This makes me seethe.

Wal-Mart employee suffers brain damage in a truck wreck, Wal-Mart’s health plan pays for medical treatment (which it agreed to do when it took premiums from the employee), employee gets a $417,000 settlement from the trucking company (which is put into trust to pay for her on-going nursing home care) and now Wal-Mart sues the brain-damaged employee for the $470,000 the health plan paid plus its attorneys’ fees (which, at least in Texas, the injured employee would not be able to recover from the trucking company). It’s called subrogation, which is a fancy word for “insurance company screws the little guy.”

The biggest corporation in the world is taking this lady’s last dime, leaving her future medical care to be paid by Medicaid, which means you get to pay for it.

Watch this video and think about this the next time you decide to shop at Wal-Mart.

Allstate refuses to turn over documents in a Missouri lawsuit which pertain to company policies “allegedly” designed to shortchange clients while earning itself huge profits. Even the Missouri Supreme Court, not exactly known as a hot bed of liberal judicial activism, orders Allstate to turn over the documents. They still refuse. So the trial judge fines Allstate $25,000 per day until the turn them over. They still refuse. This has been going on since September.

The fine currently exceeds $2.4 million. Yet Allstate’s lawyers say the company will not produce these records for public view no matter how much the court fines them.

This display of arrogance and contempt towards courts and the rule of law is just mind-boggling. But perhaps most disturbing is how Allsnake will stop at nothing to screw their own insureds.

Remember this case from back in the summer?

A Kentucky judge will decide next week which company will perform testing on the broken cable from the ride at Six Flags Kentucky Kingdom that severed the feet of a 13-year-old Louisville girl in June. Kaitlyn Lasitter’s attorneys are asking that a local company test the cable, while Six Flags “wants to award the contract” to a laboratory in Chicago.

“Award the contract” for testing the cables that cut this poor girl’s feet off sounds so crass.

Sharon Keller, the presiding judge of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (that’s the highest court in the state for criminal matters), has been named in a wrongful death lawsuit brought by the widow of Michael Wayne Richard. Richard was executed by the state on September 25th, after his lawyers tried unsuccessfully to file a last-minute appeal.

Keller contends that while she ordered the clerk’s office closed promptly at 5 p.m., state law clearly gave attorneys for death row inmate Michael Wayne Richard the power to contact judges on the court directly.

In papers filed in U.S. district court in Austin, Keller said Richard’s lawyers made no attempt to contact any judges on the court, even though three were available Sept. 25, the date of Richard’s execution in 1986 rape and murder of Marguerite Dixon, a Houston-area mother of seven. Keller said the clerk’s office was closed but the court’s building remained open.

Keller has garnered national attention for refusing to extend the court’s closing time prior to Richard’s execution, despite calls from Richard’s attorneys alerting her office they were experiencing computer problems and begging for extra time.

But in a motion to dismiss the suit, Keller said Texas law “provides a clear and unambiguous avenue for litigants to file documents with the (Court of Criminal Appeals) directly through any of its judges, so Richard did not need the CCA clerk’s office to stay open after hours to file his motion.” This is the first time Keller has claimed Richard’s lawyers could have directly gone to other judges on the court. She previously has tried to shift blame to Richard’s lawyers by saying they had all day to file.

Jim Harrington, director of the Texas Civil Rights Project, called Keller’s argument “shameless” and said “The rules of procedure in the law are supposed to serve justice and here you have a case where a guy’s life is at stake. It’s literally a matter of life or death and to fall back on some off-the-wall assertion, ‘go find a judge and file it that way’ is absurd. It makes a farce of the law.”

Story here.

WATERBURY, Conn. – Attorneys say the family of a Madison teen killed nearly six years ago in a car accident is to receive an $18.3 million settlement. Seventeen-year-old Tim Orefice was killed in Guilford on Jan. 25, 2002. The teen’s car was hit by a Guilford Texaco tow truck driven by Jason Secondino. Secondino, Guilford Texaco, and the company which leased the truck to Guilford Texaco, were all sued in the case that went to trial in October at Waterbury Superior Court. A lawyer says the settlement was reached on the day before closing arguments. An attorney for the family says the award came years after the Orefice family proposed a $1 million settlement that the defendants refused.

Obviously, that jury must have seen some baaaaad evidence and the plaintiff’s lawyers were ready to put on a whale of a closing argument. Wonder if it was the defendants or their insurance company who decided to refuse the earlier offer?

Interesting. President Bush endorses Texas Supreme Court Justice Don Willett by saying “he is a proven conservative who understands courts should interpret and apply law, not legislate from the bench.” Yet Justice Willett authors a recent opinion – joined by the other eight justices – that “offends not only the law, but also court precedent, legislative intent, reason, custom and common notions of justice” in order to side with big business. As the Houston Chronicle points out, this ruling “makes the justices guilty of blatant judicial activism, which many conservatives regard as an unpardonable sin.”