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Rebekah Brooks, Former News International Exec, Indicted for Perversion of Justice

05/15/2012 - 14:29

It’s always the cover-up that gets you.

Rupert Murdoch’s British executive, Rebekah Brooks, will face criminal prosecution for her alleged role in obstructing justice.

Ms. Brooks is accused, along with her husband and aides, of having removed entire boxes of material from the News International archive in order to hide the evidence from the police and of having “conceal[ed] documents, computers, and other electronic equipment” to prevent the police from accessing information contained therein.

Ms. Brooks and her husband issued a statement today...

DSK Denied Immunity from Sexual Assault Lawsuit

05/02/2012 - 15:02

The New York Law Journal reported today that Nafissatou Diallo’s lawsuit against Dominique Strauss-Kahn will not be thrown out of court on the grounds of immunity.

Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s lawyers had argued that as the head of the International Monetary Fund at the time of the encounter, Mr. Strauss-Kahn enjoyed immunity from civil prosecution.

Bronx Supreme Court Justice Douglas McKeon, however, found that DSK was not entitled to absolute immunity – which would allow him to avoid civil and criminal liability for anything he did, even acts...

Justice Kennedy is no moderate when it comes to consumer rights

04/04/2012 - 12:38

Americans of all political stripes are looking to Justice Anthony Kennedy to see how he will rule on the constitutionality of health care reform and the individual mandate. But the Justice known as the swing vote on the current court has a long history of voting against the rights of the individual when it comes to civil justice and consumer rights.

As Ian Millhiser wrote earlier this week at Think Progress, Justice Kennedy has voted with the Supreme Court’s conservative majority in several of the past decade’s...

Morelli Ratner files Class Actions Against Spyware Maker Carrier IQ

12/08/2011 - 16:02

On Wednesday, December 7, Morelli Ratner PC filed federal class action lawsuits against spyware maker Carrier IQ in the Southern and Eastern Districts of New York. Morelli Ratner filed the class action on behalf of individual plaintiffs and similarly situated others who own and have used the iPhone 4 on AT&T, the iPhone4S on AT&T, and the HTC/Android OS phone on T-Mobile.

Carrier IQ gained notoriety in the past few weeks after a systems administrator in Connecticut discovered the company’s software surreptitiously recording everything he was doing on his iPhone and transmitting this sensitive data off to parts unknown.

“At issue in this lawsuit is whether Carrier, IQ, Inc., violated certain laws...

An Online Background-Check Tool for Managers Accused of Sexual Harassment

12/02/2011 - 11:06

Managing Partner David S. Ratner was quoted yesterday in a Workforce.com article, Background-Check Tool Keeps Tabs on Sex Harassment Cases.

David Ratner, a lawyer who represents an Illinois woman who was awarded $39.8 million in her sexual harassment case, doesn't like the registry.

"I think harassers should lose their jobs and be punished," says Ratner, managing partner of Morelli Ratner of New York. "But there's a right way and a wrong way to go about it."

Adelman...

Suing Second Mile for Sandusky’s Sexual Assaults

11/30/2011 - 15:46

On Thanksgiving, the New York Times reported that at least one of Jerry Sandusky’s accusers plans to sue the former Penn State assistant football coach for his alleged acts of sexual abuse and assault.

This accuser filed for injunctive relief to get a court to prevent Mr. Sandusky’s charity organization, Second Mile, from attempting to shelter its assets from litigation. Second Mile held more than $9 million in assets last year.

The accuser’s attorneys argue that Second Mile played a major role in enabling Mr. Sandusky’s alleged crimes by failing to...

Risks involved in suing big companies: criminal prosecution on trumped-up charges

07/22/2011 - 15:15

An employee leaves Cisco and launches an antitrust lawsuit against the company over its alleged anticompetitive and illegal tactics. Cisco responds by using its influence to get the whistleblower arrested in Canada and embroiled in unnecessary extradition proceedings for a year, all on trumped-up charges. You might call such behavior a mind-boggling abuse of corporate power. Cisco calls this a defense litigation strategy.

According to an article published yesterday on ArsTechnica, Cisco had antitrust plaintiff and former employee Peter Adekeye arrested in Canada and deemed a flight...

Chantix Smoking Cessation Drug and the Increased Risk of Heart Attack

07/18/2011 - 14:24

Earlier this month, a Canadian medical journal showed that the smoking cessation drug Chantix (varenicline) is associated with a greatly increased risk of heart attack, stroke, and congestive heart failure in a population of “smokers without a history of heart disease [as] compared with smokers who did not use the drug” (emphasis added).

Chantix has for several years now been associated with psychiatric problems and other health risks. (Morelli Ratner PC is currently litigating several hundred product liability claims for adverse events associated with the drug, including attempted and successful suicides).

The journal...

Tort reform and suing big companies for harmful acts

07/11/2011 - 15:40

Law360 reported at the end of last week that the U.S. House Judiciary Committee, controlled by the House’s Republican majority, has passed tort reform legislation that purports to fight frivolous lawsuits.

According to the newswire,

Committee chair and the legislation's author Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, said the reforms outlined in the two-page bill would reduce hundreds of thousands of frivolous law suits that proliferated after the 1993 law relaxed federal rules around mandatory sanctions.

"Lawsuit abuse has become too common in American society partly...

Throwing Out the Baby, Keeping the Bathwater: On the Rupert Murdoch Phone-Hacking Fiasco

07/07/2011 - 15:26

After the News of the World’s implication in a far-reaching phone-hacking scandal, parent company chairman James Murdoch announced earlier today that the British tabloid would shut its doors. In one of the most-publicized cases, the paper broke into the voicemail of a missing teenager and deleted messages, giving her parents false hope that the teen was alive and putting police investigators on the wrong path. Her convicted killer, meanwhile, killed two more victims before police were able to arrest him. At best, the tabloid committed brazenly illegal and callous acts in the pursuit of sensationalist headlines; at worst, its agents may have seriously obstructed a sensitive police investigation. While disturbing, this case...

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