer v. Meyer, a dispute between a father and his son and daughter over the equitable division of the proceeds from the sale of real property. Mom's involved in this disaster too.

On my list of lifetime goals: never get involved in a lawsuit with my wife and kids.

Guy files a bizarro-world reverse paternity complaint against LeBron James. Normally, you chalk this up to "there are a lot of crazy people in the big city" and just move on. But this guy is a lawyer in Washington who graduated from Princeton.

Obviously, he wants to be LeBron James' father. Let's say he is the father. Is it worth admitting you committed statutory rape and that you were basically a deadbeat dad until your kid became an NBA mega star?

You can find the complaint against LeBron James here. It is unbelievable... and pathetic.

In a narrow 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court found today unconstitutional Chicago, Illinois', 28-year-old strict ban on handgun ownership.

In his dissent, Justice Stephen Breyer wrote that he believes that this will change gun control laws in many states. I suspect Maryland may be on this list. You can expect a lot of Maryland gun control laws to come under attack in the future.

The New York Times has an interesting piece about grade inflation. Apparently, some schools are going back and increasing the GPA of all of its students in an effort to make them more competitive.

As an anonymous commenter alludes to on Overlawyered, this is not an awful idea at top tier schools. But at law schools that are not in the top tier, students do need to separate themselves by doing particularly well or potential employers have no reason to take a chance students cannot be distinguished by GPA.

Grade inflation in and of itself is of no consequence. These days, half of the graduating class of a high school has a GPA better than 4.0. The key is class rank. As long as lines are cut well enough to allow law firms to figure out who the top tier students are at average law schools, grade inflation is not really a big deal.

The Washington Post has a interesting portrait of Elena Kagan.

It is an interesting angle on her story. But on some of these in depth biographies, you can't help but wonder if the interesting angle is one that was uncovered or whether it is a conclusion that was met with facts. Anyway, if you suspend disbelief and accept it at face value, it is a very interesting look at the woman who I think is a virtual lock to be our next Supreme Court justice.

Above the Law has a wild email exchange between a lawyer who hired a law student and then kinda took it back. And everyone gets mad.

The U.S. News and World Report law school rankings may be flawed. Wait, we knew that already. But they may be more flawed than we thought.

In the much anticipated 2011 U.S. News & World Report law school rankings, 74 schools did not report their employment numbers at the time of graduation. You don't have to be Oliver Stone to conclude that the vast majority of these law schools were covering up their employment numbers because, believe me, everyone gets the importance of the U.S. News & World Report rankings. But the schools who blew off reporting their employment numbers were just automatically assigned a number that is approximately 30% lower than the number of graduates employed nine-months later.

So law schools that played by the rules got burned. Somewhere, some kid with a magazine is making a wrong decision on which law school to attend based on a ridiculous use of statistics. My only solace is that kid should not have been using a magazine to pick his school in the first place.

• 2011 U.S. News & World Report Rankings and the University of Baltimore
• The Volokh Conspiracy on Law School Rankings

An Anne Arundel County lawyer who gave a woman Vicodin in exchange for oral sex was suspended from practicing by the Maryland Court of Appeals for 60 days. Incredibly, this lawyer had previously been suspended for the less creepy but still creepy offense of sending sexually explicit text messages to one of his clients and touching her inappropriately in the courthouse.

The court was split 4-3 with Judges Glenn T. Harrell Jr., Lynne A. Battaglia and Mary Ellen Barbera pushing for an indefinite suspension (although he could apply for reinstatement after six months).

I think the most logical question here is how on Earth did this guy get off with essentially a slap on the wrist? The short version of the story is that the court gave the offending lawyer a lot of credit for the fact that he came forward with information to help a client. You can read the full twisted story in the Maryland Daily Record article on the court's opinion. (If you read the case, this next comment will make sense to you. I find it a little odd that credibility of the woman's claim she was raped appeared to pivoted on the fact that she traded oral sex for Vicodin and no one even as an aside questioned the logic of this leap. But the details are not made entirely clear so I don't know what to make of it.)

The longer answer to the question of how the majority can justify such a short suspension is that the decision to discipline lawyers is not measured by the "how awful is it?" scale. The purpose of disciplinary sanctions is “to protect the public, to protect the integrity of the legal profession and to deter other lawyers from violating the Rules of Professional Conduct." The judiciary has an obligation to make sure the public can trust their lawyers. To me, comingling client funds with your own when you have no intention of stealing the clients' money is a lesser crime than exchanging drugs for oral sex. But when your mission is to protect the public and to maintain clients' trust in their lawyers, the relative innocence of comingling funds becomes the graver offense.

Discipline in sports is similarly, yet correctly, convoluted. Pete Rose bet on baseball, a relatively innocuous offense to the general public, particularly because he bet on his own team. His own team. Is that so awful?

From the point of view of the best interests of baseball, it is that awful. Baseball's primary job is not to sanction wrongdoers but to protect the game. Betting on baseball, which brings into question the very integrity of the game, is a graver crime for the game itself than, say, a violent crime or a DWI that leads to a fatality. Baseball fans can live with a player on the field being a bad or even evil human being. But that fan cannot live with the idea that the game could be fixed. Baseball's disciplinary rules reflect this reality.

Going back to this case, in his dissenting opinion, Judge Harrell called the 60 day sanction, in the absence of analysis of how long the sanction should be, "plucked randomly from the air." This is absolutely true. But even if you analyze it until you are blue in the face, isn't every sanction, where the determination is length of the sanction, plucked out of the air on some level? It is a "what does your gut tell you?" kind of decision, no matter how much you try to break it down.

I'm sure it did not hurt that the suspended lawyer was represented in the Court of Appeals by Kramon & Graham's Andy Graham, who is on everyone's "Best Lawyers in Maryland" list. He's just a spectacular lawyer.

Incredible fact of the day: Of Elena Kagan gets confirmed, every Supreme Court Justice will have attended Harvard or Yale law schools.

• Kagan's Nomination: Youth Prevails
• The Supreme Court and Personal Injury Cases

Another great example of the heartache caused by billing by the hour.

The three finalists to replace Judge Salmon on the Maryland Court of Special Appeals are three Prince George's County judges: Toni Clarke, Michelle Hotten, and Melanie Shaw Geter.

President Obama has nominated Maryland Court of Special Appeals Judge Ellen Hollander and Magistrate Judge James K. Bredar to two vacancies on the US District Court in Maryland.

Of course, I'm jumping the gun a little bit with the title of this post. Both of these nominees still need to be confirmed by the Senate.