SBM Blog

"Trusty Catherine" and Other Enticing Legal Tidbits Concerning the Royal Wedding

Our earlier Royal Wedding post was distinctly tongue-in-cheek, but for readers who take these matters seriously we have found a legitimately informative post about the legalities of the royal wedding at Et Seq, the Harvard Law Library's blog.  Here it is: Royal Wedding, Pomp, Circumstance, and Law. 

For the "Trusty Catherine" proclamation, see below the jump.

The Royal Wedding: Above The Law's Legal Look

Blogs everywhere are tieing themselves in nuptial knots figuring out how the Royal Wedding relates to their content. Above the Law outdoes leading legal blogs with a three-part series, The Royal Wedding: A Legal Look.  In our view, the best part of their coverage is this observation about the accent of a U.S. lawyer working in London -- that it is "that weird Madonna accent Yanks acquire when they’ve been in London too long."  Good to know that Michigan natives continue to be trend-setters, even as ex-pats.

Our own Royal Wedding-legal thought-moment happened this morning when switching to Sirius's 60's music channel to avoid Royal Wedding overload, just in time to catch a caller to the program say, "Hey, yeah, I'm just sitting here watching what's-their-names goin' to the palace."  My condolences to all you trial lawyers on your ongoing struggle to get jurors to pay attention.

Illinois Hearing Board Recommends Suspension of Lawyer for Failure to Pay Loans

An Illinois hearing board found a lawyer's explanation for why he failed to make payments on his student loans "not credible" and recommended a six-month suspension, until further order:

The uncontroverted evidence established that Respondent applied for and received education loans in the amount of $78,483 in 2005 to assist him in payment of the costs of obtaining his graduate business degree. It is also undisputed that Respondent’s loans became due in October 2006, that he failed to make any payments at that time, that in August 2007 he asked for and received an administrative forbearance from December 2006 to December 2007, and that since his forbearance ended Respondent has only made one voluntary payment on the loans. The evidence further established that Respondent was employed at DLA Piper from April 2007 until February 2009 and that he received severance pay until May 2009. Respondent’s starting annual salary at DLA Piper was $190,000 and was increased during the time he worked there. Respondent had the means to repay his loans while he was working at DLA Piper and chose not to fulfill his obligation. Accordingly, we find the evidence clearly establishes that Respondent avoided the repayment of his student loans in bad faith in violation of Rule 8.4(a)(8).

Homeowners Insurance: The Not So Fine Print

It's not often that a law review article has such obvious practical, down-to-earth information that its substance migrates to the mainstream media even before publication, but that's what's happened with University of Minnesota law professor Daniel Schwarcz's article "Reevaluating Standardized Insurance Policies."  Soon to be published in the University of Chicago Law Review, the article says that despite widespread consumer presumptions that homeowner insurance policies are basically all alike, what were once standardized provisions have evolved into a plethora of significant deviations.  According to Schwarcz the deviations, which mostly decrease the amount of coverage relative to the presumptive industry standard, are so widespread that even informed and vigilant consumers are unable to comparison shop among carriers on the basis of differences in coverage.  He calls for state insurance commissioners to help make the contracts more transparent, and according to a story in the New York Times, has gotten some traction with the National Association of Insurance Commissioners.

Here's a preview of the article. (PDF)

More on the Fate of Consumer Class Actions

While consumer advocates are wringing their hands over the possible demise of consumer class actions in the wake of this week's U.S. Supreme Court decision AT&T Mobility v Concepcion, which upheld clauses  clauses that require individual arbitration in consumer disputes, banks are worried that the business community's victory in the case could be undone by a provision in the Dodd-Frank Act that allows the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) to revisit the issue and potentially decide to limit arbitration agreements in the future.  "I think consumer advocates will certainly turn to the CFPB in the wake of the ruling," Jo Ann Barefoot, a co-chair with Treliant Risk Advisers and a former deputy comptroller at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, told the American Banker.  Barefoot  said the CFPB has substantial leeway under the regulatory reform law. "Mandatory arbitration has been a top complaint of consumer groups for years," she said,  "and they clearly hope the bureau will curtail or regulate the practice."

Help With Cleaning Up Your Act

Lovers of fine, clear writing should not miss the New Yorker's Ideas We Like: Corporate-Jargon-to-English Dictionary.  Its standards are daunting.  (I confess to wincing at this one:  "Beware anyone who calls a “problem” an “issue.”)

Collateral Consequences of White Collar Crime?

WSJ Law Blog spots a new development of interest to white collar criminal defense lawyers -- use of an obscure Social Security Act administrative policy that allows federal officials to bar corporate leaders of health-industry companies found guilty of criminal misconduct from doing business with the government. The case highlighted in this WSJ story (subs. req'd) is a ban against the CEO of Forest Labs, maker of Celexa and Lexapro, which agreed to pay $313M in criminal and civil penalties last fall over sales-related misconduct.  The CEO, Howard Solomon, was not accused of any misconduct. According to the story, lawyers not involved in the case said the attempt to punish an executive who wasn’t accused of misconduct "could tie up the industry’s day-to-day work in legal knots."

Too Many Law Students in England, Too

A serious and growing mismatch between the number of legal jobs and the number of law students isn't just a U.S. problem.  In an op-ed piece in The Lawyer, Dr. Alexis Massey, the managing director of an English law firm, calls his country's "oversupply" of law grads "unethical."

The numbers are alarming. In 2009-10 around 20,000 students were accepted on courses to study law as a first degree combined with more than 15,000 LPC places. At the same time there were fewer than 4,900 new traineeships, a number that declined by 16.1 per cent compared with the previous year.

A rough calculation demonstrates that the chances of an undergraduate law ­student getting a training contact are around one in four and a postgraduate LPC student around one in three.

The cost of a legal education in England isn't cheap, either -- the minimum cost is more than $83,000, not including living expenses.  The piece points out that new English laws designed to restructure legal services are likely to compound the problems for new grads.

A Lawyer's Role: The Obama Birth Certificate (Long Form)

Okay, so you're President of the United States and you decide that you want to ask the Department of Health in your birth state to make an exception to their rule of providing only short-form birth certificates.  What do you do?  Ask your personal lawyer to act on your behalf, of course.  Perkins Coie counsel Judith Corley made the inquiry upon the President's authorization, and then traveled to Hawaii to pick up two copies of the certificate.  The National Law Journal has the story. 

U.S. Supreme Court Decision Today May Be Death Knell for Consumer Class Actions

The decision in AT&T Mobility v Concepcion has been widely anticipated for what it might portend for consumer class actions, and the decision is in -- 5-4 in favor of the enforcement of clauses that require individual arbitration in consumer disputes.  When the Supreme Court granted cert there was widespread speculation that the decision in the case would signal the end of the consumer class action era, but oral argument gave some consumer advocates reason to hope that the Court might favor state law choices over arbitration provisions. See "Most Important Consumer Case in Decades" Argued Yesterday Before Supreme Court.  (SBM Blog readers responding to a poll on the case thought the decision would go the other way, and overwhelmingly preferred that outcome.)  In the hours and days ahead there should be a good deal of analysis of the decision (PDF) and SBM Blog will flag it. In the meantime, this short pre-decision commentary on the issue from George Washington law professor Lawrence Cunningham, Supreme Court Arbitration Rhetoric v Reality and AT&T Mobility, is worth a read.