Not a fan of personal injury attorneys in this town, but f*** uber. Ignoring even the car crashes, uber has had a problem with drivers harming people (mostly women and girls) for years and done nothing about it. They deserve to get worked over by the plaintiff’s bar.
And as someone who does occasional contingency work outside of personal injury, a double fuck you to Uber. My contingency clients will NEVER get counsel if this passes. They will be completely fucked over by more powerful and rich people EVERY time. I’ve done the math and my contingency cases, aggregated, pay LESS than my hourly rate. People can poo poo this all they want, but this really is about access to justice. Uber is indifferent to the collateral damage they are going to cause outside of personal injury cases.
What is often lost in the routine vilification of the Plaintiffs’ bar is their roles as mediators of public anger. I have no idea what happens in PI mills, but I have spent a lot of time explaining and promoting the fairness of the legal process to civil litigants or prospective clients who are extremely upset at a perceived wrong. I have had to convince a fair number of people that certain judges / companies / opposing counsel were not racist, or corrupt, or had some personal vendetta against them, etc. just because they received an adverse ruling, or had to answer a few tough questions at a deposition, or experienced some other aspect of the legal process or legal reality that was unfamiliar or uncomfortable to them.
Where will all of that anger will go when the human beings I talk to don’t have anyone to guide them – especially if those folks are told by one attorney after another that their grievance, while legally meritorious, isn’t “valuable” enough to undertake? Uber may not care about the consequences of breaking this social contract, but the rest of us should.
Brian Thompson would be able to answer this question. But he is dead, apparently because someone felt they had no other outlet. And that is not the most consequential part. That killer is now hailed as a hero by tens of millions of Americans. Maybe the Uber CEO’s should stop and read the zeitgeist a little more closely.
You mean like when they passed the medmal law, and it made NV a great place for doctors right?
We have plenty of medical professionals now, and they’re more affordable because they don’t have to worry about those nasty plaintiff’s lawyers, right?
ding ding ding. What kind of insurance company wants to provide services in a city where every other god damn car doesn’t have a license plate, insurance, registration, and a license?
You know what would bring down rates? If LVMPD actually enforced traffic laws.
I’d say it’s a combination of things. PI attorneys are admittedly out of control, but since they largely fund the judicial elections I don’t see that changing any time in the near future. The doctors are in on it too. We attorneys get the bad rep, but the doctors are as shady if not more so. We’ve got a local economy that is driven by gambling which virtually always includes alcohol and we have absolute trash for public transportation here. The taxicab authority made taking a cab anywhere in town prohibitively expensive and most cab drivers wouldn’t leave the strip anyways. Uber and Lyft are more expensive here because even though they aren’t cheap, the cabs are so expensive it is easy to undercut them. We’ve got a very transient population with lots of people coming here for short term gig type work and/or moving here and realizing Vegas is going to eat them alive so they have to go home to Michigan. It all adds up to crazy roads and high insurance rates.
The reason for contingency fees is to allow an injured person, who cannot pay for attorney services, to be able to obtain representation to recover for his/her’s injury.
Now, given that most PI cases are minimal injury, and assuming fees are capped at 20%, means that most people with a vehicular related injury will not be able to obtain representation.
The cost to prosecute, conduct discovery, time, etc. means that the PI bar cannot take these cases.
I hope the NV SC applies common sense, but I am skeptical in light of the court’s gutting of fixed fee arrangements which are in the interest of the public.
..PS – I am not a PI attorney
NVSC is not aware that they gutted flat fees. Our firm is among those who simply stopped offering flat fees in light of the “mile post” standard. That standard turns flat fees into a combination of the worst parts of hourly work and the worst parts of flat fee work. If I do $12,000.00 of work on a $9,000.00 flat fee, no ethical problems. but if I work efficiently and do $7,000.00 of work without “mile posts” it’s not a reward for efficient work, but an ethical infraction.
Clients like flat fees because they know *exactly* what they will pay up front. I liked flat fees because I could still make my hourly rate across multiple cases.
I had a law professor who used to say bad cases make bad law. When an attorney takes a 5 figure retainer and then the action gets cancelled before anything is filed and the clients get a refund of less than 20% of the retainer, there’s going to be questions asked. If the fee cannot be justified, it should have been returned. Instead, someone got greedy and kept more than they were entitled to and here we are.
2:50 PM here. Agree on all counts. The attorney in that case was greedy and I extend no sympathy towards her. My sympathies are for the loss of access to justice, which was never intended, but is the obvious result. I have plenty of work, I don’t need flat fees, but I feel bad turning people away who want the certainty of what something is going to cost.
There used to be an attorney named jan paul koch who advertised his 21% contingency fee—others responded in kind….If other PI attorneys stop taking cases with a 20% cap, there will be other attorneys to fill the void, and they will make a killing on the volume
Even if that’s true, it’s under the free market and the right of freedom to contract, not a statutory restriction rammed by Uber.
Guest
Anonymous
December 6, 2024 11:07 am
If Uber wins, it’ll be a huge blow to not only plaintiffs lawyers in town, but defense counsel as well. They’re a corporate monolith that regularly screws over both its drivers and customers. Don’t be fooled by them for a second.
The public will be fooled on this, trust me. Very fooled. This is peak “leopards at my face” stuff.
It is going to be genuinely tragic, when they, or their wives/sisters/daughters are sexually assaulted by an uber drive and can’t get anyone to take their case, which is exactly what Uber wants.
Agreed. There is no overwhelming public policy reason, like Med Mal, to limit attorneys fees in all civil cases. Whatever happened to freedom to contract?
There was no overwhelming, legitimate public policy reason for med mal either, but the public certainly got sold a bill of goods into believing there was one.
Guest
Anonymous
December 6, 2024 11:10 am
I’m taking a Lyft.
Guest
Anonymous
December 6, 2024 11:48 am
Does anyone know when consent became a mitigating circumstance for sentencing on Statutory Rape? Or did this judge get it very wrong?
However, as argued in front of the supreme court earlier this week, minors are capable of determining whether to receive gender affirming care-as long as there parents affirm their decision.
A school employee in a position of authority raping a minor child student who is legally incapable of consenting to sex is not the same as gender. Take your sicko comments back under the rock with you when you go.
(Not 2:11p here) – How exactly is a decision about sex not the same as a decision wanting and agreeing to physical alterations, either internal or external, of one’s body? The one answer I know is that, hopefully a parent wouldn’t affirm the minor’s decision because it’s a bad thing for the minor. Parents don’t seem to think the same for their child changing genders. The lawsuits by adults whose parents and doctors did those things to them when they were minors are just starting.
Your comments are revealing. I never said the two are the same in all regards. However, the fact children can’t consent to either is the same.
Also, I am extremely concerned about youth pastors sexually abusing children. It’s disgusting and disturbing. From my comment, what would make you think that I’m not concerned about this?
Because you dared to point out the absolutely logical correlation with “if they can’t legally consent to sex, they can’t legally consent to sex change”.
This challenges the left’s approach to the trans narrative and gives 543 the right to deflect your logic into the played out “youth pastor” argument.
Its all horseshit and they know it. Keep telling the truth and they will continue to lose their minds. It’s inevitable.
This is the equivalent to me arguing “Hey, I don’t think a minor can consent to getting a tattoo, or a purely cosmetic surgery” and the response being “SO YOU’RE SAYING A MINOR BEING RAPED AND GETTING A TATTOO ARE THE SAME THING???!?!?!?!!??!?!? MAYBE YOU SHOULD FOCUS ON THE BOY SCOUT SEXUAL ASSAULT CASES BIGOT.”
We’re supposed to be lawyer and be able to discuss things logically.
Gender affirming care, performed by a licensed doctor, with informed consent from a parent, helps the kid express their gender consistent with how they feel. It’s not a short process. You don’t show up to school in the morning as a boy, decide during 1st period that you’re a girl, and get gender surgery during lunch. This is medical care that is designed to benefit the kid.
Sex with an adult is obviously different. And we have laws and bright lines in place to protect kids from adults. We don’t let kids consent to sex with adults because of the obvious power/age/influence imbalance. There’s no “well this is for the kid’s benefit” argument to support letting adults have sex with minors.
And we DO give kids lots of ability to make their own decisions, right? They can get a drivers license. They can apply to colleges. But as a society we’ve decided that minors can’t consent to sex with adults for their own protection.
“Because pedo sex is the same as getting a driver’s license.” I’m arguing the opposite of that. It’s NOT the same as getting a drivers license. And we should NOT let kids consent to sex with adults, full stop.
The 8th lets child rapists off easy all the time. After they get smacked on the wrist in criminal court, they head down to family court where those judges give them unsupervised visitation with the kids. Great little system we got here.
Juden’s resignation probably had nothing to do with the decision and timing on the lawsuit by the former city manager. https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/nv-supreme-court/115796194.html
Not a fan of personal injury attorneys in this town, but f*** uber. Ignoring even the car crashes, uber has had a problem with drivers harming people (mostly women and girls) for years and done nothing about it. They deserve to get worked over by the plaintiff’s bar.
And as someone who does occasional contingency work outside of personal injury, a double fuck you to Uber. My contingency clients will NEVER get counsel if this passes. They will be completely fucked over by more powerful and rich people EVERY time. I’ve done the math and my contingency cases, aggregated, pay LESS than my hourly rate. People can poo poo this all they want, but this really is about access to justice. Uber is indifferent to the collateral damage they are going to cause outside of personal injury cases.
To be fair though, what is your hourly rate?
What is often lost in the routine vilification of the Plaintiffs’ bar is their roles as mediators of public anger. I have no idea what happens in PI mills, but I have spent a lot of time explaining and promoting the fairness of the legal process to civil litigants or prospective clients who are extremely upset at a perceived wrong. I have had to convince a fair number of people that certain judges / companies / opposing counsel were not racist, or corrupt, or had some personal vendetta against them, etc. just because they received an adverse ruling, or had to answer a few tough questions at a deposition, or experienced some other aspect of the legal process or legal reality that was unfamiliar or uncomfortable to them.
Where will all of that anger will go when the human beings I talk to don’t have anyone to guide them – especially if those folks are told by one attorney after another that their grievance, while legally meritorious, isn’t “valuable” enough to undertake? Uber may not care about the consequences of breaking this social contract, but the rest of us should.
Brian Thompson would be able to answer this question. But he is dead, apparently because someone felt they had no other outlet. And that is not the most consequential part. That killer is now hailed as a hero by tens of millions of Americans. Maybe the Uber CEO’s should stop and read the zeitgeist a little more closely.
Why are our insurance rates so high in Clark County? It is because these PI attorneys need for their 40%.
Or because we’re covering the damage from all the drivers that don’t have insurance.
People will be shocked – SHOCKED – when the Uber initiative passes and premiums don’t go down.
You mean like when they passed the medmal law, and it made NV a great place for doctors right?
We have plenty of medical professionals now, and they’re more affordable because they don’t have to worry about those nasty plaintiff’s lawyers, right?
KODIN was, and continues to be, an abject failure based on bad data and championed by lobbyists that couldn’t care less about Nevada healthcare.
20 years later and we still have the worst healthcare in the country.
ding ding ding. What kind of insurance company wants to provide services in a city where every other god damn car doesn’t have a license plate, insurance, registration, and a license?
You know what would bring down rates? If LVMPD actually enforced traffic laws.
I’d say it’s a combination of things. PI attorneys are admittedly out of control, but since they largely fund the judicial elections I don’t see that changing any time in the near future. The doctors are in on it too. We attorneys get the bad rep, but the doctors are as shady if not more so. We’ve got a local economy that is driven by gambling which virtually always includes alcohol and we have absolute trash for public transportation here. The taxicab authority made taking a cab anywhere in town prohibitively expensive and most cab drivers wouldn’t leave the strip anyways. Uber and Lyft are more expensive here because even though they aren’t cheap, the cabs are so expensive it is easy to undercut them. We’ve got a very transient population with lots of people coming here for short term gig type work and/or moving here and realizing Vegas is going to eat them alive so they have to go home to Michigan. It all adds up to crazy roads and high insurance rates.
The reason for contingency fees is to allow an injured person, who cannot pay for attorney services, to be able to obtain representation to recover for his/her’s injury.
Now, given that most PI cases are minimal injury, and assuming fees are capped at 20%, means that most people with a vehicular related injury will not be able to obtain representation.
The cost to prosecute, conduct discovery, time, etc. means that the PI bar cannot take these cases.
I hope the NV SC applies common sense, but I am skeptical in light of the court’s gutting of fixed fee arrangements which are in the interest of the public.
..PS – I am not a PI attorney
NVSC is not aware that they gutted flat fees. Our firm is among those who simply stopped offering flat fees in light of the “mile post” standard. That standard turns flat fees into a combination of the worst parts of hourly work and the worst parts of flat fee work. If I do $12,000.00 of work on a $9,000.00 flat fee, no ethical problems. but if I work efficiently and do $7,000.00 of work without “mile posts” it’s not a reward for efficient work, but an ethical infraction.
Clients like flat fees because they know *exactly* what they will pay up front. I liked flat fees because I could still make my hourly rate across multiple cases.
I had a law professor who used to say bad cases make bad law. When an attorney takes a 5 figure retainer and then the action gets cancelled before anything is filed and the clients get a refund of less than 20% of the retainer, there’s going to be questions asked. If the fee cannot be justified, it should have been returned. Instead, someone got greedy and kept more than they were entitled to and here we are.
2:50 PM here. Agree on all counts. The attorney in that case was greedy and I extend no sympathy towards her. My sympathies are for the loss of access to justice, which was never intended, but is the obvious result. I have plenty of work, I don’t need flat fees, but I feel bad turning people away who want the certainty of what something is going to cost.
There used to be an attorney named jan paul koch who advertised his 21% contingency fee—others responded in kind….If other PI attorneys stop taking cases with a 20% cap, there will be other attorneys to fill the void, and they will make a killing on the volume
Even if that’s true, it’s under the free market and the right of freedom to contract, not a statutory restriction rammed by Uber.
If Uber wins, it’ll be a huge blow to not only plaintiffs lawyers in town, but defense counsel as well. They’re a corporate monolith that regularly screws over both its drivers and customers. Don’t be fooled by them for a second.
The public will be fooled on this, trust me. Very fooled. This is peak “leopards at my face” stuff.
It is going to be genuinely tragic, when they, or their wives/sisters/daughters are sexually assaulted by an uber drive and can’t get anyone to take their case, which is exactly what Uber wants.
Agreed. There is no overwhelming public policy reason, like Med Mal, to limit attorneys fees in all civil cases. Whatever happened to freedom to contract?
There was no overwhelming, legitimate public policy reason for med mal either, but the public certainly got sold a bill of goods into believing there was one.
I’m taking a Lyft.
Does anyone know when consent became a mitigating circumstance for sentencing on Statutory Rape? Or did this judge get it very wrong?
https://www.8newsnow.com/news/local-news/former-ccsd-janitor-avoids-prison-in-sex-crimes-case/
Looks like he pled to a lesser offense.
Still, it seems fucked up to consider consent… I thought that was the whole issue with them being a minor?
Agreed. Minors are incapable of consent. He was in a position of authority. Consent should not have been a consideration.
However, as argued in front of the supreme court earlier this week, minors are capable of determining whether to receive gender affirming care-as long as there parents affirm their decision.
A school employee in a position of authority raping a minor child student who is legally incapable of consenting to sex is not the same as gender. Take your sicko comments back under the rock with you when you go.
If you’re really so goddamn concerned for children, why don’t you turn your karen eyeballs on to the youth pastors. Here’s a start. There’s 700 entries but you obviously have nothing better to do: https://www.npr.org/2022/05/27/1101734793/southern-baptist-sexual-abuse-list-released
(Not 2:11p here) – How exactly is a decision about sex not the same as a decision wanting and agreeing to physical alterations, either internal or external, of one’s body? The one answer I know is that, hopefully a parent wouldn’t affirm the minor’s decision because it’s a bad thing for the minor. Parents don’t seem to think the same for their child changing genders. The lawsuits by adults whose parents and doctors did those things to them when they were minors are just starting.
2:11 here.
Your comments are revealing. I never said the two are the same in all regards. However, the fact children can’t consent to either is the same.
Also, I am extremely concerned about youth pastors sexually abusing children. It’s disgusting and disturbing. From my comment, what would make you think that I’m not concerned about this?
Because you dared to point out the absolutely logical correlation with “if they can’t legally consent to sex, they can’t legally consent to sex change”.
This challenges the left’s approach to the trans narrative and gives 543 the right to deflect your logic into the played out “youth pastor” argument.
Its all horseshit and they know it. Keep telling the truth and they will continue to lose their minds. It’s inevitable.
2:11 here.
Spot on. So dumb.
This is the equivalent to me arguing “Hey, I don’t think a minor can consent to getting a tattoo, or a purely cosmetic surgery” and the response being “SO YOU’RE SAYING A MINOR BEING RAPED AND GETTING A TATTOO ARE THE SAME THING???!?!?!?!!??!?!? MAYBE YOU SHOULD FOCUS ON THE BOY SCOUT SEXUAL ASSAULT CASES BIGOT.”
We’re supposed to be lawyer and be able to discuss things logically.
I think we’re way oversimplifying things here.
Gender affirming care, performed by a licensed doctor, with informed consent from a parent, helps the kid express their gender consistent with how they feel. It’s not a short process. You don’t show up to school in the morning as a boy, decide during 1st period that you’re a girl, and get gender surgery during lunch. This is medical care that is designed to benefit the kid.
Sex with an adult is obviously different. And we have laws and bright lines in place to protect kids from adults. We don’t let kids consent to sex with adults because of the obvious power/age/influence imbalance. There’s no “well this is for the kid’s benefit” argument to support letting adults have sex with minors.
And we DO give kids lots of ability to make their own decisions, right? They can get a drivers license. They can apply to colleges. But as a society we’ve decided that minors can’t consent to sex with adults for their own protection.
OK here we go.
There it is. The the low key minimization and justification of pedophile child rapists.
“Because pedo sex is the same as getting a driver’s license.”
You are fucking insane. How about letting kids buy guns? They too have second amendment rights, do they not?
Kids cannot consent to sex and kids cannot consent to life altering surgery. Even with the “informed consent of a parent”.
You are the problem.
Homie you are totally misreading what I wrote.
“Because pedo sex is the same as getting a driver’s license.” I’m arguing the opposite of that. It’s NOT the same as getting a drivers license. And we should NOT let kids consent to sex with adults, full stop.
“But as a society we’ve decided that minors can’t consent to sex with adults for their own protection.”
Thanks for the clarification.
The 8th lets child rapists off easy all the time. After they get smacked on the wrist in criminal court, they head down to family court where those judges give them unsupervised visitation with the kids. Great little system we got here.
Even if they get more severe punishment, the effect of the cabal is to put them with those people.