An El Paso neurosurgeon is the subject of a lawsuit filed last week, accused of unlawfully conspiring with a local attorney to solicit legal representation for a dying truck wreck victim, according to a release from Androvett Legal Media & Marketing.

The lawsuit, filed by El Paso resident Karla Triana, claims that while her mother was undergoing emergency surgery at Del Sol Medical Center, Dr. Bratislav Velimirovic handed her a lawyer’s business card and urged her to contact the attorney. Triana’s mother died as a result of her injuries.

Triana subsequently received a call and text message on her personal cell phone from an employee in the office of the attorney, Victor J. Bieganowski, indicating that he sought to represent her in a civil claim against the trucking company.

“It’s clear that the doctor and the attorney are breaking the law by working together to solicit legal representation of accident victims and their families,” says attorney Tom Carse of Dallas. Carse handles cases involving charges of unlawful representation, known as barratry, against other attorneys, according to the release.

“It’s logical to think this was not an isolated incident, and that there may be more instances of this conspiracy still to be uncovered.”

The release states that Bieganowski was convicted in 2000 on federal charges for his role in a massive medical and legal fraud, and received a 30-month prison sentence and a fine of $375,000. He was disbarred, but subsequently regained his law license. The fraud charges involved claims against union officials for funneling the cases of injured workers to Bieganowski’s legal practice and the medical practice of his brother, Dr. Arthur Bieganowski.

Dr. Velimirovic is a partner in Neurosurgical Specialists of El Paso. According to the clinic’s website he is a “board-certified neurosurgeon who utilizes advanced techniques to perform minimally invasive spine surgery, cranial surgery and interventional radiologic procedures.”

A new study by Above the Law takes a unique approach to ranking the influence and impact of justices of the U.S. Supreme Court by rating them based on the career success of their former clerks.

“Today’s Supreme Court clerks are tomorrow’s Supreme Court justices. They are tomorrow’s attorneys general and United States attorneys.” explains executive editor Elie Mystal. “They are tomorrow’s law professors and corporate GCs. Former Supreme Court clerks are incredibly powerful people in their own right, and they received their final training from a Supreme Court justice.”

The study covers former justices as well as current members of the court. That’s why, for example, Sandra Day O’Connor, Anthony Kennedy and the late Thurgood Marshall score high in the rankings. The study focuses on four categories: the judiciary, Biglaw, academia and government.

Read the Above the Law article.

The ABA Journal reports that a would-be class action suit filed against President Donald Trump alleges he engaged in a scheme to defraud investors by promoting three companies that charged people to sell their products and learn about business opportunities, while failing to disclose the financial risk of the buy-in.

Reporter Debra Cassens Weiss writes that the suit alleges Trump didn’t disclose that he was “lavishly paid” for the endorsements, and instead led consumers to believe that his backing was based on due diligence, inside information and personal experience with the companies.

Defendants include Trump, the Trump Organization and children Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump and Ivanka Trump.

Read the ABA Journal article.

SCOTUSblog reports that in Lamps Plus Inc. v. Varela, the U.S. Supreme Court will decide whether the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit correctly held that an employer consented to class arbitration.

The employer in that case included language in the arbitration contract that committed the parties to use arbitration “in lieu of any and all lawsuits or other civil legal proceedings,” specified that arbitral claims include those “that, in the absence of this Agreement, would have been available to the parties by law,” and authorized the arbitrator to “award any remedy allowed by applicable law.”

Lower courts have found that the arbitration agreement could be read to authorize class arbitration, and that California contract law called for ambiguity on that point to be resolved against the contract’s drafter, Lamps Plus, writes Charlotte Garden.

Read the article.

Writing in ContractsProf Blog, Myanna Dellinger discusses a case that “nicely demonstrates how the consideration doctrine is still relevant and, as always, the importance of getting contracts in writing even though they do not have to be.”

The plaintiff had agreed to do some work for the defendant for $10 an hour, with the understanding that he would receive a $150,000 bonus after nine months. Somewhere along the way, the employer gave him a raise to $11, and then, after a total of 18 months of labor, fired him and refused to pay the bonus.

Dellinger explains that the court apparently found that because the plaintiff actually received one single dollar more per hour over nine months, there was no consideration for the original promise of working for a “reduced salary.”

Read the article.

Over the past 15 years, Key Risk Insurance Co. has made multiple trips to courts and before the North Carolina Industrial Commission to argue that Mario Seguro-Suarez has been faking his symptoms from an on-the-job injury and that his benefits should be cut off.

The Charlotte Observer reports documents show that the company disregarded years of medical opinions — including several from its own doctors — that Seguro-Suarez was indeed left disabled from his fall at a Southern Fiber factory. The 2003 head-first fall from 18 feet onto a concrete floor left him disabled.

After years of failing to cut off payments to Seguro-Suarez, the insurance company’s private detective “took what a detective would describe as misleading information to Lincolnton police to accuse Seguro-Suarez of insurance fraud. He was arrested, jailed and later indicted,” reporter Michael Gordon writes.

That attempt drew a withering rebuke from a judge, and now Seguro-Suarez is suing for malicious prosecution.

Read the Charlotte Observer article.

A former Foley & Lardner partner was suspended two years by the state Supreme Court for lying to the IRS during an audit of two wealthy estates connected to a major area business, reports the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

“The firm fired Adam Wiensch, 55, in 2016 when it learned he had falsified documents related to the transfer of wealth from the owners of Carma Laboratories to their children, a move that attempted to save the family millions in taxes,” writes the Journal Sentinel‘s Bruce Vielmetti.

The court’s opinion recounts Wiensch’s earlier testimony that he had been facing “several highly disruptive and personal” issues at the time of his offenses, and was dealing with depression and alcoholism.

Read the Journal Sentinel article.

The New York Times reports on the Heritage Foundation’s “Federal Clerkship Training Academy,” which required applicants to keep the training materials secret and to pledge that they wouldn’t use any of the training materials “for any purpose contrary to the mission or interest of the Heritage Foundation.”

The report by Adam Liptak says application materials told prospective clerks that “generous donors” were making “a significant financial investment in each and every attendee.”

“But legal experts said the effort by Heritage to train and influence law clerks raised serious ethical questions and could undermine the duties the clerks have to the justice system and to the judges they will serve,” according to Liptak.

A few hours after the Times report went online, the foundation announced that it was suspending the program.

Read the NY Times article.

The Associated Press reports that Florida’s next governor and not incumbent Gov. Rick Scott will get to pick three new justices to the state Supreme Court, the court ruled in a decision with major implications in this year’s gubernatorial campaign.

“In a major rebuke to Scott, the Supreme Court concluded that the Republican governor exceeded his authority when he started the process to find replacements for the three justices,” the AP reports.

Because of age limits of 70, three justices must retire at midnight Jan. 8, the same day Scott is scheduled to leave the governor’s office. Scott, claiming he had authority to name the replacements, last month asked a nominating commission to start accepting applications with a Nov. 10 deadline.

Read the AP article.

Two companies facing multiple lawsuits over a summer tourist boat accident in Missouri that killed 17 people have invoked an 1851 law that allows vessel owners to try to avoid or limit legal damages as they also seek settlement negotiations with victims’ family members, reports the Chicago Tribune.

“If a judge concluded that the federal law cited by Ripley [Entertainment Inc.] and Branson Duck Vehicles applies, claims for damages over the July 19 accident on Table Rock Lake near Branson, Missouri, could be consolidated into a single federal court case,” explains the article, from the Associated Press. “The companies’ petition states that under the federal law, they would not owe any damages because the boat carried no freight and was a total loss.”

Read the Chicago Tribune article.

The lawyer most responsible for winning a $289 million verdict against Bayer AG may end up wiping it out, according to a Bloomberg Law report.

Brent Wisner, the lead trial attorney who in August convinced a jury that Monsanto Co.’s Roundup weed killer caused his client’s cancer, irked the judge handling the case so profoundly that she’s considering tossing the verdict and ordering a new trial.

From the Bloomberg report: “The lawyer told jurors that Monsanto executives in a company board room were ‘waiting for the phone to ring’ and that ‘behind them is a bunch of champagne on ice,’ according to a court filing. He said that ‘if the damages number isn’t significant enough, champagne corks will pop.’”

Read the Bloomberg Law article.

A recent case from the United States District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania highlights how expensive a Fair Labor Standards Act case can be when an employee prevails for unpaid overtime compensation, writes Jay Carr in Vorys, Sater, Seymour and Pease’s Energy & Environmental Law Blog.

The article describes Sammy Mozingo v. Oil States Energy Services L.L.C., in which oil field workers in Texas filed a class action alleging that their employer Oil States had misclassified them as exempt from overtime laws. Most of the employees settled, but eight went to trial, resulting in Oil States paying damages, fees, and costs totaling $3,385,884 for just these eight employees.

Read the article.

Bloomberg Law reports that the U.S. Senate has confirmed Eric Dreiband, a Jones Day attorney who defends companies accused of discrimination, to lead the Justice Department office that enforces anti-bias laws and investigates police civil rights cases.

“Dreiband represented the University of North Carolina when it implemented policies under the state’s since-repealed ‘bathroom bill,’ requiring people to use gender-designated restroom facilities based on the biological sex listed on their birth certificates,” writes Bloomberg’s Chris Opfer. “He also won a case for R.J. Reynolds Tobacco that made it harder for workers to sue for age discrimination under federal law.”

Read the Bloomberg Law article.

Plaintiffs’ lawyer John McCraw of Dallas is facing possible disciplinary action because he filed a motion asking two appellate court justices to remove themselves from a case, implying that the pair voted to overturn his clients’ $1 million jury verdict because of donations they’d received from two political action committees.

Dallas Observer reports that the justices not only declined to recuse themselves, they and their fellow justices sent McCraw’s name to the general counsel of the State Bar of Texas for possible disciplinary action for insulting the court.

A three-judge panel of the 5th Court of Appeals had overturned a $1 million award to McCraw’s clients, two women who had sued their apartment owner after an intruder entered through a window and violently assaulted both women.

Reporter Nashwa Bawab writes: “McCraw asked the entire 13-member appeals court to reconsider — minus Justices Craig Stoddart and Molly Francis, two of the three judges who unanimously voted to overturn the verdict. Stoddart and Francis each received $2,000 from the Texans for Lawsuit Reform PAC and the Apartment Association of Greater Dallas PAC a few days apart from each other and less than a month before they were assigned the case.”

Read the Dallas Observer article.

A recent Ninth Circuit ruling that Uber’s arbitration agreements did not violate the National Labor Relations Act provides a major victory to Uber by requiring each plaintiff to separately arbitrate his or her claims.

Christine M. Fitzgerald, writing in the Jackson Lewis California Workplace Law Blog, explains that plaintiffs filed a putative class action against Uber for failure to remit gratuity paid by customers, and for misclassification of the drivers as independent contractors and failing to pay their business expenses. The O’Connor plaintiffs sought an order declaring Uber’s 2013 arbitration agreements unconscionable.

The panel rejected plaintiffs’ argument that the lead plaintiffs constructively opted out of arbitration on behalf of the entire class.

Read the article.

The law firm that spent nine years fighting and winning health care for veterans subjected to government-administered human testing of chemicals including sarin, mustard gas, and LSD was awarded $3.4 million in fees, a small fraction of the value of the hours the firm said it put into the case.

Bloomberg Law reports that Morrison & Foerster LLP accepted a fee award from the U.S. Army that’s $16 million less than the fee the firm could have sought.

“The fee award is the latest and nearly last chapter in the litigation by soldiers subjected to the government’s decades-long human testing program who were seeking recognition and health care above what they could get at the Veterans Administration for injuries they suffered,” writes Bloomberg’s Joyce Cutler.

Read the Bloomberg Law article.

Vizio has announced a potential $17 million settlement in a recent class action lawsuit, which could result in a pay-out that is as little as a few cents for each of the millions of people claiming the company’s smart TVs collected and shared their private viewing data without their consent, reports the New York Daily News.

A ProPublica 2015 expose alleged Vizio used its smart TVs to spy on an estimated 16 million Vizio TV owners who purchased and connected their televisions to the internet between Feb. 1, 2014 and Feb. 6, 2017, writes reporter Jessica Schladebeck.

“After payment of notice and administration costs and any approved award of attorneys’ fees, costs and service awards, all funds remaining in the settlement fund will be distributed to the class,” according to court documents.

Read the NY Daily News article.

The Orlando Sentinel is reporting that the founder of Tea Party Nation has been disbarred for trying to swindle timeshare owners into thinking they canceled their timeshares.

Tennessee attorney Judson Wheeler Phillips, a senior partner with Nashville-based Castle Law Group and founding member of the conservative Tea Party group, was accused of taking off with the money he earned from the fraudulent transactions, the Tennessee Supreme Court has ruled.

Federal lawsuits were filed against Phillips by Westgate Resorts and Orange Lake Resorts, both based in Orlando, as well as Las Vegas-based Diamond Resorts and Fort Lauderdale-based Berkley Resorts. More than 90 consumer fraud complaints also were filed.

Read the Orlando Sentinel article.

A recent article posted on the website of Haynes and Boone analyzes nationwide trends in the filing and certification of royalty class action cases, which result in much greater exposure to producers than individual royalty owner cases. For example, in the past five years, producers have settled class actions for amounts in excess of $80 million.

“Ninety-six putative class actions filed during the period from 2001 to the present are analyzed in this article. Since Congress enacted the Class Action Fairness Act of 2005 (CAFA), most of these cases were litigated in federal court,” write David Ammons and Mike Stewart.

“These cases deal almost exclusively with alleged underpayment of natural gas royalties (oil royalty litigation rarely arose during the period analyzed).”

Read the article.

The Chicago Tribune tells the story of a former general counsel who had been unemployed and job hunting for three years when he came across a position that seemed promising, but for this part of the ad: “3 to 7 years (no more than 7 years) of relevant legal experience,” it said.

The story of Dale Kleber, who was 58 at the time, illustrates a bigger story of the critical question about whether job applicants can pursue lawsuits at all in such cases, explains reporter Alexia Elejalde-Ruiz.

“The federal Age Discrimination in Employment Act prohibits discrimination against people over 40, but there is dispute about whether Congress intended for the law to protect external job applicants, not just current or former employees, against policies that appear to be neutral but have a disproportionate adverse effect on older people,” she writes.

Kleber’s experience includes a stint as general counsel at Dean Foods and, most recently, as CEO of a dairy products trade group.

Read the Chicago Tribune article.