Legal Pad

Howard Rice Name Partner Has Good Day With Supreme Courts

It was a big day for Jerome Falk Jr. and punitive damages.

The director of Howard, Rice, Nemerovski, Canady, Falk & Rabkin’s litigation department scored wins from the California Supreme Court as well as the U.S. Supreme Court.

Falk represented McKesson in an employment case in which a supervisor at the company made snide remarks and belittled an employee who continually missed work due to diagnosed panic attacks. A Yolo County jury had hit McKesson with more than $3.5 million in compensatory damages and $15 million in punitive damages. In a 5-2 ruling today, the Supreme Court lowered the punitive damages award to $1.9 million.

Also today, the U.S. Supreme Court reportedly rejected Ford Motor Co.’s challenge to punitive damages in an $82.6 million award in an Explorer rollover case. Falk represented the woman, Benetta Buell-Wilson, who was paralyzed from the waist down when she swerved to avoid an object and her 1997 Explorer rolled four and a half times.

“It’s ironic that I’m on either side in one day,” Falk said.

— Kate Moser

Oakland Attorney Stakes Out (Virtual) Space on Worker's Comp

Julius Young scours the news and analyzes political developments every week for updates on workers’ compensation law. He’s been doing it for three years, having closely watched the “upheaval” created by workers’ compensation reforms in 2004. “I saw a space where some of the other types of commentators or journals dealing with workers’ comp weren’t covering it in the way it should be covered,” says Young, a partner at Oakland’s Boxer & Gerson.

Young’s blog, Workerscompzone.com, recently won Top Blog of the Year 2009 from the LexisNexis Workers’ Compensation Law Center, sharing the honor with Workers’ Comp Insider.

Young’s perspective, and more accolades, after the jump.

S.F. Lawyer Gets Help Prepping for U.S. Supremes

Preparing to argue in front of the U.S. Supreme Court for the first time is taking up most — but not all — of Schneider Wallace Cottrell Brayton Konecky partner Todd Schneider’s time these days.

“The bottom line is, the preparation is the same for any appellate arguments,” Schneider said. “You sit down and read and read and refine arguments until you’re so comfortable with the subject matter that you can have a real academic discussion with the court.”

Schneider is arguing Nov. 10 in a wage and hour case, The Hertz Corporation v. Melinda Friend, et al, that tackles diversity jurisdiction — the question of whether the class of Californians in the case can sue under California law in California court even though Hertz is incorporated in a different state and argues that California isn’t its principal place of business.

An upshot to preparing for the Supreme Court is all of the help that academics send, Schneider said. Stanford, UC-Irvine and American University have all offered to do moot courts.

One of the biggest challenges, Schneider said, is to “marshal what is a very large and complicated record in the case and the case law of every circuit — trying to reconcile all that into an argument that best approximates congressional intent.”

“One certainly feels the gravity of the argument,” he said.

— Kate Moser

Equal Rights Advocates Finds Its New Executive Director

Arcelia Hurtado knows it will take a lot of energy to tackle the financial constraints facing Equal Rights Advocates, where she takes over Sept. 1 as executive director. But the 38-year-old is no stranger to penny counting.

She comes to the position from the San Francisco state public defender’s office, where she was an apellate attorney. “At the state level, we were experiencing a lot of furloughs and budget cuts,” Hurtado, pictured at left, told Legal Pad this afternoon.

So she'll start by thinking small ...

Lawrence Lab Employee Suit Has No Class

More than 100 employees laid off last year from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory sued the lab’s ownership on Thursday for age discrimination and other claims.

The Lab laid off around 440 people in May 2008, and 130 of them have joined the suit, according to a press release sent out by Oakland-based Gwilliam, Ivary, Chiosso, Cavalli & Brewer, the law firm representing the plaintiffs.

The firm filed one suit (.pdf) on behalf of all 130 former employees, rather than a class action, according to the press release. Randall Strauss, an associate at the firm, said that will allow each ex-employee to make individual claims based on their emotional distress, salary, and other factors.

The Patience It Takes To Be a Plaintiff Lawyer (Assuming You Want to Get Paid)

Never lose faith, oh lawyers for whom contingencies are both bread and butter: It only took about eight years or so, but the San Francisco Housing Authority is finally, finally paying up for some verdicts it lost in the earliest part of this decade. Which means some local lawyers and, of course, their clients, are finally, finally getting paid the ga-millions they've been owed for, oh, years now.

A whole passel of judges and justices coming down on the SFHA hadn't done the trick last we knew, so what finally did? After the jump ...

State Bar Wants to Push Unions Around

Giving up a federal holiday, cutting back on comp time and agreeing to take half the salary increase expected isn’t an easy thing to do.

But union reps for the State Bar’s two bargaining units — one for attorneys and the other for regular employees — did just that. And it still wasn’t good enough for the State Bar Board of Governors, even though both sides have been in a standoff, and without a labor agreement, since Dec. 31.

Earlier today, the board, meeting in San Francisco, unanimously rejected the union’s “bottom line” demand and sent State Bar management back to fight for more concessions. How many and what kind wasn’t made clear.

State Bar governor Laura Chick, who’s the controller of Los Angeles, expressed “great concern” about the economy and increases in “salary overhead.”

Governor James Aguirre, a lawyer with Los Angeles’ Richardson & Fair, added that the board is “very aware of the shifting landscape.”

Conservatives Can't Muster Votes on Privacy Case

Every so often a case comes along that splits the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals almost perfectly along ideological lines. Such a case came today, as arguably the court's seven most conservative judges clamored to rehear a notable workplace privacy case to no avail.

Judges Sandra Ikuta, Diarmuid O'Scannlain, Andrew Kleinfeld, Richard Tallman, Consuelo Callahan, Carlos Bea and N. Randy Smith dissented from the denial of en banc review (.pdf) in Quon v. Arch Wireless, in which a Southern California police department snooped through a SWAT team officer's text messages.

Pointed remarks, after the jump.