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On Aug. 27, 2004, the Fifth Circuit Court of Davidson County in Nashville, TN entered final judgment for Terminix International in a nine-plaintiff toxic-tort personal injury lawsuit. <i>Ballentine v. Terminix Int'l Co.,</i> No. 98C-836 (Aug. 27, 2004 Order). The case demonstrates the use of a challenge to the admissibility of plaintiffs' causation evidence to dismantle a multi-plaintiff or mini-mass tort claim from a single toxic exposure, and it illustrates the importance to both sides of getting the scientific evidence right from the outset. The approach to a mini-mass tort involving injuries from a single exposure need be no different from that used in a single plaintiff's claim.
Traditionally, courts have been reluctant to consider the use of statistical tools such as sampling to determine damages in class action litigation and other cases involving large groups of plaintiffs. Arguments against the practice include the fact that it seemingly flies in the face of the Seventh Amendment, and that damages, by their very nature, are peculiar and specific to each individual plaintiff.
Environmental insurance has become a core element of corporate risk management programs, which are presently being utilized in commercial real estate transactions, sales of businesses, and to resolve mass tort and product liability litigation. Attorneys should consult with knowledgeable environmental insurance brokers to understand clients' environmental liability exposures. An environmental liability exposure can be related to a product, toxic tort, or cleanup of a hazardous waste site. In situations where there is a known potential environmental exposure, environmental markets assess the costs associated with the known environmental liability and provide insurance above those projected costs. This insurance is called "cost overrun insurance." Environmental policies also insure against the risk of unknown environmental exposures. There are several ways to insure against this liability. For example, environmental policies can include combined coverage for general liability, products, and pollution. In addition, combined finite funding and risk transfer programs have been developed as a risk management strategy to address asbestos, silica, manganese, products liability, toxic tort and other general liability risks.
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After 3 months of talks, Boston-based Ropes & Gray and New York intellectual property firm Fish & Neave have decided to join forces.
Features
Partnerships often provide supplemental retirement benefits to their partners. These plans were established many years ago, and in many cases, do not achieve many of the business objectives for the modern law firm. <br>This article will cover the origins and objectives of these programs and assess their modern day relevance. The article will discuss prominent current objectives a firm might have with respect to retiring partners, identify HR solutions to meet them, and suggest change management strategies to manage their unfunded retirement plans to satisfy both younger and older members of the firm.
Law firms are a natural breeding ground for developing strong, effective leaders. Most often though, when selecting an attorney to assume leadership responsibilities for their practice group, office or as managing partner, the nod goes to the most financially successful attorney who has established a baseline of trust as a knowledge-based expert with clients. Is it any wonder that when these very successful attorneys who are superb at maintaining client relationships by keeping their nose to the grindstone and practicing law without interference from the firm, often stumble when thrown into leadership roles where expectations dramatically shift to the care and feeding of others within the firm?
For the industry as a whole, the economic performance of law firms in 2004 was quite good. Indeed, given the overall state of the national economy and the dire early predictions of some pundits, the performance of the industry was remarkable. Much of this positive performance was, of course, attributable to the continuing strength of litigation practices as well as, to a lesser extent, bankruptcy and reorganization activity.
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Increasingly, expert witnesses' opinions are subject to the scrutiny of the professional organizations to which they belong. This scrutiny can act as a check on their proffered expert testimony. The requirements of admissibility of expert opinion at trial have long been subject to the requirements of <i>Daubert v. Merrill Dow Pharmaceutical Inc.</i>, 509 U.S. 579 (1993), and after admission, the opinions are often second-guessed by an unhappy client in a subsequent lawsuit, as in LLMD of <i>Michigan v. Jackson-Cross Co.</i>, 740 A.2d 186 (Pa. 1999). Now we're finding that the further review of these same opinions by the expert's own specialty professional organization is being used increasingly as a new strategy of attack by the expert's unhappy opponents.
