The Legal Underground

AT MY TRIAL PRACTICE WEBLOG . . . "Geoffrey Fieger on Jury Selection: Don't Listen to the Answers."

TO HOWARD BASHMAN: I'M OUTRAGED . . . I fell for your silly O'Connor ploy, and followed your links . . . and wished I'd done it myself!

EVEN GREEDY TRIAL LAWYERS LOVE THEIR MOTHERS . . . Congratulations to my mom, Pamela Schaeffer, whose magazine Heart just won a number of 2005 Catholic Press Awards. Heart is published by the nuns of the Society of the Sacred Heart for their constituents in the United States; my mom is the founding editor and chief writer.

My mom's last appearance on this weblog was her guest post, "A Lawyer’s Mother Reports on a Recent Trip to Paris, Concluding that Traveling There Is Not as Difficult as Some Might Think."

OH, NOW I GET IT . . . It's the hearsay rule and its exceptions as explained by Lego creatures. You'll find it all in this short film, popularized by Favorable Dicta and Ambivalent Imbroglio.

THE STANKOWSKI REPORT #7: The Truth About Discovery

by Stan Stankowski

So, I am sitting in my office. Admittedly, I am a bit bored. Quite frankly, discovery disputes have become a large, and unfortunate, part of my life. Don't get me wrong, I do not mean the actual responses, though I do a huge number of those as well.  I mean the pseudo-disputes.

Normally, disputes are entertaining; they give you something to get worked up about.  Somebody did something that makes you feel just a little indignant, even though it is your job and you deal with it everyday. That, at the very least, creates a little motivation. It makes you feel a little righteous anger at least once a day. You would not believe how far a little righteous anger goes when you are bombarded by conference calls, meetings, stupid documents and other somewhat boring tasks.

Not so with discovery. "Why?" you ask. Fine question. In the long run, discovery is as good a thing to get incensed about as anything else.

The main problem is that discovery disputes are so transparently fake. A typical conversation leading up to one will progress as follows:

CAN LARGE LAW FIRMS TAKE A JOKE? . . . Answer: Of course not. However, there is the occasional foray into a bit of bathroom humor.

AT MY TRIAL PRACTICE WEBLOG . . . "A Direct Examination Tip from Geoffrey Fieger."

A VIOXX TEAM UPDATE . . . As I was preparing for a Vioxx hearing this morning, I noticed that 3,500 individual lawsuits have been filed nationwide, according the news out of the MDL. Reports vary, however--an article from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch about the first Vioxx trial next month puts the number at only 2,400 cases filed.

Anyway you slice it, we've been awfully busy in St. Louis, where the Vioxx Team has already filed lawsuits on behalf of about 800 individual plaintiffs. That's a pretty good percentage of the total number of cases filed nationwide, but I suspect it's merely because we're a little ahead of some other big groups in filing our cases. A year from now, Merck will be facing many, many more lawsuits than it is today.

As I said last week, there's just no good news for Merck. Not to gloat, however: as always happens in these mass torts, the tides will turn before everything is said and done, then turn again. My collected Vioxx posts are here.

MY PERSONAL PODCASTING RECOMMENDATIONS . . . You can find them at a post I did at Blawgcast: Something Else You Didn't Know About Podcasts.

AN ASSIGNMENT FROM MY SHINGLE . . . As I was leaving town last week for the MATA conference, Carolyn Elefant of My Shingle passed me the musical baton. Without a deadline, I'm not sure when I'll be handing it off to any other lucky recipients. But rest assured, I'm working on it.