CalBizLit blogged late last year on ICO's $630 million thumping of Boeing from a Los Angeles Superior Court jury last Halloween. All this in a contract dispute.
Yesterday, Forbes reported that things didn't get any better in the post-trial motions. The trial court upheld the award. It'll bear interest at 10% until paid (and what investments do you have paying 10% just now?). Moreover, if Boeing wants to appeal, they're looking at posting an appellate bond of a mere $1.2 billion to avoid execution, per CCP 917.1(b). Although if they want to put up a cash deposit or get a bond from an admitted surety, it'll only cost them $945 million.
I've been following with interest the case of Radiologist Dr. Martin Martinucci, who
contended that Kaiser Hospital forced him to quit because he complained about the quality of its care. As reported in the San Francisco Chronicle, Martinucci was hired in 2003 and resigned three years later after his supervisor and a human resources staffer accused him of being racist and making sexual advances toward a male technologist. His suit was a "constructive termination case," a difficult form of employment case in which the employee who resigns must prove that the resignation was essentially a firing because working conditions were so intolerable that no reasonable employee would have stayed. This was established by the California Supremes in Turner v. Anheuser-Busch, Inc. (1994) 7 Cal.4th 1238.
As California Punitive Damages, an Exemplary Blog has reported, the jury found for Martinucci last Monday and awarded compensatory damages of $3.9 million. Under California law, the question of whether the defendant has acted with malice, fraud or oppression (the prerequisites for a punitive damage award) are decided at the same time the jury decides liability and compensatory damages. But the defendant is entitled to have bifurcation -- i.e., a second phase of trial -- on the question of whether punitive damages should be awarded and how much. Most defendants exercise this right to a two-phase trial, and Kaiser did here.
Here's where it gets interesting. In phase two, Martinucci asked the jury for $1 billion in punitive damages. Most of us would think that's a little on the aggessive side. Conventional defense lawyer wisdom would have it that a request this high risks turning off the jury. But I'm not so sure. There's a very good, albeit rather ponderous study of punitive damages called "Punitive Damages, How Juries Decide," by Cass Sunstein and others. I've read it, so you don't have to. Sunstein and company found that the most significant predictor for a large punitive damages award is a large request. And in fact, there is no limit -- it's like the more the plaintiff attorney asks for, the more he gets. So by asking the jury for a billion bucks, the plaintiff attorney doesn't get a billion bucks. But he gets more, all other things being equal, than he would if he asked for a mere, say $700 million.
No press release on Boeing's site so far. The statement when it comes, of course, will read: "We are shocked by the jury's verdict, and are confident that we will be vindicated on appeal."
When I was a young associate in an insurance defense firm about 300 years ago, our senior partner made one of the other associates try a plaintiff death case. I say "made him" try it, because the theory was that our client's decedent, a small airplane pilot, was the victim of negligence when he flew his plane into the side of a mountain next to an air strip on a bright, sunny, cloudless day. We always thought it was the senior partner's way of teaching the associate humility, and I think the jury was out just about long enough to choose a foreperson before coming back with a defense verdict.
Well, here's a verdict from a rather similar case, obtained by a pretty talented lawyer: A San Diego jury awarded $15.2 million in compensatory damages and $40.4 million in a death case involving four Camp Pendleton marines killed in a 2004 helicopter crash. The accident, of course, is tragic. But the theory, which the jury apparently bought, was that San Diego Gas & Electric was negligent for not putting safety lights on a tower; the pilot whose heirs were not parties to the case) crashed into the unlit tower. Per the Los Angeles Times story, the cable (and presumably the tower) had been on the base without incident for twenty-five years.
As discussed here and lots of other places in lots of blawgs, Mattel's Barbie has been duking it out with MGA Entertainment's Bratz in Federal Court in Riverside since last May. The jury previously found copyright infringement and has been deliberating on damages since last week.
Ever since California's courts adopted their "fast track" programs some twenty years ago, state court cases here have generally moved along at a pretty good clip. Even somewhat complex cases can be set for trial, and go to trial, within a year of filing. (I recall one defense lawyer complaining near the beginning of "fast track" that he was being "denied my God-given right to conduct a leisurely defense.)
A big exception for some time has been the Superior Court in the inland empire's burgeoning Riverside County . That Southern California court has experienced extreme population growth, a shortage of judges and a district attorney who reportedly never met a potential criminal filing he didn't think meritted a jury trial. These factors have combined to cause a multi-year backlog of cases, and frequent suspension of civil trials altogether. As reported in Legal Pad, the problem has most recently been attacked with a group of visiting judges from other counties, but they apparently have their doubts whether they have provided any long term relief.
But Riverside also has a Federal Court outpost, and that's where they've
been trying the Mattel v. MGA Entertainment plastic doll smack-down, with Mattel claiming the defendant stole its intellectual property to develop and sell the Bratz doll. The case has been a boon to the Riverside hotel and lodging industries, as swarms of lawyers have descended for the lengthy trial. As previously reported here, and just about everywhere else, the jury found liability in the first phase of this bifurcated trial, and the presentation of evidence on damages has just concluded. The LA Times reports that Mattel's lawyer John Quinn asked the jury for $1.8 billion. "I'm well aware that the numbers we're talking about here are very substantial," Quinn told jurors.
Ya' think?
Off Topic Double-Barreled Musical Interlude
It's been awhile since we had a music post. Some of you may be familiar with What About Clients, Dan Hull and Holden Oliver's excellent and unique law blog dealing with client service issues. Happily, it also includes periodic musical posts, and recently included this one, featuring the late and great Paul Butterfield, Son House and my boyhood blues guitar hero, Mike Bloomfield. He really did sound as good as I remembered (Language warning -- may not be entirely safe for work):
I commented on WAC that I thought they and I had the only lawblogs that featured jazz, blues and r & b interludes, but boy was I wrong. Hull turned me on to Raymond Ward's Minor Wisdom. He's a lawyer from New Orleans, and, as is only proper, his blog has tons of outstanding musical posts.
For example, there is this one with Dr. John and Johnny Winter:
Pity the poor flight attendant. The French diplomat's wife kicks her in the back. The pilot raises his fist at her and throws her off the plane. The airline suspends her, sends her to a shrink and won't give her his report.
One of CalBizLit's missions is reporting verdicts of interest. The Wall Street Journal and its LawBlog are both reporting that the Federal Court jury hearing the Mattell v. MGA Entertainment case in Riverside has just come back with a verdict that the popular Bratz doll was designed while the designer was employed by Mattell. The dollars involved will be decided in a separate phase of the trial. But there likely will be many such dollars.
California's Unfair Trade Practices Act, Business & Professions Code sections 17000 and following, makes it unlawful to engage in the "production, manufacture, distribution or sale" (section 17040) of an article or product with the intent to destroy competition. Section 17043 makes it unlawful for a person in business to sell a product at less than cost or to give away an article or product, for the purpose of injuring competitors or destroying competition. Section 17044 makes loss leaders (defined in section 17030) illegal.
This brings us to The San Francisco Bay Guardian and the SF Express. Almost every major city has one or more of these progressive, free, tabloid weeklies. The most venerable one in San Francisco is the Bay Guardian, founded in 1966 with the stated plan to "Print the news and raise hell." In its early years, the BG and its founder, Bruce Brugman engaged in a lengthy, and ultimately unsuccessful, anti-trust action against San Francisco's two more traditional dailies, the Chronicle and the Examiner.
Now, the trial judge has trebled the damages under section 17082 (or at least trebled most of them -- I haven't quite figured out how the math worked) and issued an injunction preventing the Weekly from doing this any more (required by section 17078). Story here in The Chronicle.
That is, the jury ran away from the plaintiff as fast as they could. Dish Network sues News Corp.'s NDS Unit for over a billion bucks, contending an NDS employee hacked into its network, stole code, posted the code on the internets so everybody could watch satellite tv for free. Jury finds for plaintiff. Awards $1,500 dollars.
