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It is a well-established practice that a lawyer cannot employ an expert witness on a contingency fee. It is common for personal injury lawyers to use a contingency fee agreement, whereby they are only paid if the plaintiff receives a settlement or award, but this practice is strictly forbidden for experts. Rule 3.4 of the […]

Ask a law student what case stands for the proposition that a defendant needs minimum contacts with the forum state to be sued in that state, and the answer (hopefully) will be International Shoe Co. v. State of Washington, 326 U.S. 310 (1945). Thousands of lawyers, actually hundreds of thousands of lawyers, have been trained […]

If you use spell check and you type the word “tortious” you will find that it is thought that you meant to write “tortuous”. So what is “tortious” and what is “tortuous”? Tortious conduct is conduct or acts that create liability, such as for negligence, though not necessarily just negligence. Indeed, much of the litigation […]

I have blogged about defendants in automobile accident cases who will attribute a collision to weather conditions that they claim made the accident unavoidable. Of course, my rejoinder is that a driver acting reasonably must take into account the prevailing weather or road conditions. Inclement weather is one such defense that comes up. Seriously, though, […]

Advocating for clients requires honesty. Not surprisingly, the rules of professional conduct speak to this. Those rules, as promulgated by the Supreme Judicial Court in Rule 3.4(A) and (B) of 3:07, the Massachusetts Rules of Professional Conduct, prohibit a lawyer from counseling or assisting a witness to testify falsely. The rationale is that the adversary […]

Recent blogs of mine have dealt with jurisdictional issues. Some have focused on how it is that a defendant comes under the personal jurisdiction of a Massachusetts court and others have dealt with the method or mode of service of process on that tort defendant. Probably the most famous case in the country involving personal […]

Having considered the kind of behavior that creates personal jurisdiction in Massachusetts, how does one go about serving such a person/entity with the complaint? What is the method of service outside of the Commonwealth? By far the easiest and probably most often used method is by relying upon (3) of Massachusetts General Laws 223A S.6: […]

A local racetrack has been advertising quite a bit on the Boston stations. When I hear their ad I am reminded of a case I had against them more than 20 years ago when a horse kicked a client and fractured the client’s patella. We sued the racetrack and naturally the owner of the horse. […]

In a recent blog, I wrote of the inability to use the federal courts to gain jurisdiction over a defendant who does not have sufficient minimum contacts with the forum state. That blog was in response to the misperception of many that all a litigant needs to do is to sue in federal court to […]

If you think of major cases in tort law, which includes personal injury law, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts in the 1970s provided a wealth of evolving law. Their decisions were as epic in this field as the decisions of the United States Supreme Court in the 1960s when that court issued a whole […]