2010
The team at Potts Law Firm had a toy drive this Christmas Season to collect toys for the Salvation Army. Members of the firm collected presents for children ages 6-10 which were later delivered to children in need.
Kansas Association for Justice is hosting their 38th Crown Center Seminar and Annual Meeting. Derek Potts will be a noted speaker at the event held on December 4, 2010, in Kansas City, Missouri.
Continue reading “Derek Potts speaking at 38th Crown Center Seminar” »
The Arkansas Trial Lawyers Association (ATLA) is hosting a legal education seminar on “Trial Skills.” Derek Potts from Potts Law Firm will be a feautured speaker.
He will be presenting on “Implementing Community Safety Standards and Rules from Beginning-Trial”. The event will be held at the University of Arkansas Global Campus in Rogers, Arkansas on November 5, 2010. The seminar will also feauture five other prestigious speakers and topics. Other subjects of the seminar include: ”Top 10 Trial Tips”, “Reverse Planning for Trial Preparation”, “Roadblocks in the Road: Adapting Your Rules”, and more.
Attorney Derek Potts was admitted by the Texas Supreme Court as a member of the Texas State Bar on October 26, 2010.
Potts Law Firm is proud to announce that its partners in the Kansas City office were named Best of the Bar by the Kansas City Business Journal.
Derek Potts and Timothy Sifers were chosen as Best of the Bar in The Kansas City Business Journal. They held the ninth-annual Best of the Bar selection for Kansas City. Best of the Bar recognizes outstanding lawyers throughout the Kansas City area selected by their peers. This year, the peer-review honor feels a little more prestigious. That’s because a record number of votes were cast, amounting to about 30 percent more votes than were cast in 2009. The number of lawyers casting votes and the number of nominees increased by more than 20 percent.
The list of recognized attorneys serves to provide a starting point in the search for a skilled, trustworthy, and accomplished local lawyer. As the best attorneys in the Kansas City area, the 2010 Best of the Bar were recognized in the Business Journal September 24. See the full story by reading more: And KC’s Best of the Bar are….
Lawyers USA
Article Written By: Sylvia Hsieh
Published: September 13, 2010
Follow to orginal article: http://tinyurl.com/24hykq8
After years of so-so success, lawsuits against factory farms, also known as concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), are gaining traction and producing multi-million dollar jury verdicts.
The mass production of animal and dairy products was recently in the spotlight when a nationwide salmonella outbreak exposed the fact that half a billion eggs were produced by only two Iowa factory farms.
Individuals, families and small farmers living next to factory farms have been suing in droves over noxious odors wafting through their neighborhoods that they claim interfere with the use and enjoyment of their property.
In short, they claim factory farms stink.
After mixed success seeking remedies under federal statutes like the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, plaintiffs’ lawyers have turned to a simple cause of action as old as British common law: nuisance.
The shift to that argument and the focus on civil damages has breathed new life into these cases.
In March, fifteen individuals won an $11 million verdict under a nuisance theory against Premium Standard Farms, which was the second largest pork producer before Smithfield purchased it in 2007. And in 2006, a Missouri jury awarded $4.5 million to six individuals who sued a factory farm.
Nuisance suits have been filed in Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma and West Virginia, according to Charles Speer of The Speer Law Firm in Kansas City, Mo., who is spearheading the litigation nationally.
“Nuisance is the core of our cases and the best vehicle to push [factory farms] to civilize their behavior and be good neighbors,” said Speer, who won a landmark consent decree 15 years ago against CAFOs under the Clean Water Act.
“We’ve got thousands of cases in the works,” said Richard Middleton of The Middleton Firm in Savannah, Ga., who settled a case for $1.1 million earlier this year on behalf of two aging hippies who retired from city life only to find a CAFO in their rural paradise.
Speer and Middleton have devoted their practices to nuisance litigation against factory farms and have formed a new Industrial Agriculture Litigation Group for the American Association for Justice, a trial lawyers’ group.
Defense attorneys agreed there are new nuisance claims but disagree as to why.
Jean Paul Bradshaw, a defense attorney with Lathrop & Gage in Kansas City who represents Premium Standard Farms, suggested that nuisance claims are a cottage industry invented by plaintiffs’ attorneys with “stars in their eyes about how much money they are going to make on these cases.”
Smelly neighbors
The concentrated aspect of CAFOs means that thousands of animals are housed in the same operation. Their waste is shoveled into lagoons and later spread onto fields as fertilizer.
“There are rows and rows of consolidated feeding operations for miles, one after another. When you put it together there may be 70,000 animals,” said Derek Potts of The Potts Law Firm in Kansas City, Mo., who is preparing to file cases against a New Mexico diary operation. “All the waste frankly destroys the water, leaves a stench for miles and miles, causes insect infestation, destroys the environment and ruins property values and the quality of life.”
Potts noted that many states have enacted “right to farm” laws protecting CAFOs. In states without such restrictions, plaintiffs’ attorneys have been careful to plead temporary nuisance, meaning that the property is used unreasonably and the nuisance could be remedied.
“There are no-tech, low-tech, and high-tech ways” to address the problems of CAFOs, such as injecting manure into the soil and using organic material like wood chips to reduce odor in barns, Speer said.
But Bradshaw, the defense attorney, contends that the problems plaintiffs complain about were fixed back in the 1990s by industry changes such as covering lagoons and changing methods of applying manure to the land.
“Our defense is: This is agriculture. This is how we raise our food. Our use of land is not unreasonable,” said Bradshaw.
A hurdle for plaintiffs suing smaller operators with shallow pockets is whether the odors fall under insurance policies’ pollution exclusions.
“Our position is that is exactly what you insured when you decided to provide liability insurance to a 1,000- head dairy operation,” said William Sieben, a partner with Schwebel Goetz & Sieben in Minneapolis, Minn., who represents a dozen neighbors against a dairy operation that moved into Thief River Falls, Minn.
Property owners who move in next to a CAFO have had less success claiming nuisance than property owners who were present before a CAFO moved in, Middleton said.
A tactical advantage to temporary nuisance claims is that in some states, including Illinois and Missouri, there are no limits on how many times a plaintiff can sue.
“The next day, if they are still doing the same conduct, you have a brand new case and can start up fresh going for damages again,” explained Ralph Davis of The Janssen Law Center in Peoria, Ill., who represents seven families alleging that odors and an infestation of flies from a CAFO in Rushville, Ill. have interfered with the enjoyment of their property.
A 92 year-old property owner in Missouri named Jack Arnold has just filed his third lawsuit against the same CAFO after winning $100,000 in the first suit and $750,000 in the second, said Middleton.
“It’s a gift that keeps on giving,” he said.
Jury-friendly cases?
Plaintiffs’ lawyers believe they have struck a chord with juries based on a universal experience – property enjoyment – that jurors of all stripes can relate to.
“Forget all the demographics,” said Middleton. “Every juror is good – the tree huggers and environmentalist Democrats and the not-in-my-town Republicans. I’ll put the first 12 people in the [jury] box. I’ll take anybody.”
But Bradshaw disagreed, suggesting that city jurors are more likely to side with plaintiffs, while as a defense attorney he prefers jurors with a farming background.
“It’s less about odor than about people who don’t like large farming operations,” said Bradshaw.
Speer said that while he is often accused of being anti-farming, most of his clients are farmers, and nuisance doesn’t discriminate.
“It doesn’t matter if you’re wealthy or poor. That smell gets around all the same,” he said.
Tags: Air Act, Clean Water Act, Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, nuisance law
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Plaintiff attorneys nationwide gather in Atlanta, GA September 24-25 in a special seminar event: To bring their applications, their success stories, and their verdicts thanks to implementing the “Reptile” into their legal work. Derek Potts is one of the selected featured speakers who used the “Reptile” approach.
Masters in Reptile – Sept. 24-25, 2010
Atlanta, GA
Nationally known attorneys Don Keenan and David Ball host the “Masters in Reptile” seminar featuring a wide variety of plaintiff attorneys from across the country, all of whom have taken the applications and techniques of the Reptile and implemented them successfully into their legal work. Most started out learning about the Reptile during a “Welcome to the Revolution.”
The attorneys themselves will discuss the ways the Reptile has aided their case work to successful settlements or verdicts. They will discuess their trials and tribulations, new approaches and techniques, and learn from some of the best about how they’ve taken the Reptile to new levels in their own legal work.
Each of the featured attorneys will discuss their experiences over a two-day event held in Downtown Atlanta. Their experiences with the Reptile will cover a wide range of topics, including successful verdicts and settlements in med mal cases, a $21 million verdict in a convenience store wrongful death case, a nuisance action that led to an $11.1 million verdict, scripture techniques, police misconduct, focus groups, and much more.
Derek Potts spoke in Atlanta, Georgia at the national seminar for attorneys put on by the famous jury consultant David Ball. Derek was asked to speak by David Ball about recent jury verdicts he had obtained using David as a consultant.
David Ball is a nationally known jury consultant and author of “Ball on Damages” and “The Reptile” which are used by plaintiff’s lawyers around the country to win jury trials.
Derek Potts and the rest of the trial team representing the first victim of the defective Kugel Mesh hernia patch completed their four week trial in the United States District Court of Rhode Island.
The jury rendered a verdict finding that although the particular plaintiff’s injuries were not related to the patch, that the Kugel Mesh hernia patch is unreasonably dangerous and defective due to its propensity to change shape and buckle in the body. There are believed to be at least 100,000 devices currently in patients around the world.
The Potts Law Firm expands its national class action practice In Re: AT&T Mobility Wireless Data Services Sales Tax Litigation, MDL Docket No. 2147 and In Re: Bisphenol-A (BPA) MDL Docket No. 1967.
