Don’t miss this Matt Tolson/Houston Chronicle investigative piece on the cooperation between several Houston plaintiff’s attorneys — including prominently John O’Quinn — regarding the prosecution of dubious silicosis and asbestos claims, sometimes based on the same plaintiff (see related earlier post here). This part of the article is particularly interesting:

From the moment in late 2004 that silicosis litigation began to unravel under [U.S. District Judge Janis] Jack’s scrutiny, [former O’Quinn partner Richard] Laminack has denied any wrongdoing. The O’Quinn firm did not do asbestos work, he said, so it should not be lumped in with other firms who recycled their old clients, a practice that Jack saw as presumptive evidence of fraud.
“We never, never represented an asbestos claimant and then turned around and retreaded it as a silicosis claimant,” Laminack told the judge, an assertion he repeated to the congressional committee. “We never, ever did that.”

Continue reading →

Turns out that former Texas Southern University president Priscilla Slade’s decision to teach accounting at the school — while under indictment for accounting irregularities — was not a good idea. The school announced yesterday that Ms. Slade has been put on leave from her teaching duties and that a proceeding is being commenced to attempt to revoke her tenure at the school. The proceeding to revoke tenure will almost certainly be postponed pending disposition of the criminal charges against Ms. Slade.
Meanwhile, up in always-interesting Austin, University of Texas law professor Loftus Carson‘s lawsuit against the University of Texas and related parties hasn’t received much publicity. However, that all changed when Professor Loftus filed a motion to recuse U.S. District Judge Sam Sparks from his case after the Austin American-Statesman listed Judge Sparks as one of 30 judges who have received complementary Longhorn football tickets and attended exclusive receptions while at UT football games. Judge Sparks recused himself from Professor Loftus’ case yesterday and appointed a judge who is not a Longhorns fan (a rare jurist in Austin) to handle the case. I mean, what else could Judge Sparks have done given that the no. 2 Longhorns are playing no. 1 Ohio State on Saturday night in Austin?
By the way, the Statesman article on the Loftus case reports that Judge Sparks observed during the recusal hearing that he considered the tickets and receptions “a small favor” from UT for the time that he serves on panels at the UT Law School. Longhorn football tickets “a small favor?” Judge Sparks has obviously not purchased any UT football tickets lately. ;^)

As noted earlier here, the occasional bad day that Merck experienced recently in regard to a couple of its Vioxx cases is inevitable when defending tens of thousands of such cases.
However, it’s also inevitable that Merck will experience some good days during the Vioxx trial marathon. One of those occurred yesterday as the federal judge in the recent New Orleans trial that concluded with a $51 million jury verdict against Merck threw out the verdict on the basis that the jury’s award was clearly excessive.
Meanwhile, according to this Heather Won Tesoriero/WSJ ($) article, a juror involved in awarding a plaintiff a $32 million verdict against Merck in a Vioxx trial that took place earlier this year in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley had borrowed money from the plaintiff prior to the trial, a small detail that the juror did not disclose during pre-trial questioning. As noted in this prior post, the Rio Grande Valley was rated by the American Tort Reform Association as the number one “judicial hell-hole” for 2005. The ATRA describes a judicial hell-hole as a venue of “disproportionately harmful impact on civil litigation. Litigation tourists, guided by their personal injury lawyers, seek out these places because they know they will produce a positive outcome – an excessive verdict or settlement, a favorable precedent, or both.”
Looks to me as if Merck needs to compare notes with Ford Motor Company over this one.

One of the biggest deterrents to free-market investment in state-controlled economies such as China or Russia is consistent application of the rule of law, and few rules of law are more important to an investment decision than those that bear on the risk of insolvency. So, the news that a long-awaited amendment to China’s bankruptcy laws was approved by a powerful government committee and is scheduled to go into effect on June 1, 2007 is an important milestone in the Chinese government’s continuing — but sometimes ineffectual — attempts to attract greater foreign investment capital in China’s economy. A key provision in the new law introduces a mechanism for corporate reorganizations, something that has been alien to the Chinese Communist legal system, but a concept that has preserved massive amounts of employment and going concern value in the U.S. and other Western market-based legal systems.
Investment of foreign capital in China has traditionally been high risk, but the new bankruptcy law reflects that the Chinese government is serious about passing reforms that addresses that risk. Compare that to Russia, where investors still face daunting risk in an economy controlled by a volatile combination of government officials and oligarchs.
By the way, I hope the amendment to the Chinese bankruptcy law corrects this type of problem that arose under the old law. In the meantime, the Chinese government is also attempting to reform the market for funeral attendees in that country.