Gordon Caplan, who left his job as co-chairman of the prestigious New York law firm Willkie Farr & Gallagher LLP this year amid the U.S. college-admissions scandal, was sentenced Thursday to one month in prison, reports Bloomberg Law.

“I disregarded the values I’ve had throughout my life,” the once-highflying New York M&A lawyer told the U.S. district judge just before she sentenced him.

The sentence also includes a $50,000 fine and 250 hours of community service.

In his guilty plea, Caplan admitted he paid $75,000 to fix his daughter’s test scores. He asked for 14 days in jail, if he had to be incarcerated at all.

Read the Bloomberg Law article.

A Los Angeles jury returned a complete defense verdict for Hyundai Motor America and Hyundai Motor Company on Sept. 26, following a three-week trial presided over by Judge John A. Torribio.

The action was in the Norwalk Courthouse of the California Superior Court for the County of Los Angeles. Plaintiff Jorge Romo brought suit against the Hyundai defendants in January 2015, claiming that the subject 2003 Hyundai Tiburon was defectively designed and seeking an award of $40 million in economic and non-economic damages.

According to a release from Hyundai’s defense law firm: The action arose out of a motor vehicle accident that occurred in 2013, around midnight in South Gate, California. Defendant Alfred Schaer was driving his 2003 Hyundai Tiburon with another individual in the front passenger seat and plaintiff in the right rear seat. Schaer lost control of the vehicle causing it to leave the roadway, travel off the right side of the road, impact a curb and a chain-link fence, and finally collide with a steel shipping container at over 20 miles per hour. During the accident sequence, the shipping container deformed the passenger side of the Hyundai Tiburon and fractured the windshield, passenger side windows, and backlite. When the vehicle came to rest, plaintiff discovered that he had suffered a traumatic amputation of his right upper arm, according to the release.

Plaintiff filed suit against the Hyundai defendants, alleging that the Hyundai Tiburon was defectively designed because tempered safety glass — rather than laminated glass — was used in the side windows. Plaintiff also asserted a claim against Schaer for negligently operating the vehicle. At trial, plaintiff sought $40 million in economic and non-economic damages.

Plaintiff offered the testimony of numerous retained experts, including an automotive engineering and glazing expert, Stephen Batzer, Ph.D., P.E., biomechanics expert, Peter Francis, Ph.D., and accident reconstruction expert, Joseph Yates. These experts offered opinions in support of plaintiff’s theory that, if the Tiburon had been equipped with laminated glass instead of tempered safety glass in the side windows, the passenger-side, rear quarter window would have remained in place and prevented plaintiff’s injuries. Plaintiff’s automotive and mechanical engineering expert, Donald Phillips, P.E., presented a series of different litigation tests purportedly demonstrating that the properties of laminated glass were such that the use of laminated glass would have prevented plaintiff’s injuries during the accident.

In response, the Hyundai defendants offered the testimony of biomechanics and glazing expert Michael Carhart, Ph.D., as well as accident reconstruction expert Jeffrey Croteau. Carhart explained that the use of tempered safety glass is a safe and appropriate design choice for automotive side windows that complied with all applicable federal and industry standards, and accordingly that the Hyundai Tiburon was not defective or unreasonably dangerous. Moreover, Croteau prepared an extensive accident reconstruction based on 3D laser scanning and modelling and Carhart prepared a surrogate study and other 3D modeling establishing that the rear quarter glass window fractured when the vehicle impacted the edge of the 40-foot, multi-ton steel shipping container, and that the use of laminated glass in the quarter window would not have prevented plaintiff’s injuries. The Hyundai defendants also presented a complex sled crash test using an exemplar Hyundai Tiburon with laminated glass installed in the rear quarter window. This crash testing, which matched the relevant interactions in the underlying crash sequence, demonstrated that the use of laminated glass would not have prevented plaintiff’s injury, according to the release.

After deliberating over the course of three days, the jury found in favor of the Hyundai defendants on both the Strict Product Liability Consumer Expectation Test and Strict Product Liability Risk-Benefit Test. As to the claim for negligent operation of the vehicle, the jury returned a verdict against Schaer and awarded plaintiff a total of $17,270,000 in economic and non-economic damages.

Plaintiff presented the following experts at trial: automotive engineering and glazing expert Stephen Batzer, Ph.D.; automotive and mechanical engineering expert Donald Phillips, P.E.; biomechanics expert Peter Francis, Ph.D.; accident reconstruction expert Joseph Yates; economist expert Catherine M. Graves, MBA, CFA; orthopedic surgery expert Frederic Nicola, M.D.; psychology expert, Anthony Reading, Ph.D.; prosthetic expert Richard Riley, B.S.Ed., C.P., FAAOP; and psychical medical and rehabilitation expert, Khyber Zaffarkhan, D.O., FAAPMR. The Hyundai Defendants presented accident reconstruction expert, Jeffrey Croteau, and biomechanics and glazing expert, Michael Carhart, Ph.D.

Plaintiff was represented by Daniel Sheldon of Scolinos, Sheldon & Nevell, and Patrick Ardis and Kip Whittemore of Wolff Ardis, P.C., based in Memphis, Tennessee.

The Hyundai defendants were represented by Gary Wolensky, Paul Alarcon, and Taylor Brown of Buchalter, as well as Hyundai Motor America’s in-house counsel, Jamison Power.

Defendant Alfred Schaer was represented by David Gomes of Gomes Hirshik & Hummel.

A California woman suffering from mesothelioma has prevailed in the latest talc trial against Johnson & Johnson, following six days of jury deliberation that ended Friday when the jury awarded her $40 million in damages.

Plaintiffs’ lawyers said Nancy Cabibi, 71, of Hasuer, Idaho, and her husband Phil sued Johnson & Johnson, makers of Johnson’s Baby Powder, following her pleural mesothelioma diagnosis in 2017. Since then, Cabibi has undergone a variety of medical procedures including radical surgical intervention, chemotherapy, radiation and immunotherapy.

Testing of her body tissue showed the presence of tremolite and anthophyllite asbestos, known contaminants of Johnson’s Baby Powder and Shower to Shower, both of which were manufactured by Johnson & Johnson and both of which Cabibi used.

The jury in the case found Johnson’s Baby Powder defective because it contained asbestos. It also found the powder caused Cabibi’s mesothelioma, which is an invariably fatal form of cancer, her lawyers said.

Johnson & Johnson argued Cabibi was exposed to asbestos through living in an area of Los Angeles home to industry, though she never worked in or even entered any facilities where she would have been exposed to asbestos.

“Nancy Cabibi is fighting to survive every single day because of asbestos in Johnson’s Baby Powder. While we are very pleased with this verdict, we know that we must continue to fight on behalf of the Cabibis and so many others who have been harmed,” said attorney David Greenstone of Simon Greenstone Panatier in Dallas, who along with firm attorneys Stuart Purdy and Marissa Langhoff represented the plaintiffs.

This is just the latest win for the law firm against Johnson & Johnson. Earlier this month, name partner Chris Panatier was one of several lawyers representing four people with mesothelioma who sued J&J in its home state of New Jersey. That jury found the four were exposed to asbestos from using the company’s baby powder and awarded $37.3 million.

And in May 2018, attorneys David Greenstone and Chris Panatier represented Joanne Anderson of Williams, Oregon who was on the receiving end of a $25.75 million verdict when another California jury found manufacturing and design defects in Johnson’s Baby Powder due to the presence of asbestos.

Simon Greenstone Panatier, P.C., is a nationally recognized trial law firm with a reputation for creative and aggressive representation of clients in a wide variety of catastrophic personal injury matters nationwide. For more information, visit http://www.sgptrial.com/.

The  Chicago Tribune reports that a Chicago law firm says it has settled lawsuits against Boeing on behalf of the families of 11 passengers killed in the crash of a Lion Air jet off the coast of Indonesia.

Boeing is facing dozens of lawsuits after the October 2018 accident and another crash, also involving a Boeing 737 Max jet, in March in Ethiopia.

Attorney Alexandra Wisner declined to discuss financial terms. She said her firm has six other lawsuits still pending.

Read the Tribune article.

The Dallas-based firm Aldous Walker has chalked up three jury trial victories in 80 days, accounting for verdicts of more than $95 million.

In Jackson v. Beamers Private Club, et al., the firm represented the mother of Jerry Brown, a Dallas Cowboys practice-squad football player, who died in an alcohol-related automobile accident in December 2012. The lawsuit was filed under the Texas Dram Shop Act.

Milburn v. American Honda Motor Co., Inc. was an automotive product liability case on behalf of their client Sarah Milburn. The firm brought a product liability claim against Honda, arguing that the design of the seat belt in the third row’s middle seat was defective because it did not work as passengers expect and would therefore be used incorrectly.

In I.F. v. Andrew Valderrama and Isaiah Gary, the firm represented a client who at the age of 14 was drugged and then sexually assaulted by two high school football players at a party.

Read about the three cases.

A lawsuit alleges that the Sackler family that owns Purdue Pharma has been transferring billions of dollars from the company to personal accounts in an effort to protect funds from litigation, reports The Washington Post.

“Now, as the maker of OxyContin heads to bankruptcy court, those billions represent a central sticking point in the company’s plan to resolve thousands of lawsuits against it. Purdue asked the bankruptcy judge, Robert D. Drain, on Wednesday to take the unusual step of temporarily halting lawsuits against the Sackler family,” write the Post‘s Renae Merle and Lenny Bernstein.

The company said the Sackler family could back out of a settlement agreement with multiple states if it cannot get the protection it seeks.

Read the Post article.

Senators from both parties criticized a nominee for a federal appeals court for declining to answer questions Wednesday about his work in the Trump White House and Education Department, according to an Associated Press report.

Trump has nominated Steven Menashi, an associate White House counsel, to a seat on the New York-based 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Senators from both parties at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing complained as Menashi refused to answer questions about his work on immigration issues, including a policy to separate migrant children from their families at the U.S.-Mexico border.

“This isn’t supposed to be a game,” Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., told Menashi.

Read the AP report.

Politico is reporting that Sen. Ted Cruz will oppose President Donald Trump’s nominee for the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, Halil Suleyman “Sul” Ozerden, a major setback for the embattled nomination.

The report says conservative opposition places in doubt the future of Ozerden, who is a close friend of acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, and whose nomination Mulvaney pushed over the objections of the White House Counsel’s office.

“Unlike most other Trump judicial nominees, Ozerden lacks explicit backing from conservative judicial groups like the Judicial Crisis Network,” Politico reports. “Carrie Severino, the group’s chief counsel, wrote last year that ‘we could do better than Judge Ozerden’ in Mississippi.”

Read the Politico article.

Akerman LLP announced that Ruben Castillo, former chief judge for the U.S. District Court, Northern District of Illinois, will join the firm’s Chicago office as an equity partner in the Litigation Practice Group upon his retirement from the bench on Sept. 30.

Castillo will chair Akerman Bench, the firm said in a release.

As a first chair litigator, Castillo will focus his practice on corporate investigations, white collar criminal defense, private arbitration and mediation work for litigants. He will lead Akerman Bench, one of the nation’s largest moot court panels of former appellate and trial court judges, seasoned appellate lawyers, and former state and federal law clerks, who provide guidance and feedback for optimal oral argument preparation.

Castillo was nominated to the bench by President Bill Clinton and confirmed by the U.S. Senate in 1994, becoming the first Latino federal judge in Illinois. He served as vice chair of the U.S. Sentencing Commission from 1999 to 2010. In July 2013, Castillo began his service as chief judge, becoming the first Latino to hold this position in the district. In 2008, he was considered a possible candidate by President Barack Obama for the United States Supreme Court.

Prior to serving on the bench, Castillo was regional counsel to the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund. He also practiced in private law for two law firms in Chicago, including serving as first-chair litigator, and served as Assistant United States Attorney in the Special Criminal Prosecutions Division for the United States Attorney’s Office – Northern District of Illinois.

For more than 20 years, Castillo has taught trial advocacy at Northwestern University School of Law, with law students recognizing him with five teaching awards.

Castillo earned his Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from Loyola University Chicago in 1976 and his law degree from Northwestern University School of Law in 1979.

Zapproved has published “The Definitive Guide to Legal Hold Best Practices,” a guide to effectively preserving information for use in litigation.

The guide can be downloaded from Zapproved’s website at no charge.

It provides clear advice on recognizing trigger events and scoping preservation efforts; recommendations for how to issue, monitor, and release legal holds; analyses of common points of preservation failure; helpful checklists; and case law examples.

Download the guide.

A legal victory for Delta Air Lines this year is unique in that it is the first time that a court has determined that a business owes no obligation of privacy to a customer because its privacy policy explicitly disclaims any type of contractual relationship between the business and its customers, writes Sunrita Sen in the Frost Brown Todd fbtTech Blog.

The case involved a breach of contract claim over the data breach suffered by the airline in 2017.

A U.S. district judge dismissed the claim, agreeing with Delta that the Airline Deregulation Act preempted the plaintiff’s breach of contract claims.

Read the article.

The company that owns a scuba dive boat that caught fire and sank off California, killing 34 people, has sought to avoid liability by invoking a 19th-century law that has shielded vessel owners from costly disasters such as the sinking of the Titanic, according to reports from Reuters and the Los Angeles Times.

“Accidents that occur on land with a similar death toll could lead to more than $100 million in damages, lawyers said,” Reuters reports. “But on the water, maritime law applies, and any lawsuits will run up against the statute invoked late on Thursday by Truth Aquatics, which allows the owner of a vessel and its insurer to escape or severely limit its liability in certain cases.”

Owners of the boat have cited an 1851 statute in asking a judge to eliminate their financial liability or lower it to an amount equal to the post-fire value of the boat, or $0. The owner of the Titanic, which sank in 1912, limited its liability in lawsuits in the United States to $92,000, which was the value of the lifeboats that survived the accident.

Read the Reuters article.

A New Jersey judge struck a BigLaw attorney’s closing argument for Johnson & Johnson on Wednesday in a case alleging asbestos in the company’s talcum powder caused mesothelioma in the plaintiffs’ stomach linings, reports the ABA Journal.

Judge Ana Viscomi of New Brunswick struck from the record the entire argument made by Diane Sullivan, a litigation partner with Weil, Gotshal & Manges.

According to reports, Sullivan told jurors that experts for the plaintiffs didn’t draw a connection between talcum powder and mesothelioma until they were hired by the plaintiffs. “When you don’t have evidence, sometimes you have to create it,” Sullivan said.

Viscomi said the closing argument was “replete with conduct this court has already warned you about.”

Read the ABA Journal article.

The judgment in the Oklahoma opioid litigation, if upheld, could yield a huge return on investment for the private lawyers hired by Oklahoma’s Republican Attorney General Mike Hunter, reports Legal Newsline.

“Under their 2017 contract with the state, those lawyers — Whitten Burrage, Nix Patterson and Glenn Coffee & Associates — get 25% of any award up to $100 million with that percentage falling to 15% of anything over $500 million,” writes Legal Newsline’s Daniel Fisher.

And more big bucks could be in the pipeline: “They stand to earn $90 million in fees from this verdict, on top of $59 million of the $260 million Purdue Pharma settlement and another $21 million from an $85 million Teva settlement in June.”

Read the Legal Newsline article.

The families of three American war veterans who died at a railroad crossing in Midland, Texas, in 2012 are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to review their legal case, arguing it could impact safety at many of the nation’s 250,000 railroad crossings.

The veterans – Army Sgt. Maj. Lawrence Boivin, Marine Chief Warrant Officer 3 Gary Stouffer and Army Sgt. Maj. William Lubbers – were three of the four who died when a Union Pacific train rammed a parade float carrying wounded war heroes. The veterans’ families sued Union Pacific, but a Texas court granted summary judgment for the railroad, and the 11th Court of Appeals in Eastland affirmed. Earlier this year, the Texas Supreme Court declined to hear the case.

“We believe the Texas courts have made significant errors of nationwide importance and we’re asking the U.S. Supreme Court to correct them before there’s another needless tragedy elsewhere,” said attorney Doug Alexander of Alexander Dubose & Jefferson in Austin, who represents the plaintiffs.

According to Alexander, the most critical error involves the amount of warning time that elapsed before the Union Pacific train entered the Garfield Street crossing, where the crash occurred. Based on a federally mandated agreement between the railroad and the Texas Department of Transportation, the warning time was supposed to have been set at 30 seconds.

Union Pacific actually set the timer higher – to 35 seconds – which compensated for a defect in the track’s warning-system circuitry and allowed the system to give 30 seconds warning, as it was supposed to, plaintiffs claim in filings.

According to a release from the plaintiffs’ law firm, eight months before the crash, Union Pacific reduced the warning time by 10 seconds, without getting written approval from the Texas DOT or the City of Midland, as it had agreed to do. Coupled with the circuitry defect, the float the veterans were riding on received only 20.4 seconds of warning, almost 10 seconds less than mandated.

Union Pacific argued the warning still exceeded the 20-second minimum that a Federal Railway Administration (FRA) regulation requires and the Texas courts agreed.

But the plaintiffs argue the 20-second amount is a baseline minimum, not intended to replace the requirements of the agreement, but rather enforce them. They point to one of the FRA’s own bulletins, which says some crossings require at least 35 seconds of warning time or even more.

“If this decision is allowed to stand, then Texas courts have effectively nullified the federally mandated agreements for warning times at crossings all over the country,” Mr. Alexander said. “We don’t believe that’s what Congress intended and we certainly don’t believe it is safe.”

Supporters of the veterans’ families have been signing an online petition (https://www.change.org/p/union-pacific-justice-for-all-veterans-killed-by-union-pacific-train) asking Union Pacific to take care of the veterans’ families.

The case is Catherine Stouffer et al. v. Union Pacific Railroad Co., in the Supreme Court of the United States.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other business and employer groups have just submitted amicus briefs calling on the 9th Circuit to reconsider decisions that, in the views of these amici, eviscerate mandatory arbitration provisions, writes Alison Frankel in a Reuters report.

The briefs come in the wake of the 9th Circuit’s June 28 rulings in which plaintiffs claimed they couldn’t be forced into arbitration because they sought injunctions against corporate defendants.

The court found that because California’s policy of allowing consumers to pursue public injunctions does not specifically obstruct arbitration, it’s not precluded by the Federal Arbitration Act.

Read the Reuters article.

As they reach an age when other esteemed elder statesmen of the bar might be basking in acclaim for their life’s work, 78-year-old David Boies and 80-year-old Alan Dershowitz are brutally yoked in a subplot of the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking case, reports The Washington Post.

Boies and his partners at Boies Schiller Flexner represent one of Epstein’s accusers. That client has alleged that Epstein lent her for sex to his friends, including Dershowitz, according to the Post‘s article.

The accuser and her lawyers portray Dershowitz, who has never been charged with a sex crime, as a liar and a sneak who secretly recorded a call with a fellow lawyer, write the Post‘s Tom Jackman, Deanna Paul and Manguel Roig-Franzia.

Dershowitz has painted Boies as a corrupt attorney with a long trail of ethical lapses, a cheat and the head of a criminal enterprise.

Read the Post article.

Kraemer Manes & Associates has settled a lawsuit claiming that a client got bad legal advice after she was tricked into hiring the Pennsylvania law firm because of fake online reviews, reports the  ABA Journal.

The Journal‘s Debra Cassens Weiss explains:

“The lawsuit claimed that Kraemer Manes had ‘orchestrated a scheme of soliciting positive online reviews’ from people who had never used the law firm’s services. Nonlawyer employees were encouraged to solicit friends and family to write the reviews and given time off for each positive review they secured, the suit alleged.”

Read the ABA Journal article.

The U.S. firearms industry is facing a different kind of existential threat: liability to shooting victims, surmises Alison Frankel of Reuters.

She based that statement on the evidence of a petition filed Friday by Remington Arms, maker of the Bushmaster version of the AR-15 rifle that was used to kill 20 small children in Sandy Hook.

“Remington’s lawyers at Baker Botts asked the Supreme Court to grant review of a 2019 ruling in which the Connecticut Supreme Court held that Sandy Hook victims’ families can move forward with a suit attempting to hold Remington responsible for marketing and promoting a military-style weapon to civilians bent on executing campaigns of violence,” she writes.

“If the Supreme Court doesn’t step in, Remington said, firearms makers will face “a flood of lawsuits nationwide” that will subject them to “crippling litigation burdens.”

Read the Reuters article.

A judicial disciplinary hearing will determine the future of California judge Jeffrey Johnson’s career on the bench, in light of a list of allegations of sexual harassment, misconduct and drunken behavior, reports Above the Law.

The Commission on Judicial Performance has begun a four-week proceeding to consider the 10 counts of alleged misconduct covering a period of 20 years. The defense plans to call 168 witnesses.

“Johnson has also responded to the controversy with a lawsuit of his own.” writes Above the Law’s Kathryn Rubino. “Last month he filed a $10 million lawsuit against the court and the administrative presiding justice, Elwood Lui, alleging emotional distress.”

Read the Above the Law article.