Lawsuits

A roving UHub Web browser points us to an ambulance Annie chaser with a Web site featuring a grinning OJ Simpson lookalike holding a stack of Benajmins:

Are you a victim of the MA Drug Lab Scandal?
Our Lawyers can help you get the compensation that you deserve!

The site appears to be put together by a Hingham law firm, which is mentioned only once, in tiny type towards the bottom. It also features creative use of a JavaScript slideshow to simulate the old Netscape blink tag.

The Massachusetts Appeals Court today tossed a former Chinese dissident's trademark suit against a non-profit group that uses the Web to promote a video that is critical of her actions in Beijing in 1989.

In a 2-1 decision, the court said the Long Bow Group, of Brookline, was not trying to confuse people into thinking it was sponsored or in any way affiliated with Jenzabar, a software company founded by Ling Chai and that it has a right to write about Chai and her company, especially since earlier defamation claims were dismissed.

Michael Rosen points us to this lawsuit (via this law firm) by a South Shore dental practice against a dentist who left and set up his own practice nearby.

As Rosen notes, they're suing under a clause in his original contract they say prohibits him from setting up shop within 15 miles of his original office for three years. So? Well, turns out that while lawyers, doctors, nurses, social workers and, um, broadcasters are exempt from the state law that makes non-compete clauses legal, dentists aren't.

Certainly a good argument can be made that the public policy underlying the exclusion for physicians -- that a patient's interest in receiving medical treatment from the doctor of her choice overrides any business interest in restricting unfair competition -- should apply equally to dentists. But for now, dentists don't enjoy this protection.

A New Hampshire man who says he was permanently injured when a folding chair in the Fenway bleachers collapsed, sending him plummeting to the concrete, yesterday filed suit against the Red Sox in federal court.

Richard McLaughlin is seeking unspecified damages - but more than $75,000 - for injuries he says he incurred during a game on May 4, 2010 (against the Angels), while sitting in the right-field bleachers, behind the Sox bullpen:

Plaintiff was seated in a metal folding chair provided by Defendants.

During the game, the folding chair that Plaintiff was seated in suddenly collapsed and flattened, causing Plaintiff to fall backwards onto the cement, hitting his head, neck, back and right shoulder. Plaintiff suffered serious and permanent injuries.

Grub Street, a Boston-based creative writing non-profit, yesterday sued a California company with a similar name that promotes "indie authors," through paid endorsements.

The Globe reports the city of Cambridge has sued the state in Middlesex Superior Court to block its approval of Uber, which lets you get a limo through its online service.

You may recall how a state measurement office barred Uber over meter issues after Cambridge Police ran a sting, only to reverse itself a few days later when it learned, oops, the governor likes Uber.

The Crimson reports waiters at the Harvard Faculty Club and Loeb House filed suit last week, alleging mandatory "gratuity" surcharges added to bills there never go to them. The suit comes as the Harvard Club, a private institution across the river, agreed to a $4 million settlement over the same issue.

A Newmarket Square company that makes frozen fillo pockets stuffed with vegetable and meat fillings says a supplier's paper boxes were so poorly made it lost a contract with Trader Joe's - and $1 million in profits.

In a suit filed yesterday in US District Court in Boston, Peppercorn Food Service charges Atlantic Packaging Corp. of Norwich, CT sold it crappy "ovenable" containers for a private-label line of frozen spinach pies that fell apart in Trader Joe's freezer sections:

The Globe reports.

The Supreme Judicial Court today dismissed a complaint by a teacher at a Newton Hebrew school that she was fired because of her age, saying the First Amendment prohibits government from interfering in how religious organizations teach their young.

Gaye Hilsenrath, who had been a part-time teacher at Temple Emanuel's Hebrew school for more than 24 years, filed an age-discrimination complaint with the Mass. Commission Against Discrimination when the school let her go in 2007 as part of an overall reorganization.

In its ruling today, the state's highest court said a US Supreme Court ruling earlier this year that gave religious organizations a "ministerial exception" to workplace bias complaints applied in Hilsenrath's case:

Jalopnik reports on some vindication this week for Clay Nissan: A Norfolk Superior Court judge this week ordered the assets of two brothers seized because the judge agreed they sure seemed to have libeled the car dealership over the way it fired their sister.

Far from firing Jill Colter because she had cancer, her manager at Clay Nissan agonized over dumping her because of poor job performance that had nothing to do with her treatment, Judge Renee Dupuis wrote in an order. In fact, Clay knew when it hired Colter she had cancer and even as it was firing her, it continued to employ two other people with cancer in the same department, Dupuis wrote.

An extensive blog and Facebook campaign by the brothers cost the dealership large amounts of money in lost sales when they had no evidence to back their claims the dealership regularly fired people diagnosed with cancer, she added in ordering the brothers' assets attached in what she said was the likely case the company would win its defamation suit.

A federal appeals court has upheld the right of Massachusetts police departments to deny people the right to bear certain arms if they lie on their permit applications.

The ruling means former Boston police officer Stacey Hightower can no longer carry a concealed .38 caliber five-round revolver - or carry high-capacity weaponry.

The Supreme Judicial Court ruled today that a Concord company's First Amendment rights weren't violated just because its landlord tried to evict it for non-payment of rent while it was negotiating with the town over getting rid of "85,000 yards of unscreened compost material."

The Supreme Judicial Court today denied a Roslindale man's request to expunge court records showing he was arrested and arraigned on what turned out to be a bogus claim he'd used a gun to threaten a worker - who made up the whole story to try to extort money from him.

The court said the man, identified only by a pseudonym in its ruling, could, however, file a request to have the records of his arrest and court proceedings sealed, so that they could not legally be used to deny him a state job or shown to anybody.

In its ruling, the court described the start of the man's troubles:

Autism Intervention Specialists of Worcester and principal Nassim Aoude today filed a federal libel suit against a New Hampshire man who says it peddles "horseshit" because it refuses to accept his theory that autism is caused by mercury in vaccines.

In its suit, filed in US District Court in Boston, Autism Intervention Specialists wants John Best's blog posts about it replaced with retractions and a suitably large, if unspecified, amount of damages.

The concern pointed to two specific blog posts by Best, one in which he called it pure bullshit, the other in which he calls its employees pure jackasses, and accused Aoude of profiteering on the backs of autism patients:

The Supreme Judicial Court ruled today that a former Superior Court judge is not entitled to a disability pension for the permanent psychiatric problems he says he suffered after receiving cartons of hate mail and death threats after Herald articles and a reporter's comments that were ultimately ruled libelous.

At issue was not whether Ernest Murphy had severe enough psychiatric problems to keep him from working as a judge, but whether he read the death threats - which came after a Herald reporter claimed on the Bill O'Reilly show the judge had told a rape victim to "get over it" - while performing his job as a judge. The court concluded he failed to produce evidence he had read them while working as a judge, even though he reported receiving them in his judicial chambers:

The Supreme Judicial Court ruled today a former executive at an Amazon subsidiary owes the state more than $320,000 - and interest - on Amazon stock he bought and then sold while living in the Back Bay.

Kenneth Dotson, originally a Florida resident, had argued he didn't owe the money on the $5.3 million he made selling the stock because he never intended to stay in Massachusetts and was in the process of moving to Florida.

The court, noting that Dotson had bought a condo in the Back Bay, had his mail delivered there, got a landline phone there, joined a local gym and obtained a subscription to an unnamed Boston newspaper, said he was most definitely a Massachusetts resident when he executed the options and sold the stock. Even though he was in the process of fleeing the state, he had not yet actually taken up residence again in Florida, the court said.

The Supreme Judicial Court ruled today that two adopted brothers have no right to a share of their great-grandmother's estate because the legislature had no right to extend a 1958 law to treat adopted children the same as biological ones to wills written even earlier.

The ruling benefits the two men's sister, who is biologically related to Anna Bird, who wrote her will in 1941. She sued after the Bird trust's executor sent her a notice saying it would start paying her brothers shares of the trust because of a 2009 amendment to the law that applied it to all wills, regardless of when written.

The maker of the ovens Julia Child liked to use yesterday sued the Julia Child Foundation for Gastronmy and the Culinary Arts to keep using the late chef's image in an online timeline about the company's history.

According to BSH Home Appliances - maker of Thermador ovens - it filed a preemptive suit in US District Court in Boston yesterday because the foundation was threatening to sue it over its use of some photos of Child and her kitchen, claiming copyright over any likenesses of the former Cambridge resident.

A federal appeals court says a builder not only can't evade damages owed a homeowner he screwed - he might be on the hook for more than the homeowner originally won for his troubles.

"What happened in this bankruptcy case is probably every homeowner's worst nightmare," the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit writes.

Courts normally don't get involved in religious battles, but in a fight involving copyright law, a federal appeals court today ordered an Eastern Orthodox archbishop in Denver to stop posting online copies of the work of a Brookline monastery.

The Society of the Holy Transfiguration Monastery sued Archbishop Gregory of the Dormition Skete monastery in Denver when he failed to take down copies of English translations it had made of various Greek-language religious texts.

A federal appeals court yesterday reinstated a developer's lawsuit over a state law giving preference to Indian tribes for a casino in the southeastern part of the state.

Although the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit rejected KG Urban Enterprises' request for a preliminary injunction against the state gambling law, it said the company had raised valid questions about the constitutionality of a law giving preference to Indian tribes in the region, and sent the case back to a lower court, which had dismissed the suit.

Genzyme, which makes a drug to treat a rare genetic disease, yesterday filed a federal lawsuit against a competitor that issued a press release saying its analogous drug is superior.

In the lawsuit, filed in US District Court in Boston, Genzyme charged that Shire, an Irish company with an office in Lexington, misrepresented Shire's own clinical studies and that nobody has yet proven that its drug works any better than Genzyme's for treating type-1 Gaucher disease. People with the disease are unable to dissolve certain types of fats, which can build up in various organs and cause a variety of problems.

Genzyme said the press release was particularly troubling because it targeted not just medical professionals - who presumably would know how to look up the data - but patients, whom it said could be misled into seeking a change of drugs from Genzyme's Ceridase to Shire's Vpriv.

Genzyme wants a judge to order Shire to issue a "corrective" press release, give it all the "ill-gotten" profits it made as a result of the press release and pay damages and lawyers' fees.

The Supreme Judicial Court ruled today that if Go-Best Assets Ltd. wants the $5 million disgraced lawyer Morris Goldings stole from it, it's going to have to go after him, rather than the bank from which he drained the money.

Boston's Economic Development and Industrial Corp. has gone to court to recover what it says is nearly $570,000 in back rent on a floor in a building in the Boston Marine Industrial Park used to make semiconductor wafers.

EDIC, which runs the industrial park, filed a lawsuit in US District Court in Boston yesterday against the US subsidiary of Umicore, a Belgian company, for back rent owed by Semiconductor Processing Co., to which Umicore has subleased the seventh floor at 12 Channel St. since 2007.

EDIC says Semiconductor Processing stopped paying its rent in June 2009 and that it went after Umicore because that company agreed to be ultimately responsible for rent payments.

In its suit, EDIC asks for the back rent, penalties and lawyers' fees.