Articles Posted in General Legal

In early September of this year, a power outage occurred at a San Diego sewage treatment center. The outage caused a malfunction in the sewage treatment plant’s operations, which resulted in sewage leaking out into several San Diego area water bodies. As a result, miles of beaches had to be closed to the public because…

San Jose State chemistry professor Dan Straus had something in common with his father and his father’s buddy: all were academics. Straus’s father was a renown mathematician, and his dad’s buddy a theoretical physicist. You might have heard of the physicist, his name was Albert Einstein. When Straus’s father died, he bequeathed him a set…

State investigators are trying to determine what caused a ride at the County Fair to malfunction and injure two people. According to witnesses, the Techno Power ride had ended and the passengers were getting off the ride when it unexpectedly began to move. A young girl was thrown to the ground as was the operator…

California has onerous medical and nursing home malpractice awards. As we’ve discussed, under no circumstances can an award for non-economic damages (e.g., pain, suffering, disfigurement, etc.) be more than $250,000.00. If a jury, in its judgment, believes a person’s damages are worth more than the cap, a judge must reduce it. There are many, many…

There is a very interesting legal story developing in Oceanside. Early on Christmas morning, 44-year-old Jimmy Misaalefua was gunned down in the cul-d-sac where he lived by his neighbor Robert Pulley. According to news accounts, Misaalefua was beloved in his community, a former Marine and college football player, who was an active volunteer in the…

This is an amazing jury verdict. In 2004, Daniel Carlock was scuba diving with Ocean Adventures Dive Co. out of Los Angeles. During a dive near an oil rig, Carlock surfaced about 400 feet from the dive boat when he had trouble equalizing the pressure in his ears. As he tread on the surface of…

We have all see schlocky television ads for lawyers, but here’s a list of lawyer ads that should be given awards for their awfulness. Click here to see several AWFULLY HILLARIOUS LAWYER ADS But this one definitely has to be the best of the worst: Source: asylum.com The accident and injury attorneys at Walton Law…

The Boy Scouts of America have agreed to settle a lawsuit with six former scouts who alleged that they were molested in the 1980s by their Portland area scout leader. The settlement is confidential, but to avoid trial, the Boy Scouts have agreed to pay an additional $2.25 million in punitive damages. One of the…

Watch this excellent video from the Consumer Attorneys of California about what lawyers are doing now, and have done for centuries, to protect the rights of individuals. I particularly like that it highlights California’s Medical Injury Compensation Reform Act (MICRA) and the injustice it has caused. Most people don’t realize that the non-economic damages caused…

One of the most maligned jury verdicts in United States history is the McDonald’s coffee case. You can approach 100 people on the street and ask if they’ve heard of it, and 95 will have heard of it, and a majority of those will have a negative opinion. The case has been used as an…