Pre-4th of July Holiday Weekend Roundup.

Boy it feels awfully slow around town, huh?

Lots of people closing up and heading out to various vacation spots, responding to emails remotely and with multiple spelling and grammatical errors (I don't mean you, of course!)

Yet here I sit, sipping my cafecito and responding to annoying motions and inane letters (again, I'm not referring to your brilliant missives).

Do you care who gets elected judge in Broward? Thankfully I rarely have to go there, but if you do the Herald's initial recommendations are here.

It appears lawyers besides Akerman are jostling for BP business, and our own J.B. Harris makes a WSJ appearance.

I agree with J.B. -- there's absolutely no reason to trust the fund to do right by claimants without professional assistance and exhaustive investigation. And there are likely additional remedies not covered by the fund, which appears to not be focusing on economic claims anyway.

But what do I know -- perhaps the oddest legal twist is offered by Miami's Steph Nagin, who offers debt settlement software to other attorneys and this somehow relates to the Gulf Oil Spill:

Attorneys using Morgan Drexen’s integrated legal software has helped residents in Louisiana settle over $800,000 in debt, Mississippi $728,000, Alabama $745,000 and Florida $306,000. These figures are courtesy of Morgan Drexen, Inc.

Nevertheless, Morgan Drexen’s president, Steph Nagin, is concerned that personal debt for many families will dramatically increase.

Nagin, a Miami resident who was recently renamed a Florida Super Lawyer an accolade he has enjoyed for many consecutive years, says; “BP is attempting to cap the well and clean up the oil but who will help those families in debt, who may be hounded by many unscrupulous debt settlement companies? Floridians and residents of the Gulf States have alternatives and using an attorney-based platform has brought great success. Many of the debts settled this year by the attorneys supported by Morgan Drexen have been settled on average at 38% of the balance.”

I have no idea what any of that means, but if the Bar says it is ok who am I to judge?

(God Bless America.)

J.B. Harris: A Day Late, A COBRA Short.

Did any of you know that J.B. Harris once worked at United Auto?

I didn't, but according to this 11th Circuit opinion his tenure as in-house counsel was apparently pretty brief.

Once he stopped working there, he continued to maintain his own health insurance coverage through COBRA -- which if I'm not mistaken is an early, more euphemistic government variant to the Obama Death Panels.

But then his wife and a possible "part-time" mailman entered the picture:

Harris asserts that his wife placed the payment in the mailbox on February 11, 2008, but the envelope containing the payment was not post-marked until February 12. According to the complaint, Harris’s wife

either inadvertently [placed the check in the mailbox] after the mail carrier had made his rounds. Or the envelope was picked up that day and post-marked a day later – February 12, 2008 – a real possibility in some areas of South Carolina – like where Mrs. HARRIS lives – because the postal service often employs part-time mail carriers, who use their own vehicles to deliver the mail, and the mail could have gotten delayed, misplaced or even left in the carrier’s car overnight, before making its way to the post office the next day to be postmarked.

Because the envelope was not received within the time period for payment and was postmarked one day after the end of the grace period, Ceridian terminated Harris’s COBRA coverage. Harris attempted to resolve this with UAIG and Ceridian, but they refused to reinstate his coverage.

Ain't health care fun in America?

BTW, I'm pretty sure I recognize that mailman -- not only did he deliver the mail to Mrs. Harris, but I'm pretty sure he also delivered the mail to Chevy Chase in Funny Farm.

See, I knew it would some day pay off to rewatch those subpar 80s comedies over and over and over again.

Another Day in Paradise

Let's let good ole' J.B. Harris explain what it's like to practice in Miami-Dade County nowadays:

The flood of cases and reduction in judicial personnel are being felt in other ways as well, giving new meaning to the old adage, “Justice delayed is justice denied.”

First, despite its enormous budget and size, the clerk’s office in the civil division cannot handle the flood of paper generated by foreclosure filings. Hence, court papers are frequently misplaced or take months to find their way into court files.

As evidence of this problem, in one matter I found an amended pleading missing from the court file on the day of trial, even though I had filed it nearly three months before. While in another, I found someone else’s submissions in my client’s case file.

Second, the Legislature in its infinite wisdom reassigned some of the clerk’s duties, like calendaring motions for hearing, to judges’ judicial assistants, often creating a system of “who’s on first” between the clerks and the assistants.

By statute, the clerk is charged with docketing all case filings, while the JA’s are assigned the task of calendaring all hearings. In the past, the clerk handled both, with attorneys having the luxury of simply faxing to a calendaring clerk their hearing notices.

Recently, I waited more than three weeks to attend a hearing on a simple discovery motion, only to find the day before the hearing it did not make the calendar.

In this instance, I discovered that the clerk who was delivering motions and hearing notices to the JA for calendaring, was doing so in reverse order of filing, meaning the earlier ones filed on any given day ended up at the bottom of the stack, rather than on top.

Since the JA scheduled hearings from the top of the pile down, the first motions filed were the last to make the calendar, rather than the other way around, leaving my motion off the agenda. A Catch-22 made worse by a calendar limited to 30 motions, the majority of which were uncontested summary judgment foreclosure motions.

Let's face it, the system was always broken -- scheduling meaningful hearings took months, getting a ruling even longer, getting to trial always a distant dream. But it does seem palpably worse in recent months, doesn't it?

And imagine being a judge in circuit court with these cuts, dealing day after day with ministerial motions, uncontested summary judgments, files lost and misplaced, overworked support staff, ham-and-eggers coming in with half-arsed pleadings and bullcrap discovery disputes. And these elections are contested?

BTW J.B., your web address gave me the first chuckle of the morning: "They're Rich. You're Dead."