Litigation

How To Make a $15 Million Verdict Fly Away

Posted on March 28, 2011
There are lots and lots of multi-defendant tort cases in California. And in many of them, some defendants settle without getting a good faith order under Code of Civil Procedure section 877.6, leaving other defendants to go to trial. What...

Look Out Where You Put That Phone Booth

Posted on March 01, 2011
The late Professor Finz used to say that the first question in every tort case is this: "Was there a legal duty?" And that's the subject of today's discussion. It was only a two weeks ago that CBL was blogging...

A Real Federal Court Experience

Posted on February 22, 2011
Yesterday's Drug & Device Law talked about a recent decision by District Judge Manual Real, of California's Central District, dismissing a pacemaker case at the pleadings phase on grounds of preemption, lack of injury and failure to plead facts with....

Will Cal Supremes Overturn That Stupid Telephone Booth Case?

Posted on February 15, 2011
Take a seat right there, children, and Uncle CBL will tell you one of his long boring stories about the olden days. Once upon a time, before we all carried our own telephones around with us and before we all...

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Truth In Advertising Department; Candy Bar Division

Posted on February 03, 2011
Not sure how CBL missed this story, which has been flying around the internets for the last two weeks or so. But it seems the California Department of Public Health recently tested some candy bars imported from Pakistan and found...

Federal Court Removal: Ninth Circuit Adopts "Later-Served" Rule

Posted on January 25, 2011
Companies who find themselves on the right side of the "v" in California product liability litigation like federal court. Why? Let's count the ways: (a) In Federal Court, the admissibility of expert testimony is governed by Daubert v. Merrell Dow...

A Better Consumer Legal Remedies Act

Posted on January 14, 2011
As we rang in the new year, CBL committed to post some ideas about how to improve three problematic areas of California law, making them less business-unfriendly while maintaining California's position as a very pro-consumer, pro-green state. On January 4,...

Trademark Licensors: Protect Your Trademark, Become Strictly Liable

Posted on January 12, 2011
CBL presently subscribes to 57 blogs. More than half of them are law related (although CBL would not ever want to miss an installment of such non-law blogs as ZeroToSixtyInOneYear and PitchersAnd Poets). But CBL subscribes to very few official...

More Change At Cal Supremes

Posted on January 06, 2011
The Recorder and San Jose Merc have both confirmed that Associate Justice Carlos Moreno is retiring effective February 28. This means that incoming Governor Jerry Brown will get his first Supreme Court appointment within two months of taking office. But...

A Modest Proposal For Fixing Proposition 65

Posted on January 04, 2011
This week, we're looking at CBL's proposed tweaks to California laws to make them more business friendly without hampering those laws' overall purposes. For starters, take Proposition 65. Please. To a green and environmentally/politically correct group of California voters, Proposition...

Ninth Circuit Punts Marriage Case to Cal Supremes

Posted on January 04, 2011
This is a little bit out of our usual discussion areas, but pretty interesting. It looks as though Perry v. Schwarznegger (the Proposition 8 marriage case, soon to be renamed Perry v. Brown) will stand or fall on whether the...

Cal Biz Lit's Proposals for New Legislation in 2011

Posted on January 03, 2011
Happy New Year to Cal Biz Lit readers! This is the time of year when pundits, bloggers and law firms write about the new laws coming into effect in the new year. But frankly, the new California laws for this...

Breaking News On Exploding Snails Front

Posted on December 17, 2010
CBL is presently on vacation with his family in Philadelphia (recently named by the Amereican Tort Reform Association as the Numero Uno Judicial Hellhole in America, but that's a story for another day). But that certainly won't keep CBL from...

Is Your Alternative Fee Agreement Against The Law?

Posted on November 23, 2010
For years and years, we over here at Cal Biz Lit have been reading that the hourly fee arrangement was a thing of the past, that the only way to avoid conflicts with corporate, insurance and other institutional litigation clients...

Jury Awards Oracle $1.3 Billion in Copyright Infringement Trial

Posted on November 23, 2010
Brad Brubaker is Senior VP and General Counsel for SAP Business Systems, a large, publicly held business software company. Robert Mittelstaed at Jones Day is SAP's outside litigation counsel. How do you think this conversation went? "Uh, Brad, this is...

Exploding Snails Warning!

Posted on November 17, 2010
OK, all this stuff about Proposition 65, Medicare recovery, the Financial Sandards Accounting Board and so on is all well and good. But it's time for Cal Biz Lit to return to the subject that makes California special: really, really...

MMSEA Reporting Deadline Apparently Gets Extended Again

Posted on November 15, 2010
This is kind of weird. For nearly a year, we've known that the revised deadilne for "RREs" (that's Medicare speak for insurers and self-insureds who have to electronically report personal injury settlements with actual or potential Medicare recipients) was January...

Guest Post -- How To Win The Jury's Trust

Posted on November 10, 2010
When I started in the jury trial business, back when we scrawled our trial briefs on the cave walls and juries deliberated around the campfire, one of my mentors, who had successfully tried hundreds of cases, gave me a golden...

The New Expedited Trials: A Big Difference, Or A Non-Event?

Posted on November 09, 2010
Not long ago, the California legislature enacted, and the outgoing Governator signed, new legislation allowing for "expedited jury trials." If the parties stipulated to it, they would get a one day jury trial, with an hour to pick a jury...

FSAB Disclosure Proposal: Back To The Drawing Board

Posted on November 03, 2010
Cal Biz Lit, and a bunch of other bloggers and commentators, spilled a fair amount of ink (or 1's and 0's, as it were) on the Financial Accounting Standard's Board's highly unfortunate proposal to revise the reporting standards for loss...

News From The Cal Biz Lit Sports Department

Posted on November 02, 2010
Over here in the CBL Sports Department, baseball division, we are still basking in the glow of the San Francisco Giants? first World Series victory ever, and the franchise?s first win since 1956, back in their right coast days. Now...

So What Exactly Did We Settle, Anyway?

Posted on October 19, 2010
Workers' compensation and workers' compensation liens are often an issue in personal injury cases and the settlement of personal injury cases. But most of the time, when the tort defendant isn't a party to the workers' comp matter, the lien...

Five Ways California Is Different

Posted on September 03, 2010
The mantra around CBL has always been "The legal environment in California is different." Here's an article by Luce Forward's Mike Pappas in today's Corporate Counsel that says exactly this. And the five biggest differences he lists? Covenants not to...

Cal Supremes -- The Most Followed Court

Posted on September 02, 2010
The new -- and excellent -- "At The Lectern," Horvitz & Levy's new blog on Supreme Court practice, provides a reminder on why the California Supreme Court is so important. From 1940 to 2005: 1,260 of the California Supreme Court?s...

Consumer Expectation Test: "Hey, I Didn't Think It Would Make Me Sick"

Posted on September 01, 2010
In a California strict product liability case, the plaintiff gets his choice of ways to prove the product was defective. He can use the "risk/benefit test," which asks whether the benefits of the challenged design outweigh the risk of danger...

FASB Revisions: A Model of Concise Comment

Posted on August 24, 2010
We've blogged twice (here and here) about the Financial Accounting Standards Board's efforts to trash Standard 5 and destroy the attorney client and work product privileges, er, I mean to update and revise the standards for disclosing loss contingencies in...

FASB Extends Comment Period For Proposed Disclosure Rules

Posted on August 19, 2010
It seemed as though about half the fifty letters written so far to the Financial Accounting Standards Board on its proposed revision to corporate contingency disclosure standards were requests to extend the comment period. Given the complexity of the new...

Predicting Settlement Set-Offs In Multi-Defendant Cases: Good Luck With That

Posted on August 18, 2010
One of the more complex questions of California tort law, with one of the more counter-intuitive answers, can best be posed this way: If plaintiff sues ten defendants in tort, nine of them settle and the plaintiff gets a verdict...

New FASB Disclosure Proposal: Not Helpful. Not Helpful At All.

Posted on August 09, 2010
As best I can tell, most Cal Biz Lit readers are lawyers, and most of them are involved in some way in the litigation world. So here's a hypothetical for everyone: Suppose at the end of every fiscal year, clients...

Chief Justice Cantil-Sakauye: What Can We Expect?

Posted on July 28, 2010
As CBL discussed last week, Governor Schwarznegger has named Court of Appeal Justice Justice Tani Cantil Sakauy to succeed Chief Justice Ronald George. Justice Cantil Sakauy is considered to be a moderate Republican (no surprise -- so is Governor Schwarznegger)...

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