Donald Trump really isn’t happy with his lawyers. Well, former lawyers. Reports are pouring in that the mogul has filed a $5 million suit against the Morrison Cohen law firm for repeatedly mentioning his name on its website and dropping his name in press interviews. Trump is claiming that the lawyers, “without [his] written consent, have used—really commercially exploited—[his] name and reputation, and continue to do so, on Morrison Cohen’s website.”
While the law firm has countered that Trump is “merely trying to avoid paying $600,000 in overdue legal fees,” the Donald has explained that his gripe with the firm has more to do with the lawyers’ alleged ineptitude than his alleged greed: “They put my name up all over their ads like I’m in love with them, and I really don’t like them. If it was somebody I was happy with, that would be one thing, but I’m not happy with them.”
While we certainly don’t claim to be experts in the business of law firm advertising, we are fairly familiar with one of the primary tenets of How Not to Get Sued 101: Don’t use your clients’ names to promote your crap without asking them if it’s cool. You don’t even need a law degree to figure that one out. No wonder Trump didn’t like them. [ABA Journal and NY Post]
Can’t a nice lady just massage a horse for a few bucks without having to sue someone for the right to do it? If you’re Mercedes Clemens, the answer, apparently, is “no.” Clemens, a certified massage therapist for humans, is claiming that the state of Maryland is “keeping her from her first love [of] massaging horses,” telling her that state law only allows veterinarians to perform such services. Now she’s suing two state agencies, claiming that “regulators are unfairly barring registered massage therapists who want to practice on animals.”
A self-described “horse fanatic,” Clemens, 40, received “private” animal massage certification recently and started practicing on a roster of about 30 horse clients, but after the state’s actions, she now only works on her own horse, Chanty. As Clemens awaits a court hearing next month, she “continues to dote on Chanty, feeding her carrots, kissing her nose and of course, massaging her knots.” As she keeps explaining, “This isn’t just a career for me, it’s my passion. If I was independently wealthy and I didn’t need an income, I would do this for nothing. That’s how much I love it.”
We have no doubt that the lady does, indeed, love horses—and we sympathize with her attempt to exploit her passion for income—but we can’t help pointing out that just because you’d be willing to do something you love for free, doesn’t mean that you should be allowed to do it for pay. Just something to keep in mind the next time, say, your local veterinarian offers to throw you on the table, grease you up, and start working a little swedish-deep-tissue combo action on your bod because of his love of touching humans. [AP]
Shocking though it may be to process, recent reports are confirming that not all evangelist preacher types are the selfless vessels of love they purport to be. Recent court documents have reported that Victoria Osteen, “co-pastor” and wife of super megachurch evangelist Joel Osteen, is being sued by a Continental Airlines flight attendant for an air rage episode that took place in 2005.
The flight attendant, Sharon Brown, alleges that the incident began when Osteen became enraged upon seeing a spot of liquid on the armrest of her first-class seat. When a flight attendant didn’t clean it fast enough, the lady preacher allegedly stormed to the cockpit, where she encountered Brown, who she “elbowed…in the left breast” and threw “against an airplane bathroom door.”
The FAA has already fined Osteen $3,000 for “interfering with a crew member during the flight,” but Brown is just getting started. According to court documents, the battered attendant “claims that she suffers from anxiety and hemorrhoids because of the incident and said her faith was affected,” and is now suing Osteen for “medical expenses for counseling.”
While legal analysts have sympathized with Brown, they have yet to agree on what aspect of this case is more traumatizing—being elbowed in the tit by a lunatic preacher’s wife or knowing that, for the rest of your life, anyone who Googles you will see the words “suffering from hemorrhoids” next to your name. [Fox News]
If recent reports in the legal media are to be believed, it’s safe to assume that lady lawyer Catriona Collins doesn’t mind being called a lot of things, but she absolutely draws the line at “sweet.”
In a sex discrimination law suit that Collins filed in New York against her former firm, she alleged that the firm’s managing partner, Martin Pavane, remarked that she “wasn’t sweet enough” in dealing with a paralegal—and a federal judge has just ruled that the remark could indeed be “construed as discriminatory animus” supporting her suit. As Judge Kimba Wood explained, “A reasonable jury could find that Pavane’s statement indicates that (1) he holds stereotypes that women should be ‘sweet’ and non-aggressive, and (2) that Pavane believed that plaintiff did not fit this stereotype.”
When reached for comment, leading feminist legal scholars disagreed on the merits of Collins’s case. They did, however, wish to extend to her their collective thanks for working so hard to forge ahead and create a new world for the women lawyers of the future. A world where female attorneys everywhere finally won’t be discouraged from acting every bit like the aggressive, abusive, decidedly non-sweet douchebags that their male counterparts have been for years. Now that’s the sound of progress. [ABA Journal]
Continuing the long tradition of revered Olympians who seem to spend more time on the tabloid stands than on the medal stands, Greek sprinter Katerina Thanou is now suing the International Olympic Committee for failing to pass her a gold medal won by disgraced athlete Marion Jones in the 2000 Sydney Olympics. Thanou won the silver medal in the 100 meters at Sydney, finishing second behind Jones—who was later stripped of the gold after confessing to using steroids. Despite Thanou’s repeated requests, the Committee has still not handed over the gold medal she believes is rightfully hers. One possible reason: Soon after winning the silver, Thanou herself was busted for juicing and was banned from competition for two years.
Thanou returned to international competition in 2007 and has qualified for the Beijing Games, although an Olympic Disciplinary Committee still must meet to determine her eligibility to compete. We certainly can’t predict how the Committee will rule, but we can confidently say that Thanou would be wise to remember, like any athlete seeking Olympic glory: If at first you don’t succeed…well, maybe just stop trying in this case, actually. Sorry. It’s just that whole steroid thing. Olympic Committees apparently have a hard time getting over that one. [Sports Illustrated]
Wesley Snipes just can’t catch a break these days. On top of being handed a three-year prison sentence earlier this year for willfully failing to file his income taxes, the actor is now being told that he must reimburse the government about $217,000 for prosecution costs related to his conviction. Snipes, who is in the process of appealing his prison sentence, has apparently “objected to the cost.”
While we agree that having to pay for the people who sent to you prison is indeed objectionable, we can’t help but ask the “Blade” star: How’d refusing to pay government-mandated fees work out for you last time, guy? Last we checked, you’re trying to convince a court to let you out of having to go to prison for three years—maybe just stop complaining, pony up the 200K, and pray to God that you get some brownie points with the judge. [HuffPost]
Just when your feelings about Ed McMahon couldn’t get any more confusing, the media is reporting that two New York law firms have brought suit against the former late-night sidekick for over a quarter of a million bucks he allegedly owes them for handling his daughter’s divorce. This news rounds out a generally unpleasant quarter for McMahon, who recently admitted he’s facing foreclosure on his $6.25 million Beverly Hills home and and owes American Express almost $750,000.
While legal experts following the story have noted that you can’t fault a law firm for being excited about representing a man who no doubt raked in millions and millions after years of sitting beside a late-night legend and hawking magazine subscriptions on TV, they have nonetheless reminded billing partners everywhere that such circumstances are still no excuse for deviating from the cardinal rule of dealing with celebrities in legal distress: for the love of god, get a retainer. [NY Daily News]
Sources are reporting that one year after an unprecedented federal lawsuit targeting comment trolls on the college-admissions website AutoAdmit.com was filed, a whole lot of nothing has happened. The AutoAdmit controversy began in 2005 when two female law students were the target of bilious and harassing threads on the site which sported messages such as “Women named Hillary and Jill should be raped,” “I think I will sodomize her. Repeatedly” and “she has herpes.”
The women filed the federal lawsuit in June 2007, seeking hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages and contending that “the postings about them became etched into the first page of search engine results on their names, costing them prestigious jobs, infecting their relationships with friends and family, and even forcing one to stop going to the gym for fear of stalkers.”
While the plaintiffs have been able to unmask the trolls—an admitted “milestone in a rare legal challenge to the norms of online commenting”—not much else has apparently been resolved in the past year. The plaintiffs themselves have gone silent, and their lawyers, a law professor from Yale Law School and another from Stanford, have repeatedly declined the media’s requests for comment. As a recent article notes, “Legal experts are beginning to wonder aloud if there’s any point in pressing the messy lawsuit.”
We may not know much over here at Bitter Lawyer, but we do know that if depraved losers have the right to make violent and threatening comments about random people over a public message board, then their targets should have the right to expose them for the ball-less douchetards that they are. Fight that fight, ladies. One bit of advice, though: ditch the law professors. If you want someone to write a law review article about your case someday, sure, give them a ring. But if you want to actually win your case, hire someone who knows how to be a real lawyer. [Wired]
The legal biz is abuzz with reports that Angela Robinson, a former paralegal for heavy-hitting Texas plaintiffs’ lawyer Richard Laminack, is accusing him of not only being a “sexual predator,” but also of dabbling in federal mail fraud. Robinson alleges that that Laminack once offered her $15,000 to “stay with him in a hotel room in Las Vegas over a weekend,” and then followed up by suggesting she “perform a sexual act on an expert witness to improve his mood and testimony.” Oh, and she claims he also told her about a scheme to defraud thousands of fen-phen litigation clients, but “told her to be quiet and not inform anyone of this.”
Paralegals nationwide have been careful not to pass judgment on the merits of the case until all the facts are revealed. That said, they have gingerly pointed out to Laminack that, typically, you can’t ask a paralegal to blow one of your witnesses after asking her to be your weekend hooker in Vegas and then ask her to help you commit fraud on top of it. Pick one and you may have a shot, but all three will only lead to trouble. Sure, an actual associate might—might—be up to the task, but a paralegal’s a definite no-go. They just don’t get paid enough to put up with that. [Texas Lawyer via Law.com]
A jury has awarded a Georgia woman $150,000 after she sued her former fiance for canceling their wedding. The jilted bride, RoseMary Shell, argued that her fiance’s “promise of marital bliss amounted to a binding contract,” adding that she left a high-paying job in Florida to be with him and has “suffered financial losses since their break-up.”
The fiance, Wayne Gibbs, explained that he had already laid out $30,000 to pay off certain of Shell’s debts when they were engaged, and when he found out she had even more debt, he did what any loving life-partner-to-be would do and left her a note in their bathroom telling her the wedding was off. “People shouldn’t be allowed to do that,” Shell explained, adding, “hopefully he’ll think twice before he does it to someone else.”
Legal analysts have agreed that Shell had every reason to be upset by Gibbs’s actions, but have advised her to keep in mind as she gets back on that dating horse that, from a legal perspective at least, a promise of “marital bliss” from the kind of guy who would break up with you by leaving a note in your toilet may not be the strongest form of consideration in future romantic contracts. | WSB-TV
