Update (June 5, 2020): Our hope (expressed in the original post below) has been realized. The Minnesota Supreme Court struck down the “hoary” common law doctrine of champerty this week in Maslowski v. Prospect Funding Partners. Read the Minnesota Supreme Court’s discussion of the origin of the doctrine and it will highlight how out of […]
The practice of LEVENTHAL pllc is broad and includes an array of Minnesota civil litigation (litigation involving colleagues, customers, competitors, vendors and lenders, we sometimes say). But we have niche expertise in a particular area of Minnesota civil litigation: legal malpractice. As such, by statute, we are obligated to hire attorney experts in the vast […]
Update (May 28, 2020): We’re going to chalk up the original post, below, as a “win,” that is, as a successful prediction. It’s a bit of a stretch on our part because we did not specifically predict the outcome but we did suggest that a fair analysis would result in the outcome that did, in […]
In 2017, LEVENTHAL pllc (and Burns Law Firm PLLC) represented Mr. Lamar Ferguson, the victim of police officers’ excessive force (in our view), one of whom was Officer Tou Thao (the Complaint is linked here). Officer Thao was terminated today for his role in the death of George Floyd, who was effectively strangled by the […]
May 22, 2020 Update: We have covered the Kedrowski v. Lycoming lawsuit for years now. It is a lawsuit over a small plane crash case that resulted terrible physical injuries to the pilot and a $27 million jury verdict. In our most recent post (below) we questioned how courts could find that attorney misconduct infected […]
At a minimum in order to pass the bar and get a law license, it is possible that almost every U.S. lawyer over the past 100 years or so has had to learn the acronym “OCEAN” to remember the prerequisites for a claim for adverse possession (Open, Continuous, Exclusive, Adverse, Notorious). The Minnesota Supreme Court […]
The linked recent sanctions order from U.S. Mag. Judge Katherine M. Menendez (D. Minn.) is a scalding, withering, and lacerating indictment of defendants and one of their lawyers, in particular. Hit up pp. 31-33 for a list of “the most egregious examples” of misconduct by Chicago-based lead defense counsel, Alexander Loftus. Massive red flags surfaced […]
We have previously posted about “the enigma of foreseeability.” The COVID-19 pandemic gives us another chance to challenge the superficially simple concept of “foreseeability.” On the one hand, it is obvious that very few of us could have predicted the COVID-19 pandemic even six months ago. It was therefore “unforeseeable,” right? On the other hand, […]
Update (April 8, 2020): We are coming up on the one-year anniversary of our coverage of the Prairie River Home Care v. Procura case, which we have highlighted as a fine example of how not to defend a lawsuit. We’ve posted about the case several times. To review, Procura agreed to provide a software system […]
Black’s Law Dictionary defines a force majeure clause as “[a] contractual provision allocating the risk if performance becomes impossible or impracticable, esp. as a result of an event or effect that the parties could not have anticipated or controlled.” Black’s Law Dictionary 673-74 (8th ed. 2004). A force majeure event is commonly considered to be […]