An excerpt:

“New York’s “Scaffold Law” remains the last in the nation, a relic of bygone days and an unsightly monument to the state legislature’s inability to put policy ahead of politics.

First enacted in the late 19th century, the Scaffold Law propagated a dramatic and unprecedented shift in construction safety. The law forced upon property owners and contractors the full responsibility to provide adequate safety equipment for employees working at height. But over the years, intervening factors lessened the law’s usefulness to the point of obsolescence.”

Read the full article

An excerpt:

“The scaffold law has been on the books in New York since 1885, and it seems as though businesses have been lamenting it ever since. But lately, this obscure law has morphed from a nuisance into a threat—not just to contractors and property owners, but to taxpayers.

The statute, Labor Law 240/241, holds property owners and employers liable for all damages when a worker is injured in a gravity-related accident. This leads to bizarre outcomes. A worker who tumbled from an A-frame ladder that he’d leaned against a wall (rather than opening it as instructed) won $2 million. A town that had a leak inspected was hit with a $30.3 million judgment when the roofer’s worker fell. Only in New York is a worker’s negligence irrelevant, even if his drunkenness or disregard for safety rules led to the injury.”

Read Full Article

To find out more about the effort to reform the Scaffold Law, visit www.scaffoldlaw.org

What’s crazier? Giving away a $460,000 Lamborghini to your contractor or suing a bank for letting you? Now, we all know how tough it is to find a trustworthy contractor, but is the car plus $600,000 a sign of insanity or just thanks for a job well done?

Sad to say, a NY jury and lots of NY court time will likely be brought to bear in order to decide which is crazier. And who’s at the center? The guy giving away the car? Nope. His brother, a lawyer (surprise!) who is suing Bank of America for allowing his allegedly mentally ill brother to give away lots of money and pricey toys including a $72,000 Mercedes Benz and more than $300,000 to virtual strangers. The supposedly sane brother was actually named guardian of the crazy one back in 2010, though in perfectly logical fashion he shifts this responsibility to BOA .

The generous man in question is Jeffrey Horan, 43 of Manhattan, a former Lehman Brothers and UBS Warburg senior vice president. His brother is Lawrence J. Horan, an Albuquerque, New Mexico-based attorney who seems to have been in practice since 2008 following a “successful career” in law enforcement, according to an online profile. His legal specialties include legislative relations, civil litigation, and municipal law, among other things. Suing multi-national banks for questionable reasons is a new one.

Jeff has indeed had a rather colorful run, with involuntary stays at Bellevue Hospital and New York Presbyterian Hospital, according to the suit. Ironically, Larry was given guardianship over Jeff in 2010, as already noted, but in the three years since then, he still blames Bank of America for failing to notice Jeff’s irregular financial practices. Those activities included handing out blank checks to strangers and possibly overpaying his contractor for work on his East 47^th Street apartment.

A sane observer of all these activities would probably agree that Jeff is in need of some supervision. What his specific issues are and who is responsible for his actions is not really in question since his brother is his legal guardian. So the question then is really quite simple. How can you call Jeff crazy when Larry is suing the bank rather than admit to his own failings as his brother’s keeper? Larry says the bank should have done something besides collecting transaction fees on the large accounts. But on the surface, that’s just crazy. Who ever heard of a bank turning down a fee? Talk about nuts. Besides, Bank of America is in the business of banking, not keeping tabs on their customer’s mental status or their activities unless those appear to be of an illegal nature. Giving away expensive foreign cars is still legal in New York.

So now, NY taxpayers get to foot the bill while this family debacle takes place in our court system. If Larry were reasonable, he’d admit to his own lack of competence in his guardianship, and work to help his brother. Instead he’s focused on getting lost money back the old fashioned way: suing for it. He seeking millions from the bank and is even naming two of Jeff’s recipients, Alex Gershkovich, the contractor, and Elizabeth Ortiz as defendants. I guess he really wants the Lamborghini back.

In 1975, Dr. Allen Steere was sent to Connecticut to investigate a strange cluster of children who had developed arthritis. After diligent research, Dr. Steere and his colleagues discovered the disease we now know as Lyme disease also finding that ticks were the cause. By the early 1990s, two major pharmaceutical companies were on track to produce a vaccine for the growing threat, and by the mid-1990s clinical trials were underway. Results showed a whopping 80 percent of test subjects became immune to Lyme disease. So what went wrong? Trial lawyers, the media and public hysteria.

The fully tested vaccine was introduced in 1998, and sold very well until people began to claim they got arthritis from it. Despite NO actual clinical data to support those claims, the public began to believe the claims, and as is too often the case, lawyers got involved and started to put a class action lawsuit together. Anti-vaccine groups were formed, and the scientists involved began to receive threats. Dr. Steere had to hire a security detail things got so out of hand.

To make it clear, the Centers For Disease Control and The Food and Drug Administration looked into the anti-vaccine claims but found nothing and recommended those in tick infested areas get the vaccine. But the damage was done, and SmithKline Beecham pulled the vaccine. Pasteur Mérieux Connaught was working on its own vaccine, but never released it as a result.

So here we are in 2013 only able to offer a Lyme vaccine to animals.  With cases growing every year from 10,000 confirmed in 1995 to at least 30,000 in 2009, there is a renewed push for a human form of the vaccine. “In my opinion, this is a public health fiasco,” said Stanley A. Plotkin, a pediatrician and infectious disease specialist at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. “There are well over 20,000 annual cases of Lyme disease and probably more than that. When else do you have a disease with that incidence where you know you can prevent it with a vaccine, but you don’t make it?”

With that sort of growth (Lyme is now the most common tick-borne disease in the U.S.) and the severity of the disease, it would seem that making a vaccine for people would be a forgone conclusion, but that’s not the case. When deciding when to develop a drug, pharmaceutical companies must weigh profit versus legal risk factors. In Massachusetts, where the disease is very widespread there has been a call for the state to step in since private industry appears unwilling or unable to do so.

At a hearing last summer, of the Massachusetts Lyme Disease Commission, veterinarian Sam Telford suggested the state license GlaxoSmithKline’s FDA-approved vaccine. He suggested that it could be produced at a state lab, but Glaxo has not said if they’d jump on board, no doubt waiting to hear from their lawyers. “We all know that the market has changed,” Dr. Telford said then. “People are fed up! This is a terrible situation we’re in, which means that a vaccine still makes sense.”

“I’m personally aware of individuals, who in desperation have gone to veterinarians and remarkably convinced the veterinarian to inject them with the canine vaccine,” said Dr. Gregory Poland a vaccinologist at the Mayo Clinic

While keeping the Lyme vaccine away from humans may prevent lawsuits against pharmaceutical companies, it hasn’t stopped the lawsuits altogether.  Just this past March, a Connecticut woman won a $41 million lawsuit against her school for contracting Lyme disease while on a school trip to China.  Had the vaccine been available, this woman would likely still have her speech and the lawsuit would have been prevented.

So while lawyers argue over liability and manufacturers worry about class action lawsuits, people – many of them children – are left to suffer if bitten by an infected tick.  It’s hard to tell what’s more harmful, ticks or trial lawyers. They’re both making people sick and keeping them that way.

An excerpt:

“Amid fears that increasing numbers of plaintiffs are “bowling for dollars” through slip-and-fall lawsuits, operators of New York’s bowling alleys hope a legislative proposal will spare them some grief.

Trial lawyers, however, say the bill crosses the foul line when it comes to a person’s right to sue.

…

Word of the proposed legislation was news but not a surprise to Tom Stebbins, executive director of the Lawsuit Reform Alliance of New York, which fights what it characterizes are a plague of frivolous lawsuits. He notes that New York has twice the number of lawyers per capita, about 84 per 10,000 people, than the national average of 40 per 10,000″.

Read Full Article

An excerpt:

“Your May 2 editorial got it right when you called certain check-cashing operations “legal loan sharks.” But there is another form of loan sharking that is legal in New York: lawsuit lending. Proponents call such loans “non-recourse third party litigation financing.” Disguising loans as investments, lenders charge more than 100 percent interest”.

Read More

An excerpt:

“Kudos to the Daily News Editorial Board for rightly identifying payday loans as usury (“Lowest of the loans,” April 30). However, there is another form of predatory loan that Gov. Cuomo & Co. should address if they want to crack down on usury. That is the practice of lawsuit lending. Lawsuit lenders mischaracterize their loans as investments, allowing them to duck usury laws and charge consumers annualized interest rates in excess of 100%”. 

Read More

The economic and social cost of lawsuits are well-known and much discussed, especially here in New York State, where taxpayers are on the hook for over a billion dollars annually for settlements and judgments. This issue was brought into very sharp focus recently during a contentious city council meeting in Troy, NY.

The problem arose when the council voted 6-2 to settle a lawsuit for $15,000 that a resident had filed against the city. The plaintiff, one Ronald Nicholas, drove a golf cart down a fairway slope on the city’s Frear Park Golf Course in a botched effort to retrieve his ball. In his haste, he managed to flip the cart several times ejecting his passenger, who was unharmed, and injuring himself. According to published reports, Nicholas was trapped inside the cart and tore his left rotator cuff, requiring surgery. His claim was that there were no signs suggesting it was a bad idea to drive a golf cart down a steep hill on a fairway and thus, he wasn’t at fault.

As least one city council member disagreed and voted against the settlement, which was recommended by the city’s corporation council. “He was either drunk and stupid or just stupid and I’m not going to give a man $15,000 for that,” Councilman Kevin McGrath said. One of McGrath’s cohorts on the council, Bob Doherty didn’t agree, suggesting that commenting on Nicholas’ intelligence wasn’t appropriate.

Cases like this play out with alarming frequency in town halls and county legislatures across the state – claims that are technically meritorious (as defined by the law), yet utterly ridiculous. Liability may not be certain, but the settlement amount is carefully calculated to be just a tiny bit less than the city would pay to fight the case. The rational, risk-averse, town manager or city council cuts a check, and the plaintiff and his lawyer split the spoils. “Justice” is served, but are residents better off?

Is this the best way to resolve cases?  Recently, the New York Times reported that New York City is taking a different tack and fighting more of these suits. Along with other large cities, they are now instructing their attorneys to aggressively fight nuisance suits in order to send a message to the plaintiff’s bar. This approach, while costly initially, worked well for Chicago, which saw a dramatic decrease in litigation.

On the extreme opposite end of the spectrum, Yuba City, CA recently paid a “serial plaintiff” $15,000 to stop filing frivolous lawsuits. Will this approach pay off for the taxpayers? Somehow, that seems unlikely.

As taxpayers, we’re all footing the bill for these lawsuits. Troy will undoubtedly be putting warning signs on the golf course to avoid future cart-related issues. Of course, don’t be surprised when someone sues when they run into the warning signs.

An Excerpt:

“The New York City Council’s recent enactment of a law to allow rejected job applicants to sue for alleged discrimination based on employment status (“Lawsuits feared from new unemployment law,” March 14) will do more harm than good. In aiming to protect the jobless, this new law will actually make it more difficult to find a job.

Faced with the threat of litigation, many companies will simply hire fewer people or seek to fill positions internally. For small businesses on a tight budget, the threat of litigation will have a significant impact on hiring and will compromise their ability to grow.”

Read Full Letter