West Virginia got another stark reminder of why our state’s legal climate is routinely ranked the worst in the nation. Last week, the State Supreme Court refused to hear appeals of two of the largest verdicts in the entire nation last year, totaling more than $664 million in damages. As a result of the Supreme Court’s actions, natural gas company Chesapeake Energy has halted construction on its proposed Charleston-based headquarters, choosing instead to invest its $35 million elsewhere.

Once again, our state finds itself outside the legal mainstream. West Virginia is one of only two states in the nation that doesn’t provide civil litigants with an automatic right of appeal of some sort. Our state’s lack of an intermediate appellate court also places West Virginia in the minority. In most instances, circuit judges essentially serve as the court of last resort for West Virginia litigants. That’s a scary proposition considering the recent election of Warren McGraw to the Wyoming County Circuit Court.

How many jobs must our state lose before our political leaders decide to actually do something about our broken court system? All West Virginians deserve the right to be heard. Until we provide civil litigants with some sort of automatic right of appeal, job providers will continue to take their jobs to states that emphasize fairness, and not legal fees for personal injury lawyers.

Supreme Court candidate Menis Ketchum is trying to be all things to all people. The personal injury lawyer says one thing to some people, and the exact opposite to others. Now, it looks like Ketchum’s tall tales are catching up to him. West Virginia Public Broadcasting has issued a scathing report on how several of Ketchum’s recent statements are turning out to be untrue. It looks like Ketchum hasn’t been honest about his record, making trumped up claims about his experience. Perhaps Menis isn’t being up-front about his record because he fears voters won’t support a personal injury lawyer who has made a living filing lawsuits against local businesses, doctors and everyday citizens involved in car accidents.

Click here to check out West Virginia Public Broadcasting’s full report.

Good for Charleston’s WCHS-TV 8/Fox 11 newsman Kennie Bass. In this past weekend’s broadcast Associated Press debate, he asked state Supreme Court candidate Menis Ketchum to explain how the Huntington personal injury lawyer’s close friendship with Justice Starcher, before whom Ketchum’s firm has brought cases, is any different than Justice Maynard’s friendship since boyhood with Massey Energy’s chief executive officer.

Ketchum’s painful grimace at the question preceded his plea to focus on “the issues” in the race, the courtroom car crash king obviously distracted by official phone records showing how he and Starcher seemed to be feverishly discussing anything but the issues in the days preceding release of photos used to malign Maynard.

It’s just like how Ketchum told the West Virginia State Medical Association he is “conservative,” but told the West Virginia Record he is “moderate.”

Sorry Menis. You can’t have your cake and eat it too.

Drama in the legal profession that could rival a passage from a John Grisham novel: a West Virginia personal injury lawyer throwing one of his own under the bus.

With reference to a law on the books this summer, William Druckman told the Charleston Daily Mail he doesn’t “like to read about a $10 million burger suit,” like the one filed by one of his trial bar brethren Tim Houston over an alleged allergic reaction to a slice of cheese.

“It’s embarrassing,” Druckman declared, which explains House Judiciary chairwoman Carrie Webster’s carrying his water to keep dollar amounts under the radar when going after deep-pocketed defendants.

Druckman compared the multi-million-dollar Mountain State Quarter Pounder case to the $54 million lost pair of trousers lawsuit against an immigrant couple’s dry cleaners in Washington, D.C.

Webster tells the Daily Mail she doesn’t want West Virginia caught with its pants down, hoping her bill will change “the icy perception,” as the newspaper put it, of the state’s court system.

“It’s a baby step,” Webster said of her bill. But it takes a giant leap to keeping those huge payouts to plaintiffs under wraps until it’s too late for anyone to notice. In reality, this is lipstick on a shark bill that will only hide personal injury lawyer greed.

Nothing invites voter confidence like a judicial candidate who doesn’t know the law. When the Charleston Daily Mail recently exposed the Menis Ketchum Supreme Court campaign for running television ads featuring the personal injury lawyer-turned-High-Court-wannabe with uniformed police officers, a violation of state law, Ketchum told reporter Justin Anderson “I didn’t know it” and pretty much blamed the damned law librarian.

According to Anderson, Ketchum said “the law isn’t in the elections section of state code, but is in a set of laws governing city police forces.”

Shouldn’t a candidate for the state’s highest court know the law? Now we have two Supreme Court candidates in the May 13 Democratic primary who have been slapped on the writ for advertising infractions: Ketchum for using police officers as “pawns,” in the words of one longtime political observer; and Margaret Workman, who was advised by the State Bar not to continue advertising for her law practice with photos of her in a judge’s robe.

Click here to read the full Daily Mail story.

Though it is April Fool’s Day, the following lawsuits are no joke. These true life lawsuits highlight West Virginia’s need for meaningful civil justice reform. Let us know which lawsuit you think is most outrageous. Just click the “Submit Comment” button below to cast your vote.

* The $50,000 lawsuit against a Putnam County eatery filed by a woman who claims she bit into an unshelled pecan and damaged her tooth. The plaintiff claimed medical bills of $8,647.00, with the balance for damages. Her husband is a plaintiff here too on the ground that he lost the consortium of his bride for her oral incapacitation.

* From the same personal injury lawyer who filed the above “nutty” lawsuit, a claim against a retailer from a woman who says she was trapped underneath a defective two-drawer filing cabinet.

* The railway worker who sued his employer for $75,000 because a Jackson County goose took flight while he was on the job and allegedly attacked him.

* The $40 million lawsuit filed against the makers of the movie “We Are Marshall” for allegedly misappropriating the tragedy of the deadly plane crash.

* The Kanawha County high school graduate who is suing on the grounds that he is “unprepared for life.”

* The personal injury lawyers who raked in fees and expenses of $135 million in a verdict where the plaintiffs presented no evidence of actual injury.

* Attorney General Darrell McGraw, whose refusal to deliver restitution to the state Medicaid program is threatening to cost the state nearly $5 million in funds for West Virginia’s poor and disabled.

* AG McGraw for telling the West Virginia Legislature to come up with the millions of dollars due state agencies McGraw named as plaintiffs in a lawsuit he settled for $10 million, yet refuses to reimburse those agencies from the lawsuit proceeds.

* To state cheerleaders who have retreated from their “Open for Business” slogan among recurring announcements of high-dollar lawsuit awards, jobs leaving the state, and a bottom-of-the-barrell ranking of our state by potential employers.

Does Attorney General Darrell McGraw even have a clue about what happened with the controversial $10 million OxyContin settlement? His office has given several contradictory explanations for its decision to withhold settlement funds from the named plaintiff state agencies. Now, in an interview with The Shepherdstown Observer, Darrell McGraw seems to claim that the decision to distribute the OxyContin settlement proceeds was secretly made in the judge’s chambers.

Does the Attorney General have the authority to engage in “secret” settlements on behalf of the state? McGraw’s preposterous rationale suggests that the Attorney General holds himself accountable to no one. It is safe to say that state legislators will have a field day with McGraw’s comments, especially given the recently passed legislation which now requires Attorney General McGraw to provide notice to the Governor and the Legislature’s leadership prior to settling any cases.

Click here to read more of McGraw’s outlandish comments

Check out this “Potpouri” item on the editorial page of the Charleston Gazette, February 25, 2008:

“A Sunday article tallied $2 billion that Attorney General Darrell McGraw has won in consumer lawsuits and turned over to the state treasury for the Legislature to spend. Is it odd that the state Chamber of Commerce is paying hundreds of thousands for statewide TV ads denouncing McGraw because one settlement - the $10 million OxyContin verdict - required the attorney general alone to disburse the funds to public programs?”

The Gazette should deliver the truth to readers about the OxyContin settlement: that the plaintiff-state agencies McGraw himself named to the suit should be reimbursed for their damages. Any lawyer, including McGraw, is obligated to represent his or her clients and compensate them for their court awards. Nowhere did the court direct McGraw to convert the settlement dollars into what is basically his own political slush fund.

The Gazette rationale for McGraw could be extrapolated to all of us as follows: don’t pay your taxes this year. After all, when you consider how much you paid the IRS before, just forget it. Spend what you owe on whatever.

It’s time we started watching out for the public’s money.

This morning, the Charleston Gazette clearly mischaracterized the circumstances surrounding the 2004 state Supreme Court election. In its editorial on ugly campaigning, the Gazette attempted to downplay the fact that former Supreme Court Justice Warren McGraw voted for a plan which would have released a convicted sex offender and placed him to work in a local high school. A court of law later found the telivision advertisements that the Gazette complains of to be factually true.

Click here to read the opinion for yourself!

Also, check out Justice Robin Davis’ critical dissent in the case.

In the wake of the OxyContin settlement, Attorney General Darrell McGraw has given various and inconsistent reasons as for why he chose to keep $10 million in state settlement funds for himself and his personal injury lawyer friends, instead of sharing the funds with the named plaintiff state agencies on whose behalf McGraw filed suit.

McGraw’s numerous stories include the following:

1. Chief Deputy Attorney General Fran Hughes has said that the settlement was
intentionally structured so as to allow West Virginia to keep as much of the money as possible. In a 2007 finance committee hearing, Hughes told legislators, “We have arranged a methodology that has prevented the federal government from coming back and seizing the money,” West Virginia Record, August 17, 2007.

2. One year later, Attorney General Darrell McGraw appeared to change his office’s tune somewhat. During a January 2008 Senate Finance Committee Hearing, McGraw told legislators that his office reached a last-minute “courthouse steps settlement” on the very day the OxyContin case was set to go to trial. McGraw went on to testify that his office basically had no choice but to take the settlement as it was being offered by the Judge and defendants in the case.

McGraw’s statement seems completely inconsistent with Fran Hughes’ previous statement to legislators that the Attorney General’s office specifically structured the settlement to avoid any payments to the Federal government.

3. In an appeal of the Federal government’s decision to withhold more than $4.1 million in state Medicaid funds as a result of McGraw’s actions in the OxyContin case, the Attorney General’s office has argued that they had “abandoned the causes of action” in which the plaintiff state agencies were entitled to participate.

This statement is also inconsistent with McGraw’s testimony that the plaintiff state agencies were never dismissed from the OxyContin lawsuit.

4. In McGraw’s latest appearance before the House Finance Committee, the Attorney General went so far as to testify that his office wasn’t representing the plaintiff state agencies at all! That statement flies in the face of court documents filed in the case, which show that Attorney General McGraw and his appointed counsel were the only lawyers representing the plaintiff state agencies.

Clearly, the Attorney General’s office is having trouble keeping its’ stories straight.

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Click here to listen to Fran Hughes’ testimony before the House Finance Committee

Click here to listen to Attorney General McGraw’s testimony before the Senate Finance Committee

Click here to listen to Attorney General McGraw’s testimony before the House Finance Committe