Friday Roundup
Job Openings. I got an email - you probably did, too - from Ohio Supreme Court Chief Justice Maureen O'Connor, exhorting me and my professional compatriots to provide pro bono legal services to the victims of Hurricane Harvey.
Although as I write this, there's a pretty good chance that the regional base will be substantially expanded. Normally, a trip in the late summer/early fall to Texas or Florida will be somewhere on most everyone's bucket list. Not here. Those imagined vacations did not entail witnessing utter devastation and the sole-crushing toll from dealing, day in and day out, with people who have lost their most basic possession: their home.
O'Connor's done a good job of pushing for lawyers to do pro bono work. There are a couple of civil firms here who do pro bono criminal work, usually in appeal or post-conviction. And they do a very good job. They should be complimented for that, but I'm pretty sure assigning an associate to handle some criminal stuff didn't put the partners on the Hamburger Helper Diet.
I get I get paid $50 or $60 an hour on State court-appointed cases, a fraction of what I get on a retained case. I don't need to do those cases anymore, but I still do them, because I like it.
But that's why if you wind up heeding O'Connor's admonition and doing God's work -- if God was a lawyer -- you're not going to see me. My pro bono contribution is to help the State of Ohio acquit itself of its constitutional obligation to provide counsel to indigent defendants on the backs of the criminal defense bar.
If you're looking for a paying gig, you might want to check with the Cincinnati Reds; I'm guessing they're going to have an opening in their legal department, or know of one in a law firm they hired to handle an appeal to the Ohio Supreme Court.
A tax appeal, no less. At issue was the promotional items -- bobblehead dolls, jerseys -- that the Reds give away to patrons entering the stadium on special nights. For reasons that I'd probably care about if I did tax law, the Ohio Board of Tax Appeals decided that the Reds had to pay sales taxes on those items, even though nobody purchased them. The Reds squawked, and up it went to the Supreme Court.
In an appeal in the Supreme Court, you have forty days to file the brief, which starts to run when the record is filed. Here, that was on July 19, 2017. You can get one extension of twenty days, if it's agreed to by the other party. So on August 29, 2017, the Reds' attorney filed that extension, unmindful of the mnemonic device most of us learned in grade school which teaches that July has 31 days, meaning the extension was actually due on August 28.
Sure enough, on September 1, the Supreme Court struck the extension as untimely. That also meant the brief hadn't been filed on time, so the court dismissed the case as well.
That same day, the Reds filed a motion for reconsideration, the attorney asserting that, because of a docketing error, he believed the brief wasn't due until September 1. We'll see what happens, but take solace in the fact that however lousy last Friday was for you, it was measurably worse for that attorney, and whoever is responsible for managing his docket.
Eat Fresh. I'm pretty sure that when Subway made Jared its pitchman, they thought the worst scenario was that he'd get fat again. Well, Jared's 16-year prison sentence for paying for sex with minors and possessing child pornography certainly trumped gaining an additional 70 pounds or so of belly fat.
Subway's managed to get along quite nicely, though. It's one of my frequent lunch destinations, and although it hasn't resulted in any slimming effects, it's... well, it's food.
But it turns out Subway might be ripping off its customers. In January of 2013, an Australian teenager discovered that his Subway "footlong" sandwich actually measured only 11 inches long. I don't know if they have class actions in Australia, but they sure do here, and no fewer than nine separate class-action suits were filed. They were settled, with the lawyers getting $525,000. The named plaintiffs got a grand each. The rest of the members of the class? They got zip: not even a coupon for a few bucks off their next sandwich.
Let me introduce you to Theodore Frank. He's head of the Center for Class Action Fairness. You've probably got those notices telling you that if, say, you flew on American Airlines in 2013, you may join a class action suing them for some baggage fee discrepancy or whatever. If Frank and his people believe that a particular class action seems bogus, they will join the class, solely to give them standing to object to any proposed settlement.
Which is what Frank did here. The judge approved the settlement anyway, and so Frank appealed. And last Monday, the 7th Circuit agreed with Franks and reversed the settlement.
Boy, did they ever: noting that the shorter size was an inevitable result of the variability in the baking process, and that no Subway customer actually suffered any loss (the amount of food put on the sandwich is either pre-measured or determined by the customer), the opinion found that
A class action that seeks only worthless benefits for the class and yields only fees for class counsel is no better than a racket and should be dismissed out of hand. That's an apt description of this case... If the class settlement does not provide effectual relief to the class and its principal effect is to induce the defendants to pay the class's lawyers enough to make them go away, then the class representatives have failed in their duty under Rule 23 to fairly and adequately protect the interests of the class.
So maybe the food at Subway isn't the greatest, but at least you know that if you're sandwich is shorter than advertised, you're still getting the same amount of not-so-great food.
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