Victim 1 Sues Penn State

The man identified as Victim 1 at Jerry Sandusky's trial has sued Penn State.  HERE is link to his complaint, which was posted on his lawyers' website last night.  The five-count complaint alleges negligence/recklessness, fraudulent concealment/intentional misrepresentation, intentional infliction of emotional distress, negligent infliction of emotional distress, and aiding and abetting/civil conspiracy.  The complaint is long, but it is definitely worth reading for anyone interested in the Penn State tragedy and also for lawyers looking for tips on how to draft a thorough and detailed complaint.

There are some pretty damning allegations contained in that complaint.  Anyone who has followed this story over the past year is probably familiar with the story and will also probably acknowledge that there appears to be a high likelihood that Penn State will be found liable for covering up the abuse by Jerry Sandusky.

Looking right past liability for a second, my mind turns to the potential damages.  The complaint alleges that Penn State operates on an annual budget of more than $4.5 billion and maintains an endowment in excess of $2 billion.  These numbers become relevant when assessing punitive damages.  One of the purposes of punitive damages is to deter the defendant and others from acting similarly in the future.  The only way to do that is to hit them where it hurts (not a legal term) i.e., in the pocketbook.  The only way to make sure that it "hurts" is to know how much money the defendant has.

I plan to keep updating on this case as details emerge, so keep checking back.

"Screw you Rusty"

I told you earlier that I was going to write about a couple of interesting trials to keep up the Casey Anthony momentum.  The first one involved the Government's attempt to rob an innocent family of ten gold coins worth about $75 million.  The second one was going to be the Roger Clemens trial.  But, as you know, the judge declared a mistrial on the second day of trial.  So instead of getting into the details at this point, I'll just tell you why everybody yells "Screw you Rusty!" to Clemens' lawyer Rusty Hardin when they see him.

Mr. Hardin represented the estate of J. Howard Marshall, the Texas billionaire who married Anna Nicole Smith.  There was a very long and contentious trial concerning his billion dollar estate.  At one point during Hardin's cross examination of Anna Nicole, she was crying and sobbing while describing her love for her deceased husband. 

"Mrs. Marshall, have you ever taken acting lessons?" Hardin asked. 

"Screw you, Rusty," she shot back.

Now it is not uncommon for people in public to see him in the street and yell "Screw you Rusty!"  And he loves it!  That's hilarious.

Mr. Hardin is known for asking the right questions at the right time.  There is another story on this website about an exchange in the Calvin Murphy trial.  He is the NBA Hall of Famer who was charged with sexually abusing five of his own daughters.  During the cross examination of one of the daughters,  Hardin was getting nowhere with his questions when he suddenly stopped and asked her, point blank, “Do you sometimes make things up?” Amazingly, the daughter answered, “Yes.”

Instead of stopping there, Hardin pressed on. “Is there any way for the jury to tell when you’re making something up?”

“No,” she said.

The jury took less than two hours to acquit Calvin Murphy.

What's the next big trial?

Casey Anthony sure got everyone interested in the legal system for a week or two.  To keep that momentum rolling I have selected a couple of interesting trials from around the country to tell you about.  The first one doesn't have the nationwide allure of a dead toddler and the Miami nightclub scene, but it does involve a whole lot of money and has a similar theme of governmental overreaching.

The first case is United States of America v. Ten 1933 Double Eagle Gold Pieces.  In 1933 President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered the destruction of all Double Eagle coins shortly after they were minted due to economic concerns.  A very limited number of coins escaped destruction.  A massive Secret Service investigation during the 1940s and 1950s linked every known Double Eagle to one man, Isreal Switt, but the government decided not to prosecute him. 

Isreal Switt died in 1990.  His estate was probated without complication.  But in 2004 his daughter discovered a previously unknown safety deposit box that contained 10 Double Eagle coins.  She took the coins to the U.S. Treasury to have them authenticated, but the Government seized the coins and initiated forfeiture proceedings in federal court.  The trial started last Friday.

The Government argues that the coins were never released into circulation by the Treasury and were supposed to be destroyed, so any surviving coins must be stolen.  The daughter argues that there were several legal ways that Gold Eagles could have left the Mint in 1933.  The daughter also argues that the Government should have to prove that these particular coins were stolen, not just that all Gold Eagles must have been stolen.

The daughter has precedent on her side.  The only other Double Eagle to surface in the last 60 years occurred in 2000 when a British coin dealer was arrested by Secret Service agents during a sting operation.  The coin dealer was acquitted of all charges, then sued the government for the return of his coin.  As part of a settlement in that case, the government authorized an auction of the coin.  It brought $7.6 million. So the daughter is looking at a big payday in this case if she can prevail. The trial is supposed to conclude this week.  I'll try to follow up with a report.

Great client.

I'm sure most of you have heard about the defamation suit filed by the Cook County landlord against one of its tenants for comments allegedly made by the tenant on twitter.

I don't have any comments about the merits of that lawsuit. But I do like the mentality expressed by the landlord's representative in the Sun-Times article this morning.

"We're a sue first, ask questions later kind of an organization," he said, noting that the company manages 1,500 apartments in Chicago and has a good reputation it wants to preserve.

I need more clients like that guy.

Woman caught hiding $800,000 from husband, Sues the bank for telling him

A Long Island, New York woman is suing Chase Bank for telling her husband that she had a secret account worth more than $800,000 at the bank.

Chase Bank cold called the house to offer investment advice. The husband answered the phone. The Bank told him about the account.

The husband then "began harassing [the wife], asking for money from the funds that he can invest in the stock market and to cover a margin call he had on his stock account," the wife's suit says. The husband then began "alienating" the wife, so she forked over $155,000 "to save her marriage and restore order in the marital home," the suit says.

The wife is now suing the bank to recover the $155,000 that she paid to her husband on the grounds that the bank violated federal privacy laws that "prohibit the disclosure of non-public, personal information."

That's not fair!

Plaintiffs can file suit under the Illinois Consumer Fraud and Deceptive Business Practices Act for conduct that was neither fraudulent nor deceptive.

A plaintiff may allege that conduct is "unfair" under the Act without alleging that it was deceptive according to the ruling out of the First District in Demitro v. GMAC. In that case, plaintiff bought a Chevy Suburban for nearly $40,000. His payments were$742.18 per month. Not surprisingly, he couldn't afford it. He became delinquent nearly $2,200. He contacted GMAC. They wrote him a letter giving him seven days to come current. During that seven day period, he wrote a check to pay off his balance, but it bounced, so his truck was repossessed.

GMAC sold the truck to pay off the balance. Plaintiff sued alleging that it was unfair that his truck was repossessed during that seven day time period. (Incidentally, he never paid off his delinquency. He claimed that his check bounced because he couldn't get to the credit union to deposit funds to cover his check because his truck was repossessed.)

In any event, the court agreed that GMAC's conduct was unfair. In determining whether conduct is unfair, courts consider whether the practice offends public policy, whether it is oppressive, and whether it causes consumers substantial injury. All three criteria do not need to be satisfied to support a finding unfairness. A practice may be unfair because of the degree to which it meets one of the criteria or because to a lesser extent it meets all three.

Plaintiff was awarded $7,560 in compensatory damages, $53,101 in attorneys' fees, and $1,151 in costs.

Poetry in Law

Here is an interesting case that, if you have not already come across, is an amusing read! It’s an actual case that the Honorable Judge Gillis decided to get creative with. Apparently West Law thought it was amusing and added their own stanzas about the case.


Fisher v. Lowe, 333 N.W.2d 67 (Mich. App. 1983).

A wayward Chevy struck a tree
whose owner sued defendants three.
He sued car's owner, driver too,
and insurer for what was his due.
For his oak tree that now may bear
a lasting need for tender care.
the Oakland County Circuit court,
John O' Brian, J., set forth
the judgment the defendants sought
and quickly an appeal was brought.

Court of appeals, J.H.Gillis, J.
Gave thought to this and had this to say:
1) There is no liability
since no-fault grants immunity;
2) No jurisdiction can be found
where process service is unsound;
and thus the judgment, as it's termed
is due to be and is

Affirmed.

(West Law)
1. Automobiles Key # 251.13
Defendant's Chevy struck a tree-
there was no liability;
the No-Fault Act comes into play
as owner and the driver say.
barred by the act's immunity
no suit in tort will aid the tree.
Although the oak's in disarray
No court can make defendants pay.

2. Process Key # 4
No jurisdiction could be found
where process service was unsound;
In personam jurisdiction
was not even legal fiction.
Where plaintiff failed to well comply
with rules of court that did apply.

Summary of appeal court's opinion

J.H. Gillis, Judge
We thought that we would never see
a suit to compensate a tree.
A suit whose claim in tort is prest
upon a mangled tree's behest.
A tree whose battered trunk was prest
against a Chevy's crumpled crest.
A tree that faces each new day
with bark and limb in disarray.
A tree that may forever bear
a lasting need for tender care.
Flora lovers though we three,
we must uphold the court's decree.

Affirmed.

Motion to Fight Opposing Counsel

I just came across a great legal humor blog called Lowering the Bar that is written by Kevin Underhill, a partner in the San Francisco office of Shook, Hardy & Bacon. I spent at least an hour this weekend reading through the previous posts on the website. There is some really good stuff on there, but my favorite part of the blog is the Legal Document Archive. There are links to humorous judicial opinions, court orders, and pleadings.

My favorite pleading is the "Motion for Fist Fight" filed by Attorney Kirk Krutilla from Superior, Montana. This is an actual motion that was filed by Mr. Krutilla in a criminal case. Here is a link to the motion and the State's response.

It is not entirely clear what was happening in that case, but from what I understand, Mr. Krutilla represented a man who was charged with causing the death of another man during a fight. Mr. Krutilla's client was asserting self-defense. Apparently, the decedent was the aggressor in the fight, and Mr. Krutilla was upset that the State seemed to be sanctioning the actions of the decedent by prosecuting his client for defending himself. So, Mr. Krutilla filed a motion for a fist fight involving him and another lawyer from his office on one side, and two prosecutors on the other side.

The State's response is equally hilarious. They state that "the counsel for the State are confident they could acquit themselves respectably if it were necessary to settle any part of this matter by means of a physical contest," but, nonetheless, they respectfully request that the motion be denied.

Sharing Online Password Leads to Lawsuit

The Financial Times is suing the Blackstone Group for the repeated use of a single online password. FT is also suing current and/or former employees of Blackstone "who have used the account credentials of another person" as John Does 1 through 100. The suit alleges violation of the Computer Fraud Abuse Act and copyright infringement.

The Financial Times was first published in 1888. It is the British rival of the Wall Street Journal. Subscriptions to its website are priced from $179 to $299 per year and its website receives 72 million unique hits each month.

Blackstone is a $116 billion equity firm. The complaint calls it a "global financial enterprise." The complaint alleges that a senior employee in its finance and compliance division authorized the initiation and repeated renewal of a single individual subscription. The complaint alleges that multiple employees used the sole username and password to access a "massive" amount of subscription articles described as "more than an individual would normally access." The username was "theblackstonegroup" and the password was "blackstone." (d'oh!)

The suit asks for actual damages, statutory damages, compensatory damages, and attorneys' fees. Here's the complaint.

Donald Trump is an Idiot

Donald Trump hired a prominent Manhattan law firm to represent him in a lawsuit against a contractor who Mr. Trump claims overcharged him in the construction of a golf course. Now, Trump is suing the law firm claiming that they also overcharged him. Click here for a post from the Wall Street Journal Law Blog.

The quote that is making all the headlines is where the Donald says that he has "a Ph.D. in legal fees," and that he "knows when fees are fair and when they're not." The quote that I found interesting, however, is where he says "We won the case because I am a great witness."

I hate clients like that. Nothing that the lawyers did in three years of pretrial practice made any difference whatsoever. The Donald showed up, testified for thirty minutes at trial, and single-handedly won the case. Great job, Mr. Trump.

On a side note, the Wall Street Journal Law Blog points out that the firm that Trump is suing employs Joshua D. Saviano, the former child actor who was once known as Paul, Kevin Arnold's best friend on the Wonder Years. Check out his profile on the firm's website.