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Our health care system is 'Sicko'
Attorney Blogs | 2007/06/30 19:05

Michael Moore is convincing: Our health care system is 'Sicko'

"I always thought the health insurance companies were there to help us," claims Michael Moore early in "Sicko," his portrait of America's failing health care industry and the politics that keep it in place. It sounds a little disingenuous coming from the filmmaking activist whose skepticism of government and big business is well documented in such films as "Roger and Me" and "Fahrenheit 9/11."

But then Moore's films are less "objective" documentaries than aggressive, ironic, often mocking calls to action punctuated by his folksy narration, alternately laced with sarcasm and pleading for understanding.

For "Sicko," Moore steps away from the spotlight to allow dozens of people -- all supposedly covered by health insurance -- to tell their own stories of being abandoned in the face of catastrophe, and then contrasts them with the citizens served by the Canadian, British and French systems of nationalized health care.

He idealizes systems fraught with their own problems to be sure, but even so he makes his point simply and convincingly: health care should not be a luxury but a right for American citizens, just like primary education, police services and fire department protection.

Moore eases up from the political sideshow theatrics that make his previous films so entertaining and maddening. At least until his controversial finale, a grandstanding gesture that takes a small group of ailing 9/11 rescue volunteers to Cuba for treatment that the U.S. won't provide.

The line between documentary and political theater is blurred, to say the least, and his tactics are calculated, but Moore is a crafty showman. He makes his point boldly and still gets medical attention for these American heroes refused coverage stateside.

With less lampooning and satirical asides, "Sicko" may be less "entertaining" than Moore's previous films, but it's also more affecting and effective. Put into context by Moore, government-financed medicine is less a revolutionary concept than a modest proposal.



Homegrown Law Firm Goes Big Time Thanks to Merger
Attorney Blogs | 2007/06/29 11:45

One of the largest labor and employment law firms in the country now has a presence in Memphis thanks to a homegrown firm with ties to the Bluff City that goes back 20 years. Effective Sunday, the Memphis firm of Lewis Fisher Henderson & Claxton LLP will join with Ogletree, Deakins, Nash, Smoak & Stewart PC, the nation's third-largest labor and employment law firm.

Frederick J. Lewis, a founding partner of Lewis Fisher, said he feels the joining of the two firms will add tremendous opportunities for Lewis Fisher as well as the Memphis business community. "I think (the combination will help Memphis companies) in the same way we see our firm as benefiting - it gives the resource of having a firm with 365 lawyers and 30 different offices across the country," Lewis said. "We serve clients across the country, but this obviously increases our ability to do that. It gives us depth.

"As far as the Memphis market, it gives clients in Memphis an opportunity to call on the resources of a nationwide firm when they have a case that calls for that."


Southern presence

The attorneys of Lewis Fisher will have the benefit of Ogletree Deakins' reputation that comes from representing more than half of the Fortune 50 companies in the United States, entities such as Home Depot, Dillard's, Nissan, Dollar General and Dell Corp.

Twelve attorneys from Lewis Fisher's Memphis office and seven from its Jackson, Miss., office will make up the first Ogletree Deakins offices in each city. Lewis, Thomas L. Henderson, Whitney King Fogerty, Charles V. Holmes, O. John Norris III and Craig A. Cowart will open the Memphis office as shareholders of Ogletree Deakins. Donna K. Fisher, a founding partner of Lewis Fisher, will join in an of counsel position.

Lewis Fisher, which began operating in 1998 in its current form, already had two attorneys operating out of an office in Los Angeles, so those attorneys will move into the L.A. office of Ogletree Deakins.

The Memphis office will become Ogletree Deakins' second office in Tennessee. The firm opened an office in Nashville in 1986.

Firm shareholder Kevin Frazier, who works out of Ogletree Deakins' Nashville office, said the firm was interested in Lewis Fisher for a number of reasons.

"The first attraction was the quality of the lawyers. When we are looking at cities, that is the first thing we look for," said Frazier, who is on the executive committee of Ogletree Deakins.

The marriage of the two firms also gives Ogletree Deakins a presence in a region that it would otherwise not have had access to before. Offices in Memphis and Jackson, Miss., offer exactly that for Ogletree Deakins, Frazier said.

"I have known Tom (Henderson) and Fred (Lewis) for probably 10 years, and have always been interested in doing something with them, and the opportunity just presented itself," Frazier said.


Only a matter of time

For Ogletree Deakins, combining with Lewis Fisher was part of the firm's overall strategy to address some of the current trends in the area of labor and employment law, Frazier added.

While Lewis Fisher attorneys had crossed paths with attorneys at Ogletree Deakins for years on various cases, Lewis said it was not until recently that the two firms began to talk about combining their resources.

Lewis and Henderson, who is a partner at Lewis Fisher, were in Nashville working on a case that also involved some Ogletree Deakins attorneys. They went to lunch one day after court and discussed the possibility of working together.

"We obviously had a productive lunch," Lewis said of that February meeting. "It has been a quick courtship."

One of the main reasons Lewis said his firm was interested in working with a firm as large as Ogletree Deakins was the trend in labor and employment law for cases to be filed as class actions. That trend opens companies such as the ones Ogletree Deakins represents to more liability than before.

Another trend in labor and employment that makes the combination of firms work well is that major corporations have begun to severely restrict the number of law firms they use, meaning companies that might have at one time used 20 law firms around the country, might only use two or three firms now.

"What that does for Lewis Fisher and their client base is it gives them an opportunity to say, 'We can do your work at 30 different locations with quality lawyers we know at one firm,'" Frazier said.

Ogletree Deakins already has begun to see the benefits since news of the combination became public earlier this month. The firm has picked up three lawsuits through Ogletree Deakins contacts in Memphis that it would not have been able to get without the office here, Frazier said.




Court Rules for Expectation of Privacy in E-mail
Attorney Blogs | 2007/06/21 14:12

The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Monday that the government must have a search warrant before it can secretly seize and search stored e-mails. People that use e-mail as a form of communication have a reasonable expectation of privacy. Although surveillance of in-transit e-mails is prohibited, the government has been using the Stored Communications Act (SCA) to search stored e-mails without having to use a warrant. This week the appeals court found that the act violated the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution.

"It goes without saying that like the telephone earlier in our history, e-mail is an ever-increasing mode of private communication, and protecting shared communications through this medium is as important to Fourth Amendment principles today as protecting telephone conversations has been in past," the appeals court said.

Steven Warshak, owner and president of Berkeley Premium Nutraceuticals, brought the case against the government to stop investigators from searching his stored e-mails using the SCA. The district court ruled in favor of Warshak, and the government appealed the ruling to the 6th Circuit, where they were ultimately defeated.

Warshak is in the middle of a fraud investigation. He has pleaded not guilty to charges that he and his business defrauded customers and banks out of at least $100 million in a scheme where they billed credit cards without authorization.



The Supreme Court vs. Health Care Workers
Attorney Blogs | 2007/06/16 03:32

The Supreme Court just ruled 9-0 this week that home health care workers aren't entitled to overtime pay under the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, a significant blow to low wage workers generally. There are many ugly aspects to this story, which the press is treating as just another blip. First, around half of home health care workers are minority and over ninety percent are female. The old double standard long condemned by feminists seems to be active here. Women are the "care givers" the "homemakers" without whom society cannot stand. Yet this labor, praised and put on a pedestal, is not seen as labor, not valued as labor, and women are expected to work for less and take it, because that is what being a "true woman" is all about--what scholars used to call "the cult of domesticity."

U.S. Labor law, which the justices were in effect sustaining, is very much below average when compared to the rest of the developed world, and the laws themselves, which were largely enacted during the great labor and especially CPUSA led upsurge of the 1930s, were written by a Congress in which "conservative" Southern white supremacy Democrats played a powerful role because of their "seniority" (it helped that they weren't running in competitive elections. The legislation excluded farm workers, domestic workers, and others (African Americans,other minorities, and women were greatly over-represented in the excluded categories) in order to keep labor generally and Southern labor particularly cheap.

From the 1940s to the early 1974s, more and more workers were included under this legislation, which was of course strengthened and augmented by civil rights legislation and affirmative action in the 1960s. But things have gotten steadily worse over the last thirty years (the act which was at question here was a 1974 act whose express purpose was to include more workers in terms of benefits and protection, even though as Justice Ginsburg noted, it in this case was ironically being used by the government to exclude workers).

The unions involved and prominent progressive Democrats have criticized the ruling and promised to work to include home health care workers, which of course is good. But much more is needed. First, the overall health care industry has to be transformed from a private industry to a public health care system, as has been done successfully in all other developed countries. Home health care workers are a part of that industry and the idea that those who deal with the most vulnerable people in our society, people who literally cannot take care of themselves, should be denied the basic benefits that the majority of American workers have, not to mention their own health care and pension rights, should anger working class and progressive people as much as the existence of largescale homelessness in the richest nation on earth should.

U.S. labor law, with its exclusions and exemptions which make sense only if one wants a cheap labor country swimming in an ocean of debt, also has to be transformed so that it is at the very least "competitive" with present-day labor laws in the European Union, by no means ideal but much better than what currently exists in the United States.

This can only happen if we work steadily to elect a pro labor progressive Congress and national administration in 2008, an administration which will begin to both reverse the reactionary policies of the last three decades and also enact in regard to health care legislation which today is more than a half century overdue.

As a postscript, such a government would also be ready to appoint progressive Supreme Court justices who would vote to expand workers rights, not the centrists and moderate liberals who joined with the far right in this case to deny home health care workers basic rights.



Immigration reform falls to polarized politics
Attorney Blogs | 2007/06/08 11:46

"The reality is most people are just desperate to see a solution. If this goes down, the opposition is not offering an alternative and that means the problem is still an issue," said Pete Brodnitz, a Democratic pollster. "We're in a period where people are looking to see leadership and progress." All sides will find reasons to explain away what happened: Democrats blame Republicans for demanding too much and delivering too few votes. Republicans blame Democrats for being unwilling to take their views into account and for opposing details of a guest-worker program. Democrats blame the president for failing to bring his troops into line. Proponents blame anti-immigration forces for whipping up opposition.

There is truth in all their allegations. That this bill was imperfect is without dispute. Only a few politicians - Bush and McCain among them - were strongly vocal in urging passage, but they, too, had reservations about the compromise. House Democratic leaders were tepid in their support, demanding Republicans bring at least 60 votes for the measure in order to offer their freshman members from marginal districts the cover to vote "no."

Reid warned Thursday hours before the bill collapsed that he would not seek to revive the issue. Later, he pledged to work hard "in the next few weeks" to resurrect a deal. Perhaps, once people step back from what happened, they will try again. Perhaps they will succeed on their third try.

Loss of nerve

No one ever believed passing a comprehensive immigration reform bill would be easy. As McCain said in Tuesday's Republican debate in New Hampshire, "It's our job to do the hard things, not the easy things." But for a long time, Washington politicians have flinched at hard things, preferring to engage in political combat aimed at gaining partisan advantage first.

There is little time for progress on difficult issues before Bush's lame-duck status reduces his power even more and before the 2008 presidential and congressional campaigns turn the country into a partisan battlefield. Immigration provides one clear test for the system before that reality locks in. So far the system is losing.

If there is no attempt to revive the immigration bill, the issue will become fodder throughout the long campaign ahead. Already it is shaping the Republican presidential debate, with McCain on one side and his leading opponents all on the other.

Public opinion suggests an electorate open to, but by no means wildly enthusiastic about, comprehensive reform that provides the 12 million illegal immigrants a path to citizenship, but only if there is an effective border security plan already in place.

Republicans are clearly divided, but not perhaps as the heated rhetoric of the campaign trail suggests. The most recent Washington Post-ABC News poll found that, on the question of a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants, the public narrowly approves: 52 percent to 44 percent. Democrats back such a plan by 57 percent to 38 percent and independents by 51 percent to 45 percent. Republicans are opposed, by 53 percent to 43 percent - significant but not overwhelming.



How prepared is your injury lawyer?
Attorney Blogs | 2007/05/28 18:20

As a Virginia (VA) attorney handling injury cases like automobile accidents for about 18 years, I have come to recognize preparation as the key to success in handling serious injury cases in Hampton Roads, Virginia (VA) or in any court. The best attorneys prepare their cases better than the insurance defense lawyers who they go up against. The lawyer can't control what the facts are in a car crash or the severity of his client's injuries. One thing that the personal injury lawyer can control is being more ready than the insurance lawyer at each step of the accident case, from claim to jury verdict. I pride myself on being a master of the facts and law as it relates to any car or truck wreck case that I am working on. If I know more about what is going on with the accident case than anyone else involved in the process, I can be sure that I am in the best position to get the maximum recovery possible for the client and their injury. If the injured person's lawyer really is a master of the facts and the law through preparation, then often the insurance claims representative, the defense lawyer, and even the judge may defer to that lawyer as to what the exact facts and applicable law is for the case.

The injured client typically knows how prepared his lawyer is in handling his accident case. Does the lawyer know who he is when a client calls about his accident case? Does the lawyer come to a deposition having already interviewed the witnesses and with a written list of questions or topics to be covered? Has the injury attorney consulted with the expert witnesses such as doctors before trial? The answers to these sorts of questions show the person who is hurt in an automobile accident case that the lawyer representing him is prepared.

If you are not satisfied with the way your lawyer is preparing your injury case, you should ask for a sit down conference with them to figure out if they are the right person for the job. You always have an absolute right to change attorneys. The worst thing that could happen if you change attorneys is that the first attorney may ask for some compensation for his time spent on the matter. However, in Virginia (VA) the fired attorney is not entitled to ask for his percentage fee in the contract, under our Virginia (VA) ethics rules. Although I do not recommend changing attorneys unless absolutely necessary, if you get the sense that your attorney is not prepared or is not communicating appropriately with you about your lawsuit, then you should feel free to contact other injury attorneys to discuss the matter. If you call me about your desire to change lawyers, I will usually first recommend that you try to get straight with the old lawyer. However, if you do want to change I usually suggest that do so as soon as possible before your injury case has been moved forward in a way that may be hard for a better lawyer to undo.



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