The Trump Show: A Separate Reality

 Posted on November 08, 2023 in Courts

I have spent my professional life in and around courtrooms.

The Court system has a simple, clear, and traditional way to deal with litigants who reject its authority, reject the good faith of its prosecutors, and reject the fairness of its judges or elected officials. So, how does the system respond? With predictable results. The system’s only response to an out-of-control litigant is to exercise its levers of power or control. That Trump cannot or will not see this is comical since he was in the seat of power once. I expect that Trump’s business will be dealt a death blow. That is the only way the judicial system can respond to this nonsense.

It is difficult to convey how outside the mainstream Trump and his lawyers’ presentation of their case has been to non-lawyers or non-litigators. Obviously, what he is doing is not normal behavior. A person involved in a lawsuit, a party, calling the process, the prosecutor, and the judge a fraud or worse is simply outrageous. Amusingly, his lawyers seem to be doing little to prevent his antics. I have to assume that they know that there is little they can do to control Trump and he is going to do what he wants to do regardless of their advice. They are getting paid and whether they are good or bad lawyers does not seem to matter very much in this case. I have two quick pieces of analysis that have not been broached on the endless shows focused on Trump’s civil case.

Continue Reading ››

NOTHING BOTHERS ME MORE THAN PROFESSIONAL ATHLETES WHO FAIL UNDER PRESSURE

 Posted on October 30, 2023 in Best of

No one does grace under pressure like the one and only Mr. October, Reggie Jackson.

The figure skater who falls during their routine at the Olympics or the quarterback who throws an interception or the tennis player who double faults. Why? While there is tremendous pressure on these athletes, many of us manage to perform our jobs at a high level for decades without failing under pressure. So, the pro tennis player who cannot serve under pressure is a whole lot different than me double faulting in my weekly tennis match. This is their job. They are paid crazy amounts of money to perform under pressure and to see failure there is just pathetic to me.
I would guess that the only real difference between professional lawyers, doctors, engineers, and these athletes is age and experience and the fact that 50,000 people are not watching. The number of people watching does not impress me. This is their job. They have developed into pros in that setting. However, age and years of experience may be factors that the athletes simply cannot attain. Djokovic, Federer, Serena all made a splash early, but their grinding persistent success in destroying opponents made them legends.
Many of us have immense pressure to perform on a weekly if not monthly basis. Our success in our professional lives often depends on that performance. I just finished a trial. I may win or lose but I am certainly not going to forget to prepare or quail under pressure when giving an opening statement. Pressure is a privilege said Billy Jean King. Pressure is also something to be managed and prepared for.
There are athletes who rise to the pressure and perform on the big stage. I grew up as a New York Yankee fan and the owner, George Steinbrenner, called outfielder Dave Winfield “Mr. May”, which was trolling in the worst way. This contrasted with Reggie Jackson, whose nickname was Mr. October. You want players who perform in the playoffs in October, hence Mr. May was a way of saying Winfield was one who would fail under pressure.
In the words of one Bill Belichick, head coach of the New England Patriots, Do Your Job!

Continue Reading ››

THE WORST ADVICE EVER GIVEN TO A PERSONAL INJURY CLIENT

 Posted on October 30, 2023 in Case Matters

Bad advice leads to bad outcomes.

A potential client recently contacted me 22 months after an out of state car accident. The case sounded fairly easy and something I would have been interested in 22 months ago. However, when queried as to why it took 22 months to contact a lawyer, the client reported that a lawyer told them to wait until the statute of limitations was almost up before contacting a lawyer.
Now, I don’t know if this is the worst legal advice ever given to a client. But, in personal injury practice, it may qualify as such. This advice prevented the client from turning an okay or decent case into a good one and, frankly, prevented the client from having a case at all. The only “lawyer” I can think of that would provide such advice is State Farm in house counsel or some similar pathetic excuse for a practitioner. There, I said it.
There are other legendary bad pieces of legal advice, but I have not spent too much time collecting them. How about selling the fake electors scheme to trump? That may go down as a doozy. Not only did you likely get the leader of the free world convicted, but you also lost your law license and that of a bunch of other lawyers. Excellent work.

Continue Reading ››

TRIAL REPORT: FEDERAL COURT BENCH TRIAL

 Posted on October 30, 2023 in Case Matters

I just finished a three-day bench trial in federal court in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania (EDPA). The facts of the case in brief were that a 68-year-old woman went through a TSA checkpoint at Philadelphia International Airport, removed her shoes, and slipped and fell on the terrazzo marble-type flooring after she was cleared to pick up her belongings. The fall was captured on video. The client plainly steps off a rubber mat and her sock covered foot just slips out from under her. She breaks her knee and has surgery and lifelong pain and suffering. The defendants were the City of Philadelphia, which owns the airport, and your friends at TSA, represented by the U.S. Attorney’s office and/or the Department of Justice.

Under the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA), a plaintiff is not entitled to a jury trial, so this was tried to a judge. We call these bench trials. This was my first bench trial and while it took about half the time a jury trial would have, we still got through a lot of testimony in a short period. The preparation is the same. Amusingly, the time spent on trial was very compressed because it was a bench trial. If this trial had been to a jury, it would have taken a week and a half. We worked through four defense witnesses, two plaintiff’s witnesses, two orthopedic surgeons, and two flooring experts.

Continue Reading ››

Big Case This Week…

 Posted on October 23, 2023 in Uncategorized

Big week here at Neuwirth Law– here’s the case we’re working on:

 

 

Judge denies summary judgment to U.S. government, in case of woman injured at TSA checkpoint

PHILADELPHIA – A federal judge has denied the U.S. government’s motion for summary judgment, in response to a Delaware woman’s negligence lawsuit which contended she was injured when going through a Transportation Security Administration checkpoint at Philadelphia International Airport more than two years ago.

Continue Reading ››

Mink on the Loose in Pennsylvania: Nuisance

 Posted on October 23, 2023 in Case Matters

Minks are a nuisance? Hold my beer…

I love a good mink story. According to the New York Post, some animal activist released 6,000 mink from a mink farm in PA. I know next to nothing about mink or minks. What I do know is that mink farming forms the basis for one of the pivotal cases in nuisance law.

I always have a few nuisance cases in my case load because they are largely indefensible and fun to work on. I currently have cases in litigation against UGI, a big gas transporter and Energy Transfer or Sunoco’s successor for being a nuisance to the community. The UGI case alleges that it operates a compressor plant that runs 24/7 compressing natural gas in northern PA and destroyed my client’s family hunting grounds as bucolic places of refuge. Bucolic is a good word. In any event, the compressor plant is not moving and nor is my client.

Continue Reading ››

Influencers Gone Crazy / How it Affects the Law of Evidence:

 Posted on October 23, 2023 in Case Matters

It is getting harder and harder to trust anything online these days. Be careful what you read or consume is just no longer possible. To be fooled is easy for all of us. If you are somewhat attuned to the social media world, like I am at 55 years old, it is easy to miss fakes, deepfakes, photoshops etc.  I recently saw a guy with a side hustle renting out a gulfstream jet that was under repair for influencers to use as a set showing them in their private jet on the way to fakeland. It was worth a chuckle and smh. Don’t know that abbreviation (shaking my head a/k/a people are crazy)? Suffice it to say that we will all be deceived in the future. The sheer amount of fakery out there affects perceptions of all things internet.

In Court, how a judge perceives the internet and its reliability will matter in a lot of cases.  I recently finished up a products liability case where consumer complaints about a product were a major point in my case. I was trying to establish that prior complaints meant that the company was on notice of the dangers of the product and that similar incidents had occurred.  The complaints were made online through a store’s website and responded to by the manufacturer. Many complaints were noted to be by “verified purchaser”. To me, these were admissible for a variety of reasons. To the defense, they were merely out of court statements offered for the truth of the matter asserted.  That is classic hearsay and not permissible in evidence because you cannot drag the internet commenter into court to cross-examine them.  But, the law moves slowly and painfully slowly at times.   Should internet comments and reviews be admissible?  It certainly seems like they should in my case, but reliability is the lynchpin or gravamen or touchstone of evidence and admissibility.  There are ways around the rule against hearsay, but pithy internet commenter posts are amusing and often distill the problem with the product to its very essence.

Continue Reading ››

Philly Rules!

 Posted on October 13, 2023 in In the News

Go Phillies! Go Eagles!

Continue Reading ››

Cloudy with a chance of a lawsuit?

 Posted on October 13, 2023 in Suing Big Box Stores

If you don’t know the children’s book Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs and the movie, the townspeople never had to shop because their meals would fall from the sky fully prepared. Later on, climate change makes things dangerous. For me, the notion of things unexpectedly falling from the sky is instructive.  For no apparent reason, I have been on the receiving end of a series of claims against Home Depot and Lowe’s and other big box type stores.  The typical case goes as follows: A person goes to Lowe’s and is picking something off of a shelf at head level or higher.  There are no ladders around and customers are not permitted to be on ladders anyway.  So, the customer pulls a 2×4 or something large off the overhead shelf and Bam! something other than the 2×4 falls on them from above.  I have had two or three of these calls in the past six months and I am just one of many personal injury lawyers so it is safe to assume that this is a persistent problem. I used to have one a year, but that looks to have quadrupled by my count.

Continue Reading ››

Suing the City of Philadelphia and Other Municipalities

 Posted on October 13, 2023 in Uncategorized

I recently received an inquiry from a caller from the internet who was hoping to force the City to clean up the Kensington neighborhood. This is not something you can sue over as the City has immunity for quality of life issues like this. Nevertheless, what is to be done? Kensington is a mess, an eyesore, a failure of our social compact where we pay taxes and the City maintains the City in good working order. If you don’t know what I am talking about, google tik toks on Kensington. It’s not pretty. When I asked a local Kensington resident if there were any positives or green shoots or hope, he said, well, there is no obesity epidemic here.

While Kensington is perhaps an outlier, this is a problem occurring in various forms in other cities. When opiods were ravaging Appalachia, it was less obvious or apparent. Now, homelessness and drug use are more apparent and the solutions remain unproductive or ineffectual.

Regardless, you can only sue the City of Philly, or Norristown, or Allentown for certain prescribed offenses. No matter how negligent an employee is, that does not open them to suit unless they are driving a city vehicle or failing to maintain property or sidewalks etc.

Continue Reading ››