It’s never easy to defend a personal injury case in certain parts of Texas, and Crystal City in Zavala County is one of them.
This San Antonio Express-News article reports on a case in Crystal City (between San Antonio and Eagle Pass) in which a jury last week awarded $28 million to a plaintiff against Ford Motor Co. in a rollover case. In an almost unbelievable development except that this is Zavala County, the trial was interrupted earlier when Ford lawyers discovered that one of the jurors was the girlfriend of one of the plaintiffs’ lawyers. Moreover, in a hearing over a defense motion for a mistrial, Ford presented evidence that the girlfriend — who happens to be the Crystal City city manager (it’s a very small world in Zavala County) — had also solicited two of the plaintiffs for her boyfriend to represent in the case!
Incredibly, the trial judge denied Ford’s motion for a mistrial. So it goes in small town South Texas.
Will the plaintiff’s lawyer’s failure to disclose that the juror was his girlfriend receive a more appropriate response from the State Bar of Texas? Stay tuned.

On the heels of BofA’s settlement earlier in the week, more “courthouse steps” settlements in the WorldCom shareholder class action lawsuit took place on on Friday as four investment banks settled claims arising from their involvement in underwriting bond sales that were based in part on WorldCom’s false financial statements.
Under the latest settlements, Lehman Brothers Inc. settled for $62.7 million and Credit Suisse First Boston, Goldman, Sachs & Co. and UBS Warburg LLC each settled for $12.54 million. All four participated as underwriters in WorldCom’s May 2000 bond offering. Among the 10 institutions that remain in the litigation are JPMorgan Chase & Co. and divisions of Deutsche Bank AG and ABN AMRO Bank.

The “honest idiot” case goes to the jury today.
As an aside, it is always remarkable to me the amount of time that both the prosecution and the defense take in presenting closing arguments in these high profile criminal cases. Although the article on the closing arguments does not disclose the exact amounts of time expended, my sense is that both sides spent hours in front of the jury on closing argument. That is a dubious strategy, and one which tired jurors will often hold against a lawyer and his client. If a lawyer has not persuaded the jurors of the validity of the lawyer’s theory of the case by the time of closing argument, then spending hours on end attempting to drum it into them will more likely alienate the jury than anything else.

One of the only good provisions of the bad Bankruptcy Reform legislation — the anti-forum shopping provision for business bankruptcies — was pulled out of the Senate bill yesterday in what appears to be a political deal between Texas Senator John Cornyn and Delaware Senator Joseph Biden to protect Texas’ liberal homestead exemption law and Delaware’s favored nation status for business bankruptcies.
This proposed legislation is the quintessential example of poorly-concieved special interest legislation. Outside of the credit card industry, there is no meaningful public support for these proposed reforms of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code, which is the preferred model for emerging countries to use in establishing their own insolvency and business reorganization systems. A radical overhaul of such a successful system is not only unnecessary, but unwise.
However, the credit card industry has contributed large amounts of cash to the campaign war chests of many Republican legislators, and the industry is now expecting a return on that investment in the form of this bad legislation. Remember that next time you are considering a vote for either Mr. Cornyn or Kay Bailey Hutchison, both of whom are supporting this abomination despite an extraordinary number of appeals to them from experts and professionals in the insolvency and reorganization field to do the right thing and reject this legislation.

Eight former Afghan and Iraqi prisoners represented by the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights First have filed a federal lawsuit (bugmenot login: “colinsearle” pword: “bristol”) in Illinois seeking unspecified damages against Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for authorizing abuse of prisoners in violation of the U.S. Constitution and international law. The plaintiffs contend that they were never combatants against the U.S. and eventually were released without any charges being filed against them.