"Judges: Be Kind and Remember Your Roots"

 That's the title of a column that my middle daughter, Kate Markus, and I wrote in the Daily Business Review.  Here's the intro:

As a high school student, I deal with seemingly arbitrary scheduling decisions from teachers all the time. Especially in this age of technology, teachers can add assignments randomly throughout the day and night by sending a message to our phones, and they love to add assignments with crazy short deadlines on the day after a big event like Halloween, only to take weeks to grade them.

The same thing happens to lawyers with electronic notices. In the old days, most judges worked with the litigants to find a time that worked with everyone’s schedule for a hearing or a trial. But now, there are instances when lawyers are summarily notified by email that something has been scheduled, sometimes with only a day’s notice. And then the waiting game starts for the order.

As challenging as the scheduling may be for us high school students, the stakes are significantly higher for litigants subject to the dictates of judges who are not always sympathetic to personal family situations including the birth of children.

This happened just recently, when a lawyer asked for an upcoming civil trial to be continued due to the pending birth of his long-awaited daughter, who had been conceived after fertility treatments following a series of difficulties. A Miami-Dade judge refused to continue the case, even though it had not previously been continued and all the lawyers agreed to the continuance. The judge told the lawyer he would be sanctioned if he asked again for a continuance. Only after the story of his ruling broke in the news did the judge relent and grant the continuance.

My own birth story is another example. My dad (and co-author) was scheduled for a complicated and lengthy multi-defendant trial in Savannah, Georgia. The judge set the trial for— you guessed it—the very day my mom was scheduled to deliver me. When my dad asked the judge to push the start date back just a few days so that he could be there for my birth, the judge refused, actually telling my dad he could fly down for “half a day” to attend the birth and then fly back for court the following day. My parents solved this problem by moving up the date of my delivery so that my dad could be there for my birth before leaving town for six weeks.

Paul Huck Jr. on Trump's short list for special master

 Here's the filing.

Government’s Proposed Candidates
The Honorable Barbara S. Jones (ret.) – retired judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, partner in Bracewell LLP, and special master in In re: in the Matter of Search Warrants Executed on April 28, 2021 and In the Matter of Search Warrants Executed on April 9, 2018

The Honorable Thomas B. Griffith (ret.) – retired Circuit Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, special counsel in Hunton Andrews Kurth LLP, and Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School.
 

Plaintiff’s Proposed Candidates
The Honorable Raymond J. Dearie (ret.) – former Chief Judge of the United States
District Court for the Eastern District of New York, served on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, formerly the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York.

Paul Huck, Jr.—founder, The Huck Law Firm, former Jones Day partner, former
General Counsel to the Governor, former Deputy Attorney General for the State of Florida

News & Notes

1. DOJ has filed a notice of appeal regarding Judge Cannon's appointment of a special master.  It also asked Cannon to stay parts of her order.

2. A man has been charged with vandalizing the Broward Federal Courthouse.  The pictures don't look as bad as when the rain flooded the place:

 

Steve Bannon set to surrender

 After being pardoned, the State of New York went after Bannon with its own investigation.  He is due to surrender tomorrow.  From the NY Times:

Stephen K. Bannon, the onetime political adviser to former President Donald J. Trump, is expected to surrender on Thursday to New York authorities to face state charges in an indictment that remains sealed, according to a person familiar with the case.

The nature of the charges was unclear early Wednesday. But Mr. Bannon called them “phony” in a statement. “They are coming after all of us,” he said. “I have not yet begun to fight.”

Danielle Filson, a spokeswoman for Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, declined to comment.

The charges would not be Mr. Bannon’s first indictment. Mr. Trump pardoned Mr. Bannon in January 2021 before he could be brought to trial on federal fraud charges stemming from his work with We Build the Wall Inc., a fund-raising operation set up to help fulfill the former president’s promise to create a physical barrier between the United States and Mexico.

 

Judge Cannon orders appointment of Special Master

You can read the whole order here.

Random thoughts:

She asks the parties for recommendations on who the special master should be.  That will be an interesting list.

DOJ will surely appeal and ask for a stay.  Will they get it?

Are we now going to see a slew of folks filing lawsuits asking for special masters? 

 

All rise for Judge Michael Hanzman

 A true mensch and a great judge.  The New York Times has a wonderful piece about Judge Michael Hanzman's handling of the Surfside case:

Each day, before the unusual hearings unfolded inside Judge Michael A. Hanzman’s Miami courtroom this summer, the judge’s aides would stock the judge’s bench, the lawyers’ tables and the witness stand with boxes of tissues. At some point, they knew, almost everyone would cry, and each excruciating presentation would end with Judge Hanzman offering people hugs.

The hearings in the civil case over the deadly collapse last year of a beachfront condominium tower in Surfside, Fla., gave survivors and victims’ families a chance to seek financial compensation for their enormous losses. But those involved in the proceedings also describe them as far more meaningful — something akin to catharsis — which they credit to the extraordinary handling of a case born out of calamity.

After five weeks of lengthy and emotional hearings, the court issued letters in late August, informing survivors and victims’ families of how much they would receive in damages from a settlement of more than $1 billion with insurance companies, the developers of an adjacent building and other defendants. Individual awards ranged from $50,000 for some post-traumatic stress disorder claims to more than $30 million for some wrongful death claims, Judge Hanzman said in an interview this week.

“I don’t think I have shed as many tears in my 61 years as much as I have throughout the last five weeks,” he said.

***

His first unorthodox move was to persuade the surviving members of the Champlain Towers South condo association board to appoint Michael I. Goldberg, a lawyer, as an independent party known as a receiver to handle residents’ lawsuits. That allowed the judge to corral all of the complaints and eventually have them combined into one big lawsuit. Otherwise, there would probably have been dozens of separate legal actions.

Judge Hanzman chose well-known law firms to represent the plaintiffs, though the firms knew up front that there might not be enough money recovered to pay them. Some firms turned him down, the judge said.

The legal process was not without some friction. Even before all of the victims’ remains had been found in the rubble, the judge decided that the land where Champlain Towers South had stood would be sold, to ensure the biggest possible payout. Some families wanted a memorial built there instead of selling the land for redevelopment, but the judge concluded that a fund made up of insurance proceeds alone would fall far short of adequate compensation for the victims. The nearly two-acre property was sold to a Dubai-based developer in August for $120 million.

Next, Judge Hanzman dealt with conflicts between victims’ families, who had lost loved ones, and survivors, who had lost property. He persuaded Bruce W. Greer, a renowned mediator, to try to resolve their conflicts over how much money each group deserved to receive. In February, the condo unit owners agreed to split $83 million from the land sale and from Champlain Towers South’s insurers, a total that later went up to $96 million and paid them for the appraised value of their units.

Then Mr. Greer negotiated a second settlement: more than $1 billion to be shared among families who lost loved ones in the condo collapse. That sum came from the developers, engineering consultants and security companies whom the law firms had identified as possibly at fault for the disaster, as well as their insurers. Federal investigators have still not determined the cause of the collapse.

Finally, Judge Hanzman and a retired judge, Jonathan T. Colby, a friend of 30 years, became the arbiters of how much each victim’s lost earnings — and their family’s pain and suffering — were worth.

 We need more judges like Judge Hanzman in both state and federal court.  Here's hoping we can steal him over to the feds...

Judge Cannon's hearing (UPDATE)

 To the dismay of many, it was reported that Judge Cannon had the wifi turned off in the courthouse and prohibited reporters from tweeting or otherwise reporting on the hearing from court. There was also no call-in number so members of the public and press could listen in on the hearing.  So all of the reporting came after court was concluded.  What is this, the dark ages? 

 UPDATE -- I've been told that the wifi was not turned off and instead it was just overloaded with the number of users; I've also been told that it was not Judge Cannon's new rule to prohibit reporting from inside the courtroom -- she just reminded everyone of the local rule 77.1.

Anyway, here is the NY Times coverage of the hearing:

A federal judge signaled on Thursday that she remained open to granting former President Donald J. Trump’s request to appoint an independent arbiter to go through documents the F.B.I. seized from him last month, but stopped short of making a final decision.

After a nearly two-hour hearing, the judge, Aileen M. Cannon of the Federal District Court for the Southern District of Florida, reserved judgment on the question of whether to appoint a so-called special master in the case, saying she would issue a written order “in due course.”

Notably, Judge Cannon did not direct the F.B.I. to stop working with the files, which the Justice Department has said have already undergone a preliminary review by law enforcement officials.

Judge Cannon, who was appointed by Mr. Trump in 2020, also indicated that she would unseal a more detailed list of the documents the F.B.I. took during its Aug. 8 search of Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s private club and residence in Florida. She had earlier ordered the Justice Department to provide the list to Mr. Trump’s legal team at its request. It was not clear when it would become public.

During the hearing, Judge Cannon pressed the government to explain what harm could come from appointing a special master.

Jay I. Bratt, the head of the Justice Department’s counterintelligence section, told her that a special master could slow down an assessment of the risk and damage to national security being conducted by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence — as well as an assessment of whether the seized documents contain the sort of national security secrets whose unauthorized retention is a crime under the Espionage Act.

“We are dealing with over 300 records here” that had classification markings on them, Mr. Bratt said. “That process has begun. That process needs to continue.”

But Judge Cannon appeared to suggest that if she did appoint a special master, she would do so in a way that would not hinder the security risk assessment.

The judge also left unclear whether she would limit the scope of any special master’s work to setting aside a small number of documents that may be subject to attorney-client privilege.

 

"President Trump's" reply

You can read it here.

Thank goodness the lawyers start with explaining to the reader in the first line that references to "President Trump" mean "President Donald J. Trump."

Sorry, it's a pet peeve of mine.  

Anyway, Judge Cannon will be holding a hearing this afternoon in West Palm Beach.  It will be interesting to see if she sticks to her guns and appoints a special master.  And if so, who will the judge appoint.  

More to follow.