Today's Date: Add To Favorites
Federal judge dismisses Katrina fraud claim
Topics in Legal News | 2008/04/22 08:01
A federal judge on Monday dismissed claims of fraud against State Farm Insurance by a Mississippi couple who claimed that the company denied their insurance claim for damage from Hurricane Katrina based on bad faith and fraud. US District Judge L.T. Senter, Jr. rejected the claim, writing:

Plaintiffs allege that State Farm committed actionable fraud in the handling of the plaintiffs' claim. Plaintiffs primarily rely on their contention that State Farm ordered two engineering reports from Forensic in an effort to dishonestly minimize its liability to the plaintiffs rather than for any legitimate reason. ...

Plaintiffs contend that State Farm, acting through Renfroe and Forensic, deliberately underestimated the amount of wind damage the insured property sustained in order to minimize its liability under the plaintiffs' homeowners policy. While this allegation, if sustained, would support a finding of bad faith, it is not sufficient to support an allegation of fraud. Fraud requires reasonable reliance on a misrepresentation, and the plaintiffs have not relied upon State Farm's evaluation of their claim. Indeed plaintiffs have brought this lawsuit in an effort to establish that State Farm has underestimated the wind damage to the insured property. Although plaintiffs may prevail on the merits of their claims for additional policy benefits and other extracontractual damages, including punitive damages if they establish bad faith on the part of State Farm or its agents, in the absence of any evidence that the plaintiffs relied upon State Farm's damage assessment I can see no basis for a claim of fraud.

Thomas and Pamela McIntosh filed the lawsuit against State Farm after the company refused to pay for most of the damage to their home, which State Farm concluded was caused mostly by flood damage from the storm surge.

State Farm used E.A. Renfroe & Co. to inspect the McIntosh's home, and the couple also alleged that Renfroe aided and abetted State Farm's fraudulent misconduct and that the company breached its duty of loyalty to the plaintiffs. Senter dismissed the aiding and abetting claim as he concluded there was no underlying fraud, and also dismissed the breach of duty claim.


Class Says Blockbuster Invades Privacy
Topics in Legal News | 2008/04/10 08:06
     Blockbuster invaded customers' privacy by sending information about their movie rentals to the Facebook Web site, according to a federal class action. Plaintiffs say Blockbuster's cooperation with Facebook's "Beacon" system violates the Videotape Privacy Protection Act, which Congress passed after a newspaper obtained a list of 146 movies Robert Bork or his family had rented, and publicized it during Bork's failed nomination to the Supreme Court.

    Facebook launched Beacon in November 2007, in cooperation with 44 other Web sites, that automatically fed information to Facebook, plaintiffs say. This was not just for social purposes, but was "a core element in the Facebook Ads system for connecting businesses with users," plaintiffs say.

    Blockbuster sent information about movie rentals to Facebook, which added it to members' Facebook profile, "something like this: 'Preston added Lord of the Rings to his queue on Blockbuster.com,'" the complaint states.

    This was an opt-out system, in which users had to check a box to prevent the information from being distributed, plaintiffs say.

    Faced with furious criticism about privacy invasion, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was forced to issue an apology, in December, which is quoted, apparently in full, in this filing. "To this day, however, Facebook still receives personal identifiable information from participating Web site with the Beacon javascript, whether the Facebook member has chosen to distribute their information or not," it claims.

    Plaintiffs say that if users did not check the opt-out box quickly enough, their information would be sent to Facebook, and that along with "a picture of the individual who purchased the movie and a Blockbuster ad." They say that Blockbuster did not notify online customers that this information was being sent to Facebook until "sometime in December 2007. However, the summary is immediately sent to a user's Facebook profile even before the user has a chance to decline the distribution of he/her personal identifiable information - as long as you have not marked the privacy feature telling Blockbuster never to send summaries. To this day, Blockbuster online victims remain unsuspecting victims," the complaint states.

    Blockbuster, which has 64 million "active users," is the 7th most popular site on the Web, the complaint states.

    Represented by lead counsel Jeremy Wilson with The Corea Firm of Dallas, plaintiffs demand $2,500 for each violation of the Videotape Privacy Protection Act, and punitive damages.


Two Attorneys Emerge in Detroit Mayor Case
Topics in Legal News | 2008/04/09 08:53

Lawyers Kym Worthy and Dan Webb are a pair of ferocious competitors in the courtroom. That's both good news and bad news for the mayor.

Worthy, a prosecutor, and Webb, a defense attorney, have emerged as the legal faces of a text-messaging sex scandal that has embroiled Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and his former top aide.

Worthy, the first black attorney and first woman to head the Wayne County prosecutor's office, is seeking to prove Kilpatrick lied under oath. Webb is a high-priced litigation gunslinger aiming to keep the mayor out of prison.

Slight of build, the 62-year-old Webb is considered a legal heavyweight in the courtroom, ranked among the nation's top trial lawyers by several publications.

"I hate failing. That's more of my driving force, why I work as hard as I do," he said last week while preparing other cases in San Francisco, Las Vegas and St. Louis.

A big part of Worthy's success is her focus. That's what she preaches to the team of assistant prosecutors preparing for Kilpatrick's next court hearing.

"I spent most of my weekends and holidays here in the library," said Worthy, 52, looking back at her career. "I tried to cross every 'T' and dot every 'I.' Too many things can go wrong in a trial."

Kilpatrick has been besieged since late January, when the Detroit Free Press published excerpts of sexually explicit and embarrassing text messages left on the city-issued pager of his then-Chief of Staff Christine Beatty.

The messages contradict testimony both gave last summer during a whistle-blowers' lawsuit when Kilpatrick and Beatty denied having a romantic relationship in 2002 and 2003. Kilpatrick also is accused of lying under oath about his role in the firing of a top police official.

The text messages also were referenced in a confidential agreement that led to the city settling that lawsuit and a second whistle-blowers' suit for $8.4 million.

After a two-month investigation, Worthy filed multiple felony perjury, misconduct and obstruction of justice charges against Kilpatrick and Beatty. Convictions could send each to prison, and force Kilpatrick from his perch as Detroit mayor.

The embattled mayor is the latest of Webb's high-profile clients. He's represented tobacco giant Philip Morris on racketeering charges and computer giant Microsoft in an antitrust trial.

Former U.S. Attorney Patrick Collins crossed swords with Webb in a six-month corruption trial of former Illinois Gov. George Ryan, who is serving a prison sentence on a fraud and racketeering conviction.

"Dan is a tenacious competitor," said Collins, now a defense attorney. "He's a competition junkie, and I think he loves the action and he's very good at his craft."

Worthy, who moved often while growing up with her military father and earned her law degree from the University of Notre Dame, pursued a law career because of what she didn't see.

"I can only say my father told me I could do anything I wanted," she said. "There were no lawyers in my family. When I watched TV, I didn't see any African American lawyers. They didn't even have black police officers on TV back then."

After two years as a contract worker for the Wayne County prosecutor's office, she was hired on as an assistant prosecutor in 1986. In 1992, an unemployed black steel worker named Malice Green was beaten to death during a confrontation with several white Detroit police officers.

The case put the young, black, female assistant prosecutor on the nation's stage and in the daily glare of cable television. She won second-degree murder convictions against two of the officers.

"She is highly skilled and she could work the courtroom. She prepares as well, if not better, than anybody," Detroit defense attorney Carole Stanyar said.

Webb also is no stranger to the spotlight. He's cross-examined former President Ronald Reagan and won a conviction against U.S. Navy Admiral John Poindexter in the Iran-Contra affair.

Although he would have preferred playing second base for the St. Louis Cardinals, Webb said he discovered his love for law growing up in the small farming community of Bushnell, Ill., about 170 miles southwest of Chicago.

"Somewhere before I got out of high school, I decided I was going to be a trial lawyer come hell or high water," said Webb, who took law classes at night at Loyola University while holding full-time banking jobs.

"I didn't have any money. I was broke," Webb joked. "That's why I worked my way through law school. I knew I didn't want to do banking work."



Discovery Across Borders
Topics in Legal News | 2008/04/09 08:51

You are a United States company but a global citizen. Your shares are traded on U.S. exchanges. You have sales forces in Europe, manufacturing in Asia, and your eyes on the Middle East. It used to be that only the largest companies had a broad international reach. Now, it seems corporations of all sizes, in order to be competitive, must carefully consider overseas operations. While technology has made transition into the new global economy easier, it also creates special risks.

Imagine the following: You wake up one morning to a flurry of activity in France, where regulators have raided your main sales office seeking documents and information regarding alleged kickbacks to a key customer. You are asked to turn over hard drives, backup tapes and access to your servers. A reporter from Le Monde picks up the story, and by the time the U.S. opens for business there is a story on WSJ.com. Your stock price falls throughout the day; by the end of the week a leading class action law firm has announced the filing of a securities fraud case. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) asks for information about your global sales practices and accounting policies.

Suddenly, you are faced with a swirl of information demands and document preservation obligations. French regulators want to cart your computers away-but the SEC wants the information they contain. American plaintiffs' lawyers will want it as well, and there's no telling whether additional regulators or litigants will become involved.

In today's business, all information is electronic. Paper may have been heavy, hard to store, and time-consuming to review-but it was a tangible thing, easy to inventory, and it tended to be limited in volume, even in the largest cases. More importantly, identifying relevant documents for preservation or production was relatively easy: Either a document was in your possession or custody, or it wasn't, and if it wasn't, either you controlled the people who had it, or you didn't. Electronic communication has led to exponential increases in the amount of data that companies store, and the locations where the information is stored: desktops, laptops, servers, PDAs, BlackBerries™, smart phones, optical drives, thumb drives, iPods™ and more.

Unless you spend a great deal of time talking shop with your IT managers, you probably don't know how many e-mail or file servers your company uses. You probably don't know exactly where your electronic documents are stored, what happens to your e-mails after you delete them, or how frequently your company's servers are backed up to tape. Are you prepared for information discovery across borders? Do you understand how to preserve, collect and analyze data in a way that will meet the requirements of foreign as well as U.S. courts and regulatory bodies? Are you sure?

If you operate internationally, you must be cognizant not only of a patchwork of laws and regulations-many of which could conflict-but also of cultural differences that affect your response to requests for electronic information.

The initial stage in any litigation or regulatory effort is to ensure preservation of relevant materials. But an international scope makes this far more complicated than just issuing a directive to employees to stop deleting e-mails or drafted documents. You need to know where information is located, how it is stored, when it is backed up, and whether backups are rotated or destroyed. Automatic deletion or rotation policies mean that if you do nothing, you may lose files that are subject to a regulatory or litigation request.

Data collection also is far more complicated in an international context than in a purely domestic one. Local laws may prohibit an employer from searching employee e-mail files. As a cultural matter, most Americans are accustomed to the idea that an employee's computer and e-mail account belong to the employer. Outside of the U.S., the cultural understanding is frequently just the opposite: An employee's computer and e-mail account are considered private, and it may be a criminal offense to invade that privacy. Collection of data outside the U.S. may be seen as coercion by an employer, and it may lead to labor union grievances or complaints.

Once the information is collected, getting it reviewed and produced to a U.S. regulator or litigant is also no simple matter. Data privacy and blocking statutes in Europe, Asia and South America may forbid the transfer of personal data outside of their borders to an "unprotected" jurisdiction like the United States-and personal data include names, e-mail addresses and office phone numbers. Indeed, special procedures may be required before individuals outside a company-including the company's outside counsel-may review the data. And local laws may dictate that only data specifically responsive to a request may be exported, requiring counsel to review materials locally rather than shipping them to the U.S. to one centralized location, as is normally done in U.S. litigation

Do not expect, however, any sympathy from U.S. regulators or plaintiffs' lawyers. U.S. regulators are skeptical of data protection laws and may take the view that international companies hide behind them to avoid cooperating with the regulators' investigations. U.S. courts may not be more understanding. The Supreme Court has held that U.S. discovery rules presumptively apply in civil litigation involving an international company, even if producing data in response to a discovery request would be unlawful in the international company's host jurisdiction.



Appeals court may let NSA lawsuits proceed
Topics in Legal News | 2008/04/07 08:07

A federal appeals court on Wednesday appeared unwilling to end a pair of lawsuits that claim the Bush administration engaged in widespread illegal surveillance of Americans.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals repeatedly pressed Gregory Garre, the Bush administration's deputy solicitor general, to justify his requests to toss out the suits on grounds they could endanger national security by possibly revealing "state secrets."
Judge Harry Pregerson wondered: "We just have to take the word of members of the executive branch that it's a state secret. That's what you're saying, isn't it?"
A moment later Judge Michael Hawkins suggested that granting the request could mean "abdication" of our duties.

At the heart of both cases is the U.S. Justice Department's argument that any lawsuit claiming illegal activity on behalf of AT&T and the National Security Agency--even if the eavesdropping is known to have taken place--cannot proceed because it could let enemies and terrorists know how the government's surveillance apparatus works.
It "could compromise the sources, methods and operational details of our intelligence gathering capabilities," Solicitor General Garre said.

In the first case, called Hepting v. AT&T, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other attorneys had filed a class action lawsuit against AT&T saying it unlawfully opened its networks to the NSA. Last summer, U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker in San Francisco ruled that it could proceed.

The second case, Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation v. President Bush, is unique: it involves a classified document that the U.S. Treasury Department accidentally turned over to an attorney for the foundation. The top-secret document showed, according to the group, "Al-Haramain and its attorneys had been subjected to warrantless surveillance in violation of (federal law)." They responded by filing another lawsuit in February 2006 alleging violations of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
The Justice Department says the Al-Haramain case must be thrown out because it, too, could endanger state secrets. The foundation's attorneys must not even be allowed to refer to it, government attorney Thomas Bondy said Wednesday, because their "mental recollections of the documents are also out of the case."

"I'm feeling like Alice in Wonderland," replied Judge M. Margaret McKeown.
While no decision was announced Wednesday, and a final ruling might not be reached for months, a three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit pressed prosecutors to justify asking that the case be dismissed based on declarations submitted by senior Bush administration officials. (All three judges are Democratic appointees.)

"The bottom line here is that once the executive declares that certain activity is a state secret, that's the end of it?" Pregerson asked. "No cases, no litigation, absolute immunity? The king can do no wrong?"

The conversation occasionally took bizarre turns, such as when the attorneys and the judges knew the contents of confidential documents they had all reviewed--but could not discuss those contents in a courtroom with reporters and the public in the audience.
Another odd twist was the repeated reference to the Bush administration's public claim that there is no widespread surveillance of Americans--meaning a kind of suspected electronic dragnet that would permit the NSA to sift through a large chunk of Internet communications. Last April, retired AT&T employee-turned-whistleblower Mark Klein described just that kind of arrangement at an AT&T switching facility in downtown San Francisco on Folsom Street.

But administration officials have never been willing to deny a dragnet program in a signed affidavit made under penalty of perjury. That might derail the lawsuit against AT&T for now, but on the other hand, it could carry threat of criminal prosecution if the affidavit turned out to be a lie.

"What would be wrong with a simple affidavit denying that the government has intercepted the telephone conversations of American citizens without a warrant," Hawkins asked.

In December 2005, after The New York Times reported the existence of the NSA eavesdropping program, the president replied by saying: "I authorized the National Security Agency to intercept the international communications of people with known links to al Qaeda and related terrorist organizations."

McKeown suggested this wording for an affidavit: "Without admitting or denying that the government has a relationship with AT&T, I, Mr. or Mrs. So-and-So from the executive branch under oath, essentially affirm what President Bush said." The judge also said that because the government denies the dragnet program "and says they do not do any such surveillance without a warrant and there is no such program," the affidavit should be no problem.

Garre replied that such an affidavit is unnecessary because the president has already made a public statement.



[PREV] [1] ..[56][57][58][59][60][61][62][63][64].. [65] [NEXT]



All
Legal Business
Headline Legal News
Court News
Court Watch
Legal Interview
Topics in Legal News
Attorney News
Press Release
Opinions
Legal Marketing
Politics
Amazon workers strike at multiple fa..
TikTok asks Supreme Court to tempora..
Supreme Court rejects Wisconsin pare..
US inflation ticked up last month as..
Court seems reluctant to block state..
Court will hear arguments over Tenne..
Romanian court orders a recount of p..
Illinois court orders pretrial relea..
New Hampshire courts hear 2 cases on..
PA high court orders counties not to..
Tight US House races in California a..
North Carolina Attorney General Josh..
 Law Firm Web Design Information
Law Promo has worked with attorneys, lawyers and law firms all over the world in designing beautiful law firm websites that look great on all devices, from desktop computers to mobile phones. Law Promo can construct your law firm a brand new responsive law firm website, or help you redesign your existing site to secure your place in the mobile world. Solo Practice Law Firm Website Design


   Lawyer & Law Firm Links
Amherst, Ohio Divorce Lawyer
Sylkatis Law - Child Custody
loraindivorceattorney.com
St. Louis Missouri Criminal Defense Lawyer
St. Charles DUI Attorney
www.lynchlawonline.com
Car Accident Lawyers
Sunnyvale, CA Personal Injury Attorney
www.esrajunglaw.com
Family Law in East Greenwich, RI
Divorce Lawyer - Erica S. Janton
www.jantonfamilylaw.com/about
Connecticut Special Education Lawyer
www.fortelawgroup.com
San Francisco Trademark Lawyer
San Jose Trademark Lawyer
www.onulawfirm.com
 
 
Disclaimer: The content contained on the web site has been prepared by Romeo Media as a service to the internet community and is not intended to constitute legal advice or a substitute for consultation with a licensed legal professional in a particular case or circumstance. Blog postings and hosted comments are available for general educational purposes only and should not be used to assess a specific legal situation. Legal Business News for You to Reach America's Legal Professionals. Get the latest legal news and information.