A Glut of Lawyers

 According to recent news articles, the attorney profession has been going through some very tough employment times in recent years.   According to a story on Marketplace.org, the horrid economy forced much of the class of 2009 to delay starting at a desired law firm or had to start at much lower salaries than expected.   Now that the class of 2010 is hitting the job market, the hiring situation is still pretty dicey.   Why do so many people continue to attend law school?   My unscientific reason is that some attorneys still make obscene salaries, thereby encouraging more young people to seek their place on the gravy train.

One of the sources of some of the "obscene salaries" are class action lawsuits.   It seems to me (a non-attorney) that many of these lawsuits are cooked up by law firms to basically extort money from corporations or groups of corporations.   Now, I'm no apologist for corporate America, but many of these lawsuits seem to be just blatant efforts to line the pockets of law firms.   One recent example is a case in Northern California that accused several technology firms of essentially colluding to inflate the cost of random access memory (RAM) in computers.  According to an announcement by Rust Consulting, a settlement has been reached with Hitachi, Mitsubishi, and Toshiba Corporations, which totals $27,850,000,  

If you directly purchased DRAM in the United States during the period of April 1, 1999 through June 30, 2002 from any of these defendants, you may be a member of the Settlement Class.

This lawsuit has been flopping around in the Federal courts for several years already, and I became aware of it because someone believed I was a purchaser of DRAM and sent me an email.   That, presumably, is based on someone's sales records.  To pursue a claim under these settlements, an individual has to file a claim, and what set off alarm bells for me is that part of that claim form includes a listing of how much you spent on DRAM from each of the companies involved.   While you don't have to submit any documentation at this time, the form does ask you to certify you have documentation and can submit it later "if requested."
 

Now I don't know about you, but I have difficulty remembering what I had for dinner two days ago, least of all remembering who I may have bought DRAM from between 8 and 11 years ago and how much I spent.   I question whether any significant number of individuals will have documentation of such purchases so long ago.  

What's the point?   The point may be that hardly any of this $27 million settlement will find its way into the pockets of consumers; I suspect that the vast majority of it will simply be collected by the consultants and law firms pursuing the class action complaint.  If I am not willing to certify under penalty of perjury that I can document how much I spent on DRAM from one or more of these three corporations, I'm essentially out of luck sharing part of that $27 million.  I suppose that a corporate entity (a computer manufacturer or parts reseller?) would have plenty of documents regarding purchases over an extended period of time, but I'm not comfortable with a court accepting a class that includes corporations and individuals equally.  And I'm just speculating that such a mix is involved in this case. 

This is only one of the class action "settlements" I've read about recently.   Evidence that class action lawsuits are a burgeoning industry, is that there are "consultants" who specialize in "class action notification and settlement administration."  The lure of riches like this is enough to fill more than a few seats in the next class at law school.

   

The Other >#$% Meat

Mark this one down as goofy story of the month.   There is a web site called "ThinkGeek.com" which sells a variety of well, geeky stuff like Star Wars Blueprints and a cool "Pirates on Toast Jolly Roger Toast Stamp."  Recently, they received a "cease and desist" order from the National Pork Board because ThinkGeek had posted an April Fools advertisement for Canned Unicorn Meat.   Unfortunately for ThinkGeek.com, they described the imaginary food item as "The Other White Meat" a trademark held by the NPB.  Suffice it to say, the NPB employed a full suite of lawyers to craft a 12 page letter demanding ThinkGeek "cease and desist" from infringing upon the NPB's trademark and confusing consumers as to which "white meat" was "the other white meat."

You can read the entire sordid tale here including the offending advertisement.   The entire story would be quite funny if it weren't for the fact that there apparently is at least one staff of lawyers who have no sense of humor and don't know that unicorns are imaginary.   Not to mention missing the class in law school on protected use as parody under copyright and trademark law.

A Good Argument for Tort Reform

I still have an old AOL email address and recently received this notice about a proposed settlement of a class action lawsuit. It seems that another group of California lawyers have found themselves a $250K gravy train.

This lawsuit is about the fact that AOL tacked advertisements at the bottom of emails (footers) that AOL subscribers sent out. Seems to have been a fairly common occurrence with free email accounts from a lot of providers for many years, so it's beyond me as to why this "class" of AOL subscribers has anything to complain about. If approved, the settlement will result in AOL telling users they can "opt out" of the promotional footers, about $100K in donations to some "charities," and $250K for the lawyers. What's wrong with this picture?

We seem to have too many lawyers that don't have enough productive work to keep them occupied.