Hughes Hubbard & Reed: Low-Class Sweatshop

One firm that was left off the chart is Hughes, Hubbard and Reed. It pays below market--$35 / hour and is incredibly stingy across the board. The conditions on that project are horrendous, and the leadership is both incompetent and psychotic. They have an operation offsite like the Matrix with 100s of attorneys crammed into one room. They put the rest of the bodies in the bowels of the firm's main building in a windowless space with lead paint, asbestos, dust, blinding flourescent lights, a broken furnace that sets the room as either an arctic freezer in the winter or a sauna in the spring and some of the nastiest bathrooms in the city. The size of the overblown egos of the staff attorneys and 17th year associates are rivaled only by their waistlines--the Eggman and the Walrus personified. These uncredentialed, illiterate, ignorant and just plain dumb figures wield the micromillimeter of power they have to make other people's lives miserable. They stuck a babysitter ("Anita" equivalent) in a corner of one room to peak through the glass of a partition to spy on people in another room and instructed her to follow people to the bathroom to make sure they were really going to the bathroom. Then they had someone scrape the frosting off the glass with an ice scraper and a toxic chemical that converted the glass to plastic while people were working in that room. This project may rival the "Anita" project and Paul Weiss, and things promise to get worse still: the glass wall will come down (if only life were a Lewis Carol novel, Humpty Dumpty / the Eggman would sit on the wall and have a great fall), and more bodies will be crammed into the dank space making it even more of a fire hazard and health code violation than it already is. If anyone calls you with a job at HHR, hang up the phone and run away.

Gimme Gimme Gimme (Amendments After Midnight)

Please note that on March 14, 2007, the Third Amendment to Regulation 68-C (11 NYCRR § 65-3) and the Fourth Amendment to Regulation 68-D (11 NYCRR § 65-4) went into effect. The amendments concern arbitration procedures when disputes arise as to which insurance carrier is required to cover a given claim. My, how the New Regs have grown up since April 2002!

Whole Wheat Rollin'

Please take notice of the recent addition to my NY blawg roll on the left side of your screen: New York Legal Update by Thomas Swartz, Esq., a former court attorney with the App. Div., 2d Dep't. After only a few weeks, Mr. Swartz has developed an entertaining and informative blawg, so let's hope it becomes a fixture for NY practitioners (i.e., so that Mr. Swartz can't take it with him when his lease runs out).

Having One's Priorities in Order

Just when you thought it was safe to do online research on New York No-Fault Law, I make my triumphant return. Many thanks to the likes of David Barshay, Esq., Vincent Pirro, Esq., and many others who have accosted me in public for my failure to keep the blog updated. I could give you some excuses, but a) they don't even sound believable to me, and b) you wouldn't care, anyway, would you?

Onto the important stuff.

The Court of Appeals issued its decision yesterday in Nyack Hosp. v General Motors Acceptance Corp., 2007 NY Slip Op 02439 (Ct. of App., 2007) (There is also a PDF version available).

Oral arguments were heard back on Feb. 8. Your humble blogger was lucky enough to discuss the matter with both Joseph Henig, Esq. (counsel for Appellant-Plaintiff) and Craig J. Freiberg, Esq. (counsel for Respondent-Defendant). Both expressed valid concerns over the outcome of the case, and it is interesting to see how the Court worked out such a seemingly bland technical matter; they also seem to me to have come to the correct conclusion.

In sum, the Court held that a claim is not considered received for purposes of attaining priority of payment until all requested verification has been provided. Priority of payment is crucial where, as in Nyack v. GMAC, the policy is or is about to be exhausted, and the carrier therefore either cannot pay the claim at all or can only pay a portion thereof. Nyack Hospital, through Mr. Henig, contended that they should have received an additional $15,009.21, representing the difference in basic economic loss coverage available as of the day their claim was received by GMAC as opposed to the day on which GMAC received their responses to the verification requests.

Still, all is not perfect for the carriers. The Court held that a claim acquires priority status even if the eligible injured person has not yet submitted their OBEL ("Optional Basic Economic Loss") coverage election (see, if you want to fall asleep, the prescribed OBEL coverage endorsement at 11 NYCRR § 65-1.2), at least with respect to those claims or portions of claims that can still be paid out under the core $50,000 of basic economic loss coverage. So, while GMAC was justified in waiting some amount of time to give Nyack's claims priority, it should not have waiting for the OBEL election.

In hard numbers on the facts of this case, this means that Nyack will be getting a judgment for $863.21, representing the amount of basic economic loss coverage that GMAC paid out on other claims from the time that Nyack provided verification for its claim and GMAC received the eligible injured person's OBEL election. Attorney's fees will be a whopping $172.64.

Even if the final outcome in this matter was more or less trivial in comparison to the dollar amount being sought, I have little doubt that the impact of today's decision will be wide-reaching. Hospitals often submit the no-fault claims with the largest monetary value as to any given EIP (Nyack's claim alone was in excess of the coverage limits), and determining priority of payment can easily be a difference of tens of thousands of dollars.

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Generally speaking, it is a rarity for the Court of Appeals to take up a no-fault case. However, yesterday they granted leave for appeal in Hospital for Joint Diseases v Travelers Prop. Cas. Ins. Co. See the App. Div., 2d Dep't's original decision at Hosp. for Joint Diseases v. Travelers, 34 A.D.3d 532 (App. Div., 2d Dep't, 2006). The decision is too vague to really set down the nature of the dispute, so any commentary from those familiar with the case would be appreciated.

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Dr. Andrew Carothers, M.D. is scheduled to be deposed this coming Tuesday, March 27 with regard to Matter of Andrew Carothers, M.D., P.C. v Insurance Cos. Represented by Bruno, Gerbino & Soriano LLP and Freiberg & Peck, LLP, 13 Misc.3d 970 (Civ. Ct., Richmond Cty., 2006) and numerous other matters pending in Richmond Cty.

JDjive R.I.P.

The toilet firms were quite successful last week in closing down JDjive and keeping their reputations of horrible young attorney treatment off the google cache. Luckily, I saved some of the more memorable postings:

Leahey & Johnson is a horrible place run by horrible people. Junior is as nasty as they come & lacks 1% of the old man's talent.If you go there for a deposition, you cannot use their toilet. They are disgusting people - & they churn the crap out of there files. By the way, get ready to wear a suit on Saturdays if you work there. No - I never worked there, but I'm beyond the associate ranks & know many who have. I dealt with those creeps on many cases over the years too.

Melli, Guerin, & Wall. A "firm" that is generally ranked in the Top 5 listing of NYC toilet firms to work at every time such a thread comes up. Salary is 45K for a 50 hour week doing dead-end no fault defense. You cut and paste frivilous boilerplate toilet motions together and argue them at the homeless shelter known as NYC Civil Court. Also very poor health insurance and no bonus. This place goes thru about 3 lawyers a month.

Doc. review at Paul Weiss. $21 an hour to be locked in a windowless basement full of dead cockroaches with the fire exits blocked and ONE bathroom for 65 people (that we also shared with the homeless people who live in the concourse below Rockefeller Center) all for 80 hours a week.

An earlier post and probably others have suggested the Raymond Schwartzberg & Associates is probably one of the worst firms to work at in NYC. This is what I've gathered so far... 1. He pays $30-35K to start (like he has for the past 10 years) and bonuses and raises are few and far between. 2.He expects 80-hour work weeks. 3.His office is a real dump. 4.He does medical malpractice and personal injury law. 5.Turnover at his offices is extremely high. 6.What little support staff he has are incompetent.

I worked at Schwartzberg's office for about 6 weeks. Awful, Awful place. Ray is a huge dick all the time, the lawyers there are REALLY bad, the place is a dump, Ray treats the clients and his employees like @#$%&, no benefits, low pay ($16 an hour. They pretend its salary when you apply, but really it is $16 an hour),and long hours. I had read these posts before I started, but I was desperate and who knows who's posting these things, I thought that maybe everybody here was a spoiled jerk (like most law students) who expected too much from their first job. I wanted to make it work and just put up with some bullshit, but i'd rather forget about the law and go back to delivering pizza than ever work for that @#$%& ever again! Seriously, its bad. Not just bad, but the kind of bad where you spend your nights dreaming of murdering your boss. The only way I would ever go back there is if my only other option was homelessness.

Melli might give Frieberg & Peck a run for their money re: most hated firm. The routine is pretty much the same at both, although Melli actually has the nerve to require real billible hours for no-fault toilet work. Melli pays only 45 K and has a couple computers from 1989.There is NO CASE MGMT SYSTEM! NONE! Everything is in two-pring paper files like it was 1955. Also the partners who run Melli are born liars, they exaggerate the job and lie about new computers, bigger space, etc.

Advertised job for $21k at 50 hours per week. $8.40 an hour. Wal-mart employees make an average of $9.26 an hour. It's only a matter of time before insurance carriers and ID firms catch on. How will it play out? Anemic bonuses. Salary stagnation. Entry level salary DROPS. Higher requirements in terms of hours worked, subservience, etc.

Rappaport Hertz, a real estate firm in Forest Hills, Queens, NY. There was an article in Law.com a few months ago that discussed several EEOC complaints brought by former employees about sexual harrassment and abuse. It is alleged that they put semen on some new JD's phone. http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1124269512308

Pillsbury

The law firm Pillsbury Winthrop hired 80 people for a one week project, and then fired 60 of them on the spot. I guess there wasn't enough cookie dough to go around after all.

Oh man, that sucks. My agency was HIRECounsel. I got a mass email about it and I emailed the recruiter with all the pertinent info (my availability, my conidentiality forms). I was told the "Training" would be held March 1st at 4 pm Eastern Time (1 PM Pacific), then it was "delayed". On Sat afternoon (yesterday at 4 pm), HIRECounsel sent a mass email to all the temps saying basically "well sorry but Pillsbury decided to choose their own temps and if you havent received an email saying you're on the project, then you arent on it. But anyways, let us know if you are available for other assignments next week!