This is a terrific article by Crowell and Moring’s Paul Haskel on the use of alternative fee arrangements, particularly contingency fee arrangements, by large law firms to supplement the revenue generated by traditional billable hour defense work. The author makes three points: first, that large firms have been doing this for years but it is
I like to call my shots when I can. So for instance, I am on record as saying Gunnar Henderson will win an MVP award within five years, the Orioles will win the World Series this year and that neither Bill Belichick nor anyone on his coaching tree will ever win a playoff game now
It is one of my favorite words – spoliation. It just slides right off of a litigator’s tongue. I have been litigating, either as direct claims over destruction of evidence or as an evidentiary inference, the concepts of spoliation for decades. If memory serves, the first time I handled it was defending a direct claim
When I recommended in a recent pair of blog posts that insurers and plan sponsors should make it a universal practice to try excessive fee class actions to conclusion, I wasn’t being flippant. I have probably spent 25,000 hours over the past thirty years advising insurers on when to try cases to conclusion – or
People often ask – well, sometimes ask – why I am still on Twitter, and the answer is it’s for the dog videos. But every now and then you come across something smart that is worth thinking about, and for me that happened today, when I read an appellate lawyer’s tweet that:
FWIW,
On the Fid Guru Blog, Euclid Fiduciary’s Daniel Aronowitz has an excellent deep dive on the question of jury trials in breach of fiduciary duty litigation under ERISA, asking the questions of, first, whether they are really coming and, two, if so, is that a good or a bad thing (his take clearly appears to
So there is an interesting article in Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly on the rise of so-called “nuclear” verdicts in Massachusetts, or in other words, what we used to just call – with much less hyperbole – runaway jury verdicts. (By the way, can we do away with the marketing campaign to label large verdicts nuclear; runaway
Twenty years or so ago, I represented an insurer in a $20 million insurance bad faith and Chapter 93A claim in which one of the key issues was whether the insurer was right to rely on the advice of a terrific lawyer, Tom Burns (the Burns in the Boston firm Burns and Levinson), who had
There is a lot of discussion on whether lawyers should be required to have at least a certain degree of competency with technology as a core skill set, on a par with, for instance, the rules of evidence. Personally, I am not convinced of the need for any formal requirement: technology is so embedded in any efficient provision of legal services to a client and in any interaction with essentially any business client of any size, that simple economics are going to eventually drive to the margins any lawyer who cannot, on a day in, day out basis, engage with technology on an at least marginally competent level. In other words, there is no need to regulate the profession to ensure such competence, as the marketplace for legal services will do it for state bars and any other regulator: slowly but surely, lawyers who are not technologically proficient will be sidelined by the invisible hand of the market, regardless of what any professional licensure group does or does not do with regard to ensuring professional competence in the area of technology.
Continue Reading Uber, Behavioral Economics, Choice Architecture and Trial Work
Honestly, I couldn’t really care one whit about the little locker room stare down between Roger Goodell and Tom Brady. Its just sports. A spinning teacher of mine once looked out at the class the day after a playoff or Super Bowl loss by the Patriots (I forget which) and said, in the middle of