Seattle and its insurers have agreed to pay $65.75 million to the family of Brooke Taylor, an amount representing the largest individual personal injury settlement in the city’s history, likely the largest in Washington state and among the largest ever in the country, reports Crosscut.

“The enormous sum is the result of a confluence of circumstances,” explains Crosscut’s David Kroman. “Taylor was 38 at the time of the crash and in the early part of what was an already decorated career with the law firm Susman Godfrey as an intellectual property litigation attorney. When she was still working, she was being showered with praise, and several industry publications had counted her among the country’s best lawyers.”

Taylor has a full-time medical attendant and currently lives in an assisted-care facility near her family’s home.

Read the Crosscut article.

Courthouse News Service reports that an attorney in Houston filed a lawsuit claiming he was conducting a deposition with a client when he encountered Apple’s latest bug that allowed others to access his iPhone’s microphone without him answering a FaceTime call.

The New York Times explains how the bug worked:

“By adding a second person to a group FaceTime call, you can capture the audio and video of the first person called before that person answers the phone, or even if the person never answers.”

The Houston lawyer, Larry D. Williams II, seeks punitive damages against Apple and unknown parties for claims of product liability, negligence, warranty and fraudulent misrepresentation.

CNBC reports that Williams claimed the experience caused “sustained permanent and continuous injuries, pain and suffering and emotional trauma that will continue into the future” and that Williams “lost ability to earn a living and will continued to be so in the future.”

Read the Courthouse News Service article.

San Antonio oil and gas entrepreneur Brian Alfaro avoided getting hauled off to jail Friday, a day after a bankruptcy judge issued a warrant for his arrest, reports the San Antonio Express-News.

Alfaro had failed to provide various records to a court-appointed receiver, prompting the judge to issue an arrest warrant. But in a hearing in which Alfaro, attending via phone from his lawyer’s office as four federal marshals stood ready to take him to jail, the judge granted him an additional 10 days to comply.

The judge “presided over a trial in 2017 on 28 investors’ claims that they had been defrauded by Alfaro. The judge awarded nine of them $8 million. Alfaro is appealing. Rose’s duties include ensuring that investors collect on the judgment,” writes Patrick Danner of the Express-News.

Read the article.

Above the Law reports that the Biglaw firm of Reed Smith has been named in a $500 million malpractice lawsuit filed by two defunct Bear Stearns investment feeder funds that Reed Smith represented in RMBS-related litigation.

Plaintiffs claim that Reed Smith failed to bring a case against the rating agencies — Standard & Poors, Moody’s, and Fitch Ratings — in a timely manner, resulting in those claims being dismissed, explains Above the Law senior editor Kathryn Rubino.

From the complaint:

“Reed Smith’s negligent failure to understand New York’s statute of limitations cost the Bear Stearns Funds what Reed Smith identified as a billion-dollar claim against various rating agencies.”

Read the Above the Law article.

Dale Kleber was 58 years old when he applied for a senior staff attorney position with CareFusion Corporation. On paper, his 25 years of legal experience, including serving as general counsel for a large corporation, showed he was qualified for the job.

But the position sought someone with three to seven years of legal experience. Kleber didn’t receive an invitation for an interview, but a 29-year-old lawyer was hired instead. Kleber sued under the ADEA, arguing that the seven-year experience cap on the position discriminates against older workers by automatically disqualifying them for the job.

Courthouse News Service reports that Kleber’s age discrimination suit failed when the en banc Seventh Circuit ruled Wednesday that the protections of the Age Discrimination in Employment Act apply only to current employees, not to job applicants.

Read the Courthouse News article.

Image by NY Photographic

Unless an employment contract specifies the forum for arbitration and the process by which the arbitration will be conducted, a court may find that the parties have not reached an agreement to arbitrate, warns a post on the website of Porzio, Bromberg & Newman.

The authors discuss a New Jersey case that illustrates the need to use care in drafting.

An appellate court found that the arbitration clause in the contract did not specify what forum would substitute in place of the jury trial.

Read the article.

Volkswagen AG is paying out $175 million to plaintiffs’ attorneys in the $10 billion settlement over the “clean diesel” litigation. But many who say they worked on those cases won’t be getting any money, according to Bloomberg Law.

“Only attorneys chosen as class counsel in the consolidated litigation, and attorneys working on assignments from class counsel, are entitled to attorneys’ fees, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit said Jan. 22,” reports Bloomberg’s Martina Barash.

“That means numerous attorneys who worked on suits before the appointment of class counsel won’t get paid,” she adds. “That includes for work they did filing complaints, attempting to negotiate early settlements, and fielding calls with clients and other attorneys.”

Read the Bloomberg Law article.

The U.S. Supreme Court rejected a San Francisco attorney’s request Tuesday to order Yelp to take down an online denunciation by a former client, leaving intact a California Supreme Court ruling that said the online review company can’t be ordered to remove libelous or offensive content, the San Francisco Chronicle reports.

At the trial level, a judge had found the client’s attack on San Francisco attorney Dawn Hassell to be libelous and ordered Yelp to remove it. Later the state’s high court found that the removal order conflicted with a federal law that shields internet service providers from legal responsibility for statements posted by others, writes the Chronicle‘s Bob Egelko.

The suit resulted from a one-star review on Yelp that described the plaintiff’s firm as incompetent and advising others to avoid it.

Read the SF Chronicle article.

Zapproved has published its Winter 2019 Volume of Ediscovery Case Law Summaries, featuring — as the company says in a release — “some heart-pounding tales of egregious misconduct by corporate and individual litigants.”

The quarterly publication can be downloaded from Zapproved website at no charge.

This volume covers a wide range of topics, from spoliation and sanctions to proportionality, scope, and technology. It includes cases where deleted evidence isn’t, in fact, spoliation; disparate outcomes regarding the form of production; and a brief discourse about how clowns are scary, but ESI is not.

Download the publication.

A federal jury in Miami set a $21.5 million verdict for a Haitian immigrant in a religious accommodation case who lost her job at a Conrad Hotel because she would not work on Sundays because of religious beliefs.

The Washington Post reports that Marie Jean Pierre informed the hotel when she was hired about a decade ago that she was a missionary for the Soldiers of Christ Church. Most of the time the hotel allowed her to have Sundays off, but in 2015 a kitchen manager started insisting that she work on Sundays.

“Pierre’s attorney, Marc Brumer, said the hotel had an obligation to ‘reasonably accommodate’ their employees’ religious beliefs — and argued they could have easily done so for Pierre. Instead, he said, they charged her with absenteeism and fired her,” writes the Post‘s Amy B. Wang.

A cap on punitive damages will limit the payout to about $300,000 if the verdict is upheld.

Read the Post‘s article.

The Association of Corporate Counsel is accepting registrations for Xchange 2019, The Mid-Year Meeting for Advancing Legal Executives.

General Counsel News readers who register by Jan. 30 will receive a $100 discount when using the code GCNEWS19.

The event is scheduled for April 28-30, 2019, at the Hotel Minneapolis in Minneapolis, MN.

ACC has arranged for four curricula addresses in the areas of contracts, leadership, legal operations, and litigation.

More information may be found here:

• Program agenda
• Rates and registration
• Hotel and travel

Register for the event.

A team of lawyers with Boyd Powers & Williamson alleging deceptive business practices against BBVA Compass Bank won a $98 million verdict for their client, a real estate developer who was working to build three luxury subdivisions in Tarrant County, Texas.

On its website, the firm explains the case:

“David Bagwell is a real estate developer who was working to build three luxury subdivisions in Tarrant County, Texas. Following the financial crisis of 2008, Mr. Bagwell entered into modification negotiations with his bank, BBVA Compass, to refinance the loans which were funding the new developments. In the course of the negotiations, Compass repeatedly told Mr. Bagwell that his loans would be renewed. However, after secretly negotiating with one of his competitors, those same loans were sold off at a discounted rate. A short time later, the competitor foreclosed and Mr. Bagwell was forced into bankruptcy.”

Read details about the case.

Business Insider reports that about 2,000 of HP’s and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise’s salespeople will finally be getting their share of a $25 million settlement paid to them by the two companies.

“In 2017, HP agreed to the $25 million settlement, from which the lawyers will take their cut — but it was just this week that the court approved the settlement arrangement, according to Business Insider’s Julie Bort. “That means the money should be soon forthcoming to the plaintiffs at last, according to the final court documents seen by Business Insider.”

The company’s salespeople complained that the company’s antiquated computer systems were not doing a good job of calculating their commissions.

Read the Business Insider article.

The National Safety Council’s recently released report on preventable injury and fatality statistics, reveals that accidental opioid overdoses have overtaken car accidents as a leading cause of deaths among Americans, according to a post on the website of Androvett Legal Media & Marketing.

“For the first time since the early 1960s, the life expectancy of Americans is consistently decreasing. Irrespective of all the advances in medicine that have occurred since the early 1960s, Americans are actually living shorter lives than they did only 10 years ago. The primary reason for this decline is the opioid epidemic, which was created in substantial part by the irresponsible marketing and distribution of these drugs by major drug companies,” notes Dallas attorney Jeffrey Simon of Simon Greenstone Panatier, P.C.

Simon Greenstone and co-counsel collectively represent more than 50 counties in Texas as well as other states in opioid litigation, seeking to recover economic damages caused by the reckless and negligent spread of highly addictive opioid drugs in communities across the U.S.

“The fact that the risk of death from accidental overdose of opioid drugs now exceeds the death risk from motor vehicle crashes, fire, drowning or even gun assault is another grim testament to the fact that corporate misconduct can, and has, destroyed many innocent lives. On behalf of our clients, we will hold those companies accountable for the harm they’ve done.”

Miller & Chevalier Chartered announced that government contracts expert Jason N. Workmaster joined the firm as a member in the Government Contracts Counseling and Litigation Practice.

Workmaster joins Miller & Chevalier from law firm Covington & Burling LLP. Previously, he spent more than 13 years at multinational law firm McKenna, Long & Aldridge LLP (now part of Dentons), then home to one of the world’s preeminent governments contracts practices, the firm said in a release.

“I’m thrilled to be joining a group at Miller & Chevalier that includes experienced trial lawyers who have significant expertise representing government contractors,” Workmaster said. “Miller & Chevalier is known for its high quality, and as a firm that has successfully deployed its multi-disciplinary teams to assist with the full gamut of issues that contractors confront, including high-stakes internal investigations and litigation when needed.”

The firm said Workmaster advises defense and civilian agency contractors who provide commercial and non-commercial goods and services to the government – such as weapons systems, IT services, cutting-edge software, and staff augmentation. He counsels these clients on all facets of the contracting process – from bid protests, to claims and disputes, to responses to government audits and investigations, to False Claims Act (FCA) cases.

Among his client engagements, Workmaster led the team representing Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR) in their successful 11-year litigation before the Armed Services Board of Contract Appeals (ASBCA) of a $44 million cost allowability dispute with the government involving KBR’s and its subcontractors’ use of private security contractors to protect themselves as they provided vital logistical support services to the military at the height of the Iraq War. Just earlier this month, he argued before the Federal Circuit in the government’s appeal of the ASBCA’s decision in KBR’s favor. His work in United States ex rel. Ubl v. IIF Data Solutions has been recognized as a rare jury verdict victory in a multi-million-dollar FCA action involving the GSA Schedules program. Further, he has counseled clients including Lockheed Martin Corporation and ITT Corporation on complex and newsworthy bid protest actions.

A frequent author and lecturer, Workmaster currently serves as President of the Boards of Contract Appeals Bar Association, the principal bar association focused on supporting and improving the practice of law before the federal Boards of Contract Appeals. He is also Co-Chair of the Pricing and Regulatory Compliance Oversight Committee of the Coalition for Government Procurement, the leading trade association for companies that sell commercial items to the government.

“Jason is a creative, experienced government contracts lawyer whose broad skillset will immediately benefit our clients that engage the government across multiple fronts. He is highly respected within the legal community and his record of success representing clients across the government contracts spectrum speaks for itself,” said Andrew T. Wise, Chair of Miller & Chevalier’s Litigation Department.

“Jason has developed a national reputation as a thoughtful and dedicated advocate for his clients. He is a seasoned government contracts lawyer and an accomplished practitioner in litigation, bid protests, and FCA disputes, which complements and expands our existing capabilities,” said Marc J. Gerson, Chair of Miller & Chevalier. “His well-rounded offering will greatly benefit our clients and we are pleased to welcome him to the firm.”

Workmaster earned a J.D., summa cum laude, from the Regent University School of Law and a B.A., magna cum laude, from the University of Florida.

Image by U.S. Customs and Border Protection

Government lawyers have taken the first step in trying to seize private property using the power of eminent domain to build a border wall — a contentious step that could put a lengthy legal wrinkle into President Trump’s plans to build hundreds of miles of wall, reports The Washington Post.

Previous eminent domain attempts along the Texas border have led to more than a decade of court battles, some of which date to George W. Bush’s administration and have yet to be resolved, according to the Post‘s Katie Zezima and Mark Berman. Many landowners are vowing to fight anew.

The reporters quoted Gerald S. Dickinson, an assistant professor of law at the University of Pittsburgh, who said this newest fight will be different because the earlier effort mostly included federal government land.

“If it’s going to be a contiguous wall across the entire southwest border, you’re talking about a massive land seizure of private property,” he said.

Read the Post article.

Even an informal email can constitute acceptance of a contractual offer, warns The In-House Advisor.

“Moreover, just a few months ago, Judge Timothy Hillman took this principle one step further by ruling, in Witt v. American Airlines, that an exchange of emails can form a binding settlement agreement, even if the parties have not agreed to all of the terms of that settlement,” explains author Shepard Davidson, a Burns Levinson partner.

The judge found that both sides had agreed to a settlement in an email exchange. When the plaintiff later tried to reopen discussions, American Airlines filed a motion to enforce settlement agreement. The court allowed the motion.

Read the article.

Many of the recent U.S. Supreme Court rulings on arbitration agreements cases have been decided by narrow 5-4 majorities, which has raised the possibility that the replacement of Justice Anthony Kennedy by Brett Kavanaugh might lead to some softening of the court’s position in those cases.

But as Ronald Mann, writing in the SCOTUSblog points out, the latest such ruling will shed no light on that broader question, because even the justices more skeptical about arbitration saw no merit in the arguments against arbitration here.

Kavanaugh wrote the opinion for the unanimous court. In this case anyway, none of the justices saw any merit in a process calling for collateral litigation over the gateway question of arbitrability.

“At bottom, the question is whether a court or an arbitrator decides whether an arbitration agreement governs a particular dispute,” writes Mann.

Read the article.

A U.S. judge overseeing a veteran’s multimillion-dollar negligence lawsuit in Puerto Rico rebuked the Justice Department for attempting to use the partial government shutdown to put the case on hold, calling the request “laughable,” according to a Bloomberg Law report.

Bloomberg’s Erik Larson writes: “In a ruling denying the government’s bid for more time, U.S. District Judge William G. Young said lapses in federal appropriations, like the current one triggered by President Donald Trump’s demand for funding for a border wall with Mexico, aren’t a government ‘policy’ that could theoretically justify staying such a lawsuit.”

The judge decried “an abdication by the president and the Congress” of the duty to govern responsibly.

Read the Bloomberg Law report.

While a $4.7 billion jury verdict in a talc case against Johnson & Johnson in July was eye-popping — the sixth-largest ever in a product-defect case — J&J may pay far less, or nothing, reports Bloomberg. No verdict of that size has survived appeal.

“Indeed, of the 25 largest U.S. jury awards, 23 were reversed, drastically cut or against defendants with few or no assets who couldn’t pay, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The remaining two, including the one against J&J, are being appealed. Most such revisions are by judges overruling angry jurors or enforcing court-imposed limits on punitive damages,” writes Bloomberg’s Margaret Cronin Fisk.

But even if the award is cut or reversed, a large verdict can draw other cases.

Read the Bloomberg article.