Daily Archives: March 14, 2005

Getting a bit chippy during a deposition in Texas

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The following is a lively exchange at the end of a recent deposition in a Texas civil case:

Lawyer 1: “Mr. Lawyer 2, if you ever imply that I manufactured testimony again, I’ll fucking kick your ass. I’ll do it right here in front of all these attorneys, okay? Because we’re off the record. Did you hear what I said?”
Lawyer 2: [To the Court reporter] “Did you get that on the record?”
Lawyer 1: “No, it’s not on the record. I said ‘we’re off the record, end of deposition.'”
The Reporter: “You have to agree, per the Rules. I mean, that’s just my — I’m sorry.”
Lawyer 1: “That’s fine. Whatever.”

Here is the motion for sanctions resulting from this exchange.
Key litigation tip for Texas lawyers — don’t threaten to kick your opposing counsel’s ass during a deposition. However, if you do, it’s generally better to do so off the record. ;^)
Hat tip to Evan Schaeffer for the link to this instructive deposition exchange.

Breakfast of Champions at Texas Tech

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This press release from the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Texas reports on the fraud conviction of Aaron Shelley, the former “sports nutritionist” at Texas Tech University.
Turns out that Mr. Shelley had set up a scam operation to line his pockets in connection with obtaining nutritional supplements for the Texas Tech football team and eventually for other Texas Tech athletes. The press release states as follows:

Shelley conspired to and carried out two schemes to defraud Texas Tech University by over-billing the athletic department for nutritional supplements provided to athletes. The first scheme involved Shelley receiving kickback payments from Muscle Tech of Lubbock, a nutritional supplement store located in Lubbock, Texas. The later scheme involved Shelley over-billing through a “shell” corporation, Performance Edge, Inc. The fraudulent, over-billed amounts from both schemes totaled $497,145.19.

“Overbilled” by half a million bucks on “nutritional supplements?” No wonder those Tech receivers have looked so fast over the past several seasons. ;^)
Mr. Shelley received a sentence of 33 months in the slammer for the scheme. Hat tip to the White Collar Crime Prof for the link to the press release.

Refining ideas on health care finance

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David Cutler is a Harvard economist who was involved in the failed Clinton Administration initiative in the early 1990’s to reform America’s health care finance system. This NY Times Sunday Magazine article examines Professor Cutler’s evolving views on health care finance reform, and a number of them are quite interesting:

Cutler’s approach is radically different. He says that most health-care spending is actually good. Spending has been rising, he says, because it delivers positive, and measurable, economic value, and because it can do more things that Americans want. Therefore, Cutler says, we should focus on improving the quality of care rather than on reducing our consumption of it. Rather than pay less, he wants to pay more wisely — to encourage health-care providers to do more of what they should and less of what is wasteful.

A tweedy, self-effacing 39-year-old, Cutler is a seriously modified lefty. He envisions a system in which everyone could get insurance while free-market incentives would motivate health-care providers to be more effective as well as more efficient. Instead of suppressing the market by rationing care, restraining prices or regulating doctors, he wants to liberate it. It is neither Clinton nor Bush — but closer to Bill Bradley, whose 2000 campaign Cutler advised.

To make coverage universal, Cutler advocates a $6,000 credit for poor families (and less, on a sliding scale, for others, tapering off to a small credit for people earning $50,000 and up). The credits would be redeemable as a sort of health-insurance voucher. Significantly, Cutler would extend credits to everyone — even to people who are covered now. Many employers, for competitive reasons, would still offer coverage, but access to care would no longer depend on either employment status or age.

The problem is that most health care finance policy wonks believe that health care spending is “out of control” and, thus, Professor Cutler’s approach would make that spiral worse. However, the wonk solution — a single payor government system — simply creates even worse problems. Professor Cutler’s focus on the qualitative side of the problems is refreshing and merits serious consideration.
Finally, note that Professor Cutler’s ideas are similar in several ways to the ideas addressed in this previous post on business theorist Michael Porter‘s views on reforming the health care finance system.

CEO news

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After a couple of years of shareholder unrest over the direction of the Walt Disney Co., the company’s board yesterday named veteran Disney insider Robert Iger to replace Michael Eisner as the company’s CEO. Mr. Iger was Mr. Eisner’s choice to to succeed him. Here are the previous posts over the past year on the turmoil at Disney.
The theory behind the appointment of Mr. Iger is that he is best suited of all the candidates to continue Disney’s recent financial success because of his experience with the inner workings of the unique Disney culture. On the other hand, some Disney board members are still smarting over the choice of Mr. Iger over over outsider Meg Whitman, the eBay Inc. CEO who interviewed for the job a week ago but almost immediately withdrew her name from consideration because she felt the Disney board favored Mr. Iger.
Consequently, Mr. Iger’s selection is unlikely to bring immediate peace to the fractured Disney boardroom, in which dissident board members Roy E. Disney and Stanley Gold have already criticized Mr. Iger’s selection as being a sham orchestrated by by Disney Chairman George Mitchell.
Meanwhile, Eliot Spitzer is about to carve another notch in his belt as this NY Times article reports that Maurice R. “Hank” Greenberg, who turned American International Group Inc. into a financial services industry giant over the past generation, is planning to step down as chief executive amidst concern on the company’s board over investigations into certain of the company’s structured finance transactions with a Berkshire Hathaway insurance unit. Here is an earlier post on Mr. Spitzer’s investigation into AIG’s practices.
Mr. Greenberg’s imminent departure from AIG is a stunning reversal for the New York-based financial-services titan. Mr. Greenberg is one of America’s most successful CEO’s, and has personally transformed AIG over the past 40 years from an obscure property-casualty insurer into one of the world’s largest financial-services companies. Its market capitalization of almost $170 billion makes it one of the world’s most valuable companies, and Mr. Greenberg is one of the company’s largest individual shareholders.
Finally, President Bush on Friday picked John Hopkins University physicist Michael Griffin to lead the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to replace Sean O’Keefe, who left NASA earlier this year after three years in the top job to become chancellor of Louisiana State University. Dr. Griffin will become the space agency’s 11th administrator.
For the past year, Dr. Griffin has headed the space department at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md. It is the lab’s second-largest department and specializes in projects for both NASA and the military. Dr. Griffin has a fairly incredible academic background, which includes a Ph.D. in aerospace engineering and five master’s degrees — aerospace science, electrical engineering, applied physics, civil engineering and business administration. Before taking over the space department at Johns Hopkins, Dr. Griffin was president and chief operating officer of In-Q-Tel, a CIA-bankrolled venture-capital organization and, earlier in his career, Dr. Griffin worked at NASA as chief engineer and as deputy for technology at the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization.
Last year, Dr. Griffin was a part of a team of experts who recommended that NASA retire the space shuttle by 2010, send astronauts back to the moon by 2020, and then mounting human expeditions to Mars and beyond. The report recommended retiring the space shuttle in order to accelerate work on a spaceship that could carry astronauts to the international space station and ultimately to the moon.