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In The News
Here are news articles
about some of the cases I've handled. They are grouped
to give you the story of how these cases developed.
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| I. |
A
law firm uses the trust of the attorney-client
relationship to convince its clients to invest
in a company run by the lawyers. |
Lampf Lipkind was a law firm that
specialized in representing pension plans. Some
members of the firm decided to go into business
and they started a surety bonding company. The lawyers
then began to raise millions of dollars for that
company; a primary source for the money was the
law firm's clients , including Marprowear,
Inc. The lawyers told Marprowear that they would
run the business as carefully and well as they had
handled Marprowear's legal work. But, the lawyers
were not good businessmen and the company soon was
bankrupt; Marprowear's investment was lost completely.
This case started when the law firm sued Marprowear,
Inc. for legal fees of $4,400. We filed a counterclaim
for legal malpractice. We claimed that a lawyer
should not burrow into the client's confidence and
then use that trust to get the client to make an
investment. You can read what happened next:
Verdict
Against Lampf, Lipkind in SIG Aft ,
New Jersey Law Journal, April 12, 1993
The law firm refused to pay the
judgment. Eventually, we had to take action to collect.
Self-Insurance
Has Its Risks , New Jersey Law Journal,
April 26, 1993
When the Writ of Execution did
not get the firm to pay, we moved to have a receiver
appointed to manage the firm. The case was settled
soon after this.
Lampf,
Lipkind Facing Receivership , New Jersey
Law Journal, June 21, 1993
| II. |
A
large Newark law firm may have blown the statute
of limitations on a $9,000,000 claim; and its
partner and former judge may have failed to
find and fix the error. |
Licette, Inc. was entitled to
royalties from the sales of certain music and children's
books, including Golden Books and Records. Its license
holder cheated it of more than $9,000,000 and in
1992 Licette won a judgment in that amount in New
York . Sills Cummis was hired to turn the New York
judgment into a New Jersey judgment and to collect
it. The lawyers at Sills Cummis may have missed
a statute of limitations. After that, Licette hired
a new lawyer, Andrew Napolitano, to try to salvage
the collection case. Napolitano is well- known as
a Fox TV commentator, and writer/lecturer on the
law to the bar and to the judiciary. This case involves
claims that Napolitano made additional mistakes
and failed to correct the mistakes made by Sills
Cummis. It is pending.
His
Turn as Litigant , New Jersey Law Journal,
July 30, 2001
And in a strange twist, less than
2 years after he was hired by Licette, Napolitano
joined Sills Cummis as a partner and continued working
on the case there. Sills Cummis now claims that
it is not liable, in part, because Napolitano, its
partner, is the one who is liable. This case contains
many claims of conflict of interest.
NJ
Appeal Tests Liability of Firms when Contract Partners
are Sued , New Jersey Journal, February 16,
2004
| III. |
A lawyer
refuses to start a trial, even when the judge
tells him to do so. |
A lawyer, Stephen Roth, was not
ready for the divorce trial of his client, Barbara
Crews. The court refused an adjournment request
made by Roth. Rather than begin the trial, Roth
walked out, left in protest. He later claimed that
several lawyers, including a retired Supreme Court
justice, had advised him that this was a sensible
reaction to the judge's demand that trial begin.
We decided to find out if this was so. There was
understandable grousing by lawyers that they did
not want to be deposed for giving casual advice
to other lawyers. Still, we had to know if a former
Justice of the Supreme Court had blessed the walk
out, had said that a lawyer could ever just walk
out. The article describes the controversy.
Paying
the Price for Giving Free Advice , New
Jersey Law Journal, April 6, 1998
The
case took some unusual turns:
Thanks,
but No Thanks , New Jersey Law Journal,
December 16, 2002
But the case worked out quite
well for Mrs. Crews. She received so much money
that her husband is now back in the divorce court
trying to get out from under his alimony obligation.
Crews
v. Crews Divorce May Set More Precedent,
New Jersey Law Journal, March 22, 2004
| IV. |
After
a big trial win, a top personal injury attorney
takes his fee and some of his client's money,
too. |
Jim Carney was a talented trial
attorney who had won many large verdicts for badly-injured
people. He was sometimes careless. Worse, he sometimes
took from his clients out of his trust account far
more money than his fee agreement allowed. There
are ethics rules that govern legal fees and trust
accounts and there is the Office of Attorney Ethics
which is charged with enforcement. Sometimes the
rules are not enforced in a timely way and a complaint
is in order.
Where
Are the Ethics Cops? , New Jersey Law Journal,
February 5, 1996
Three months after that complaint,
there was still no action taken. In order to protect
my client who might not be able to recover the money
taken, we got a judge to appoint a trustee to supervise
Carney's trust account.
Judge
Appoints Monitor to Supervise Embattled Lawyer's
Trust Account , New Jersey Law Journal,
May 20, 1996
| V. |
A
plastic surgeon rewrites medical records after
his patient has an embolism. |
Dr. Charles Servidio performed
a breast reconstruction on a post-mastectomy patient.
After surgery she had an embolism which had to be
treated with blood thinners. This treatment caused
the reconstruction to fail horribly. Dr. Servidio
claimed that he had warned his patient multiple
times about the risk of an embolism and what would
result from treatment of it. He also claims to have
told her many times that her risk of an embolism
was extremely high because she was a smoker. The
medical records he produced show that he warned
her about this at least 13 times. His patient said
that he never once mentioned the possibility of
an embolism nor, obviously, did he ever tell her
that she was at high risk. We were able to prove
that the medical records were not genuine, were
rewritten by Dr. Servidio 2 years after the surgical
catastrophe. Once we proved that, Servidio's lawyer
asked to be let out of his agreement to represent
him. We then got the deposition of that lawyer and
asked him what Servidio had said to him. Normally
attorney client privilege would bar this but we
proved that the records were part of a fraud on
the court, on the patient, on us all.
A
Not-So-Privileged Attorney-Client Communication
, New Jersey Law Journal, July 11, 1994
The more we learned of the record
rewriting, the more we were convinced that others
beside Dr. Servidio may have known of the records
being rewritten. We included those others in our
lawsuit.
Rewritten
Medical Records Prompt RICO Claim , New
Jersey Law Journal, August 26, 1994
| VI. |
The
New Jersey Division of Civil Rights did its
work so slowly and ineptly -- sometimes 10 years
would pass before a case was finished -- that
cases of racial discrimination were dismissed
for being "stale." If a lawyer did that, he'd
be sued for malpractice. |
That was the theory behind this
case. Nolan Reaves and Joe Lee had trusted to the
NJDCR their racial discrimination case against their
employer, Goodyear Tire Company. The NJDCR promised
to investigate their claims promptly and, if it
could be proven, to file charges against Goodyear.
But the NJDCR lost track of its file for years at
a time. To understand just how bad this was, NJDCR
spent 3 years trying to find Lee and Reaves; but
they were still working at the same Goodyear location,
with the same co-workers, under the same supervisors.
This was far outside the range of normal so we sued
for malpractice. We knew this was an unusual case.
But we did well at the trial court.
Suing
the State for Malpractice , New Jersey
Law Journal, October 28, 1996
But it appeared that the State
was immune from this lawsuit.
Judge
Dubious on Malpractice Suit Against State Agency
, New Jersey Law Journal, May 5, 1997
| VII. |
After
that, we sued Goodyear directly for Racial Discrimination. |
Ten more black Goodyear warehousemen
joined Reaves and Lee in a discrimination suit
against Goodyear. These 12 described a warehouse
full of racial problems and animosity. Goodyear
denied all of the claims. Soon after the claim
was filed, we received evidence from two white
supervisors who were no longer in the warehouse,
that the complaints of the black workers were
largely true. The evidence had been received
ex parte, directly from the white supervisors,
not at a deposition or through Goodyear counsel.
I was certain this was appropriate -- and the
only way to get the evidence. The magistrate
disagreed and suppressed the evidence. This
ruling strongly favored corporations keeping
evidence from a jury.
A
Rule a Corporation Could Love, New Jersey
Law Journal, February 22, 1999
The Federal District Judge reversed
the magistrate's ruling and allowed the evidence.
Federal
Judge Eases Restrictions, New Jersey
Law Journal, February 21, 2000
Andrews
v. Goodyear
Eventually, the evidence from the white supervisors
came out in the press.
Goodyear
Bias Charge Backed, News Tribune, July
7, 2000
| VIII. |
Not
legal malpractice -- FNMA offered a hardship
refinance that caused the homeowners to lose
their house. |
Irv Selem had suffered a heart
attack and he and his wife had fallen behind on
their mortgage. FNMA contacted him and, after hearing
about his health, offered a refinance that was supposed
to lower temporarily their monthly mortgage payment.
But many months later, FNMA decided it would not
do what it had offered and that it would also not
allow the old mortgage to be reinstated; it was
now concerned for itself and not Irv that he had
suffered a heart attack. It foreclosed. We sued
FNMA and the banks that serviced the mortgage.
Fannie
May Sued, New Jersey Law Journal,
September 21, 1998
| IX. |
A
big fire at a famous restaurant. |
Thom's was for generations a beloved
restaurant in Newark . It burned down in July 1985.
The insurance company refused to pay; it claimed
Thom Pannullo, the owner, was an arsonist. We knew
otherwise but it took years to prove that.
Thomm's
Owner Gains $1.2 Million Settlement , The
Star-Ledger, March 11, 1994
Click here
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The Law Journal.
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