The four part standing test for a civil RICO claim under 18 U.S.C. § 1964(c) requires that (i) a person allege (ii) injury to (iii) business or property (iv) by reason of a violation of §1962(a), (b), (c) or (d). Therefore, if the plaintiff cannot allege injury to business or property, the plaintiff lacks standing to sue. It is well settled that personal injurie ...

Last Thursday, November 15, 2007, The Wall Street Journal reported at page D1 an "alarming" increase in the number of home invasion robberies. In a related development, in a recent a 2 to 1 decision, Ferensic v. Birkett, 501 F.3d 469 (6th Cir. 2007), the Sixth Circuit overturned an armed robbery and home invasion conviction because of the exclusion of ...

The question in CS Stars LLC v. First AllAmerica Fin. Life Ins. Co., 2007 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 83738 (N.D. Ill. Nov. 13, 2007), was not whether sanctions should be awarded (that had been decided earlier) but whether the attorneys' fees request was too high. The sanctioned party argued that opposing counsel had over-lawyered the offense and that the request shou ...

‛The concept of spoliation derives from the Latin phrase ‘contra spolatorem omnia praesumuntur,’ meaning ‘all things presumed against the destroyer.’“ Perez v. La Dove, Inc., 964 So. 2d 777 (Fla. App. 2007) (citing Maria A. Losavio, Synthesis of Louisiana Law on Spoliation of Evidence-Compared to the Rest of the Country, Did We Handle it Corre ...

A lot of discovery abuse was found by the Court in Wood Group Pressure Control, LP v. B&B Oilfield Servs., Inc., 2007 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 83708 (E.D. La. April 27, 2007). Useful points: 1. Degrading Data to Backup Tapes as Spoliation. Defense counsel never implemented a litigation hold. As a result, emails were deleted from activ ...

28 U.S.C. § 1447(d) provides that "[a]n order remanding a case to the State court from which it was removed is not reviewable on appeal or otherwise." Under Thermatron Prods., Inc. v. Hermansdorfer, 423 U.S. 336 (1976), the jurisdictional bar of § 1447(d) is limited to the grounds enumerated in § 1447(c). The question of first impression in HIF Bio, In ...

A nightmare scenario. You are representing the foreign plaintiffs suing Texaco and Chevron for cancer caused by their Ecuadorian oil operations, and one your clients testify as follows: Q: Ms. [plaintiff], isn't it true that the first biopsy that was performed on you to see whether you had breast cancer was performed after April 2006? < ...

The text of H.R. 3013, The Attorney-Client Privilege Protection Act of 2007, which was passed by House on Tuesday and which reverses the Holder/Thompson/McNulty Memo, can be found at http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/C?c110:./temp/~c1107lxBfV. You can keep track of the status of the legislation in the Senate and with the President at http://www.govtrack.us/congre ...

It is not often that a civil RICO complaint brought by the federal government against a union with a checkered history is dismissed on pleading grounds, but that is what happened in Brooklyn Federal Court on November 1, 2007. The Government’s Amended Complaint in United States v. Int’l Longshoremen’s Ass’n, 2007 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 80924 (E.D.N.Y. Nov. ...

A new article summarizing significant case law developments this year under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, 18 U.S.C. § 1961 ff., has been posted on the Recent Articles page (title: RICO Developments 2007). It does not address the Supreme Court' s opinion in Wilkie v. Robbins, 127 S. Ct. 2588 (2007), because that is really a Hobbs A ...