business of law

Legal issues involving drones are an emerging practice area for lawyers, the Connecticut Law Tribune reports. One incident, involving a journalist trying to use a drone to shoot video of a fatal car crash, is being investigated by Hartford police and the Federal Aviation Administration, CLT also reports.

Jonathan Orleans, of Pullman & Comley attorney, told CLT "'there will certainly be negligence and invasion of privacy claims made. And where the drone was operated for a government entity, such as for law enforcement purposes, there will be issues of government immunity. Given the multiplicity of potential uses for the technology and the inventiveness of lawyers, the potential for legal work is quite large."'

ProPublica reports on a little-covered problem: some people harmed by medical malpractice can't find any attorneys to take their cases.

This is a phenomenon that many plaintiffs lawyers told me about when I was regularly reporting on medical-malpractice litigation for The Legal Intelligencer. Med mal cases are very expensive to work up because they require expert witnesses and scientific-oriented discovery, and many firms will not take cases in which the injury is less catastrophic or their are low economic damages because the return on investing in the case is so low.

ProPublica reports on the "problem faced by many who are harmed in a medical setting: Attorneys refuse their cases, not because the harm didn’t happen but because the potential economic damages are too low." This includes the elderly who have low incomes because they are retired, because their medical bills are picked up by Medicare and they typically have no dependents, ProPublica further reports.

As JPMorgan's legal costs mount from several governmental investigations, the investment firm has set aside a $23 billion reserve fund for litigation costs, The New York Times reports. But all the bank's legal woes will be good for law firms: "Even as defense lawyers publicly complain that government regulators are being too aggressive, they privately celebrate the windfall. Law firms in New York and Washington are collectively earning many hundreds of millions of dollars representing JPMorgan in cases ranging from weak controls against money laundering to commodities trading, according to interviews with senior partners at several of top firms," The Times also reports.

Two recent losses by litigation-funding outfits led to this interesting report from the Wall Street Journal. One tidbit: "Litigation finance is a growing field that now includes a number of specialty firms that maintain multimillion-dollar portfolios devoted to legal investments. Hedge funds and individual investors also occasionally purchase stakes in litigation as part of a broader investment strategy. There at least five litigation-finance firms in the U.S., U.K. and Australia that have $100 million or more under management. With litigation finance, funders advance money to help people and companies pay for lawsuits they would otherwise be unable to pursue. Critics are concerned that the practice could give outside investors undue influence over legal decisions and allow frivolous lawsuits to go forward, driving up the overall cost of litigation."