Ronald Miller, Jr. has an excellent post on his blog about the recent Eleventh Circuit case about people going through bankruptcy who do not list all assets, including potential lawsuits. Read the post and the case itself as these are good reminders of how careful we have to be when dealing with clients who are in bankruptcy.
The NY Times has a very interesting article about a study that was conducted to find out whether parties to a lawsuit typically make the right or wrong decision about going to trial. This only looks at the money aspect - did the plaintiff get more or less money and did the defendant pay out more or less money. There are, of course, other aspects than just money - for example a party's reputation may be at stake at the trial may be worth the risk. But this is an interesting article to consider for both lawyers and parties.
Traditionally summary judgment has been used against plaintiffs in Alabama car wreck cases (and other types of personal injury cases) by defendants. Defendants have used this device to narrow the issues and to remove from the jury's consideration theories such as wantoness that might support punitive damages. There have been times when it would be appropriate for the plaintiff to use the summary judgment approach against the defendant but traditionally we did not want to do that - we thought it was better to talk about liability rather than just have a trial on damages. This would occur in a typical rear-ender case.
Experience in the last couple of years has taught us, however, that it is best to win whatever can be won before standing in front of the jury. We have had situations where a juror may decide rear ending someone is not negligence and that affects the ultimate award the jury returns.
Our approach now is to use this device against defendants. An excellent discussion of this approach is found in the Baltimore Injury Law Blog's recent post on "Offensive Summary Judgment In Injury Cases" by John Bratt.
Elliott Wilcox has a short article that really captures the meaning of this somewhat obscure rule of evidence. This is used when your witness at one time knew the answer, and recorded that answer in writing, but now cannot remember it. Even when showed the document there is still no memory. What do you do?
Read this fine article for the answer and sign up to get these trial tips from Elliott delivered to your email every Friday. We look forward to them every week.
