Insurance Law

Scruggs Nation, March 25: the breather

By David Rossmiller

I have to conserve my time and energy between now and April 2, when I'll be speaking at the Mississippi State Insurance Day, because I need both to work on my speech.  Writing jokes is hard to do and takes a lot of time, I know people are expecting some new ones.  There is some more serious stuff in the speech, too. I won't, however, be performing any of the songs from my musical-in-progress, "The Katrina Follies," not even from the showstopping third act, which has its own title, with a double meaning: "Scruggscapades on Ice."  So posts may be more limited this week.

--  This is excellent stuff.  The Wall Street Journal Law Blog is questioning whether it is ethical for a defense lawyer like John Keker to rave on about how his client is innocent and being set up by in a fraudulent prosecution, right up to the moment the guy pleads guilty to the fraudulent charges.  You might also remember that Keker wrote a letter to the Journal back around November 20, just before the Scruggs really hit the fan, demanding a retraction because the Journal said Scruggs convinced the Rigsby sisters to steal documents from State Farm.  Untrue on two accounts, said Keker -- they decided to copy the documents all by themselves (I am not making this up) and they didn't steal anything.  

Except that in this deposition from November 20 Kerri Rigsby herself agreed she had stolen the documents -- or at least, neither she nor her lawyer quarreled with that description.  The Keker comments and the Law Blog post are also discussed on this blog sponsored by the Carnegie Legal Reporting @ Newhouse -- which I've read before and which is a pretty decent site. 

I'm not sure of the ethics of it, myself.  I mean, in one way, I've come to expect that a great many lawyers will spew gushers of malarkey and tommyrot in the face of the most obvious contradictions and without regard for either what the truth is or whether they are making total jackasses out of themselves.  Doesn't necessarily make it right, but I've never seen anyone do anything about it, either. But even though it's a losing battle, I'm glad the Law Blog is taking a look at this.

-- I appreciate the link from George Wallace at Declarations and Exclusions, but I am sorry to hear that my own blogging would lead to a lessening of anyone else's output.  There are a lot of people who try to sell lawyers on blogging for various reasons, attracting new clients, building reputation, increased brand recognition.  And I say, sure, all that is true, if you do it right, but underlying all that, at the very heart of the matter, what it is about for me is freedom, freedom to break out of the insufferable banality of calcified prose and that lawyerish fake persona that robs you of your humanity.  Blogging for me is liberation, the ability to cast off the shackles placed by dead hands and soar through the sky -- even without my own private plane!  As I wrote in the LexisNexis Insurance Law Center post George links to: Legal bloggers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains.

-- I see NMC at folo came up with some pretty decent answers to the 10 unanswered Scruggs questions I posed yesterday. 

-- Lastly, I had a reader comment in one of my posts from yesterday that seemed to question my ability to work a plug for ABBA into a blog post. No problem, I've done it before and I can do it again. And in light of the demise of the Scruggs Law Firm (three out of four lawyers in a recent survey said, "I'm guilty"), I thought this song, Waterloo, would be the most appropriate, with its prophetic first lines:

At Waterloo Napoleon did surrender/ And I have met my fate in quite a similar way/ The history book on the shelf/ It's always repeating itself.

I picked this version of the song because of two hilarious things about the video: their shocking costumes, especially that cape and the starburst guitar, and the fact that the performance is so totally mailed in and lipsynched.

Full post as published by Insurance Coverage Law Blog on March 25, 2008 (boomark / email).