Reuters’ Alison Frankel reports that a federal judge in New York has rejected a bid by CNN’s Nancy Grace (a former Fulton County prosecutor) to toss a breach of contract suit brought by Grace’s former producer. The producer, Patricia Caruso, claims Grace broke an agreement to start a new legal show with her. The story is here.

Judge Clarence Seeliger ruled from the bench today that King & Spalding can remain counsel to the DeKalb County school system in a bitter dispute with construction companies. Kathleen Joyner was in the courtroom today and is preparing her story, which will be online soon. She says that Seeliger said, “I’ve had lots of cases, but this has probably infuriated me more than any other.”

A key part of the challenge to K&S’ representation was a contingency fee agreement the firm signed with the school system. You can read about that part of the dispute in Robin McDonald’s story from February here.

A Cobb County State Court jury returned a $40 million verdict this afternoon, concluding a two-week wrongful death trial over a wreck caused by a tractor trailer that ran through a stop sign into the four-lane Highway U.S. 27 in Blakely.

The jury rejected a bid for punitive damages. The entire verdict was for compensatory damages and believed to be a record in Georgia for a wrongful death case. The three-page verdict form shows $28 million for the value of the life of the driver who was killed, William F. Foster Jr., a high earning owner of an international weapons and ammunition business. The jury also awarded $11 million to Foster’s widow, Theresa K. Foster, the plaintiff in the lawsuit. Mrs. Foster was riding in the back seat of the truck. The lawsuit says she suffered broken ribs and cracked vertebrae, and had to witness her husband’s death.

The rest of the verdict was for general and property damages as well as about $34,000 in medical expenses for the Fosters.

A front seat passenger in Foster’s pickup truck, Jay Demott, was also killed in the 2007 crash but was not part of this lawsuit. His estate settled a separate lawsuit over the wreck last year, attorneys said.

The defendant in the case is the owner of the truck, Landstar Ranger Inc. The company has many levels of insurance, starting with a series of AIG Insurance Companies, attorneys said.

We received this news too close to deadline to include in our Monday newspaper, but we will have a full story on the case in our Tuesday edition.

Judges at the 11^th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals have been known to use heated rhetoric in their opinions. And some of them are louder than others at oral argument.

But a recent exchange at the 5^th Circuit recounted by our colleagues at Texas Lawyer is like nothing we’ve heard before here in Atlanta.

Could this be one reason the 11^th Circuit still generally doesn’t release the audio tapes of its oral arguments?

“I think it’s a bad move. Period.”

That was former Georgia Attorney General Michael J. Bowers’ reaction Tuesday when asked by the Daily Report for his thoughts about a provision in the proposed legislative rewrite of the state’s open government laws that would prohibit litigants from using the Open Records Act to obtain records for use in civil or administrative litigation. (The legislation is House Bill 397, which was drafted and backed by current Attorney General Sam Olens and his staff. The bill came up for a public hearing at the Capitol on Tuesday before the House Judiciary Committee.)

Bowers, now a partner at Balch & Bingham, had success using the Open Records Act in his reverse discrimination suit on behalf of fired librarians against the Atlanta-Fulton County Public Library in 2002, in which his clients won millions.

“The government has every advantage imaginable and to preclude the use of the Open Records law in litigation is bad business,” Bowers said. “And these are public documents. They belong to the people to begin with. It’s not rocket science.”

The Rev. Markel Hutchins has sued the family of Kathryn Johnston for $490,000, one-tenth of the $4.9 million settlement the city of Atlanta paid to the kin of the 92-year-old woman slain by Atlanta police during a botched drug raid in 2006.

In a complaint filed Tuesday in Fulton County Superior Court, Hutchins says he had a verbal agreement with Sarah Dozier, Johnston’s niece and the administrator of her estate, that he “would be compensated by the Johnston Estate in the amount of ten percent (10%) of the gross recovery of any lawsuit against the City of Atlanta, et. al.”

The suit, filed by Taylor English Duma attorney Lacrecia G. Cade, says that Hutchins “served as the Estate/Family Spokesman; principal strategist and issue manager; public relations expert; crisis intervention and crisis management expert; investigator; project manager; government relations expert; and other duties as requested by the Defendants and those acting in concert with them.”

  Read more »

Yesterday’s decision by a panel of the 6^th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has been described as a major setback for legal challenges to the 2010 federal health care overall, which include a lawsuit heard in Atlanta earlier this month by an 11^th Circuit panel. A major reason it’s a bad omen for opponents of the law is that the 6^th Circuit’s rejection of the challenge was delivered by none other than Judge Jeffrey Sutton, a conservative appointee of George W. Bush.

Sutton isn’t just any Republican appointee. As solicitor general for Ohio in the 1990s, Sutton was the prototypical appellate advocate for holding the line against federal government encroachments into the purview of states. And he’s a former law clerk to Justice Antonin Scalia, an icon among conservatives. Read more »

The Associated Press is reporting that King & Spalding attorneys, working with human rights group Equality Now, filed suit in the Northern District Court of Georgia against a fishing tour operator they claim lured preteen and teenage girls to his boat and coerced them into sex acts with his customers.

Four Brazilian women, who were between 12 and 17 when the alleged acts took place, claim tour boat operator Richard Schair plied them with alcohol before introducing them to the tourists. Schair, of Gainesville, operated Wet-A-Line Tours in the Amazon until 2009. Read more »

A recent article in the Chattanooga Times Free Press hints that any court fight between Georgia and its northerly neighbor, Tennessee, over water still is a slow moving current.

The Chattanooga Times Free Press reported Friday that the two states may be working on a trade—a high speed rail connection between Atlanta and Chattanooga and better access to Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport and the port in Savannah in exchange for water. Read more »

The father of a young woman who fell to her death last month when she and a friend crashed through a window at the W Midtown Hotel has filed suit against the hotel and its corporate owner alleging that the window had been previously broken and improperly replaced with non-tempered glass.

LaShawna Threatt, an aspiring model, was celebrating her 30^th birthday with friends at the hotel when she and 25-year-old Cierra Williams fell through the window of a 10^th floor room in the early-morning hours of May 28. Threatt died at the scene, while Williams was hospitalized in critical condition. Read more »