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(((tedfrank))) Profile picture
(((tedfrank)))
@tedfrank
Dir. of Litigation, @hamlinclaw, which fights for free speech; and for consumers against class action abuse. “Ted Frank is good at Twitter.” — Reuters
Jim Lakely Profile picture Potato Of Reason Profile picture John Galt 🇫🇷 cpt secours JohnGalt1 🇳🇱 Profile picture 3 subscribed
Apr 18 • 7 tweets • 4 min read
Google Location History settlement approved today.

Attorneys get $19M.
Class gets zero.
Variety of largely left-leaning nonprofits (and no right-leaning nonprofits) get $42M:
* ACLU gets $7M to promote abortion
* Rose Foundation gets a $6M slush fund to give grants prioritizing “BIPOC communities”
* millions to lawyers’ alma maters (who already had billions of dollars of endowments) .@HamLincLaw objected on behalf of three class members. We will appeal.

We had a settlement before this judge involving Google and cy pres that we successfully took to the Supreme Court. Class ended up with $23M instead of zero. Guess we’re going back to SCOTUS if Ninth Circuit doesn’t fix its idiosyncratic precedent approving of this abuse.

hlli.org/in-re-google-l…Image
Feb 10 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Remember when people were arguing Christine Blasey Ford had “no motive to lie” and Leah Lorber and Bloomberg Law and a right-wing thinktank that should know better tried to cancel me because I pointed out that even a false accusation against Kavanaugh would be good for her mediocre academic career, just as it was for Anita Hill, who has a named professorship sinecure at Brandeis and a pile of honorary degrees despite having no publications or academic record of note?

Aside from the nonpecuniary benefits of an ESPN award and MSM fame, Blasey Ford now charges ~$50,000 for a speech, and will have a memoir coming out in 2024 that will surely get a million dollars of unpaid media if she wants it.Image What possible motive could someone have to try to derail a Supreme Court nomination of a political adversary, possibly swing the Senate in an election year, and become a celebrated hero to millions of political allies?
Jan 18 • 10 tweets • 7 min read
🧵

BigLaw firm hires affirmative action candidate from No. 51 law school (so LSAT almost certainly below 153, while every NAM hire at the firm is almost certainly above 160 with most above 165). Within a few years, a partner criticizes subpar work and she requires the firm to do an internal investigation into racial discrimination that clears the charged partner. They fire her after four years. She sues, and the lawsuit puts the firm in the headlines.

What does the firm accomplish by this DEI effort? They get an attorney who can’t do the work, and then imposes transaction costs beyond the $1 million they paid her over four years.

She was used to recruit other DEI hires (her complaint alleges she was at a large event to recruit Howard Law students two weeks before her firing), but “we need to hire affirmative action candidates so we can recruit affirmative action candidates” is a circular response. And now the firm has the reputational cost of Reuters and ABA Journal and Bloomberg Law repeating the complaint allegations (Believe All Women!), so they don’t even get the DEI virtue signaling benefit.

How on earth isn’t this self-defeating? It’s a huge tax on the lawyers and their clients: by avoiding these kinds of unqualified hires and the additional transactions costs incurred when the firm has to unwind from the hire, the firm could *both* make more profit and charge lower fees.

Clients can’t say “Don’t put affirmative action hires on my cases” without a scandal, of course, but, amazingly, several companies demand more affirmative action hires be put on their cases, though that’s equally illegal. There’s a real Moneyball benefit to simply refusing to play the DEI game.

In short, productive sectors of the economy are already paying reparations. Except the reparations aren’t even going to descendants of slaves: the plaintiff is a Black Muslim of Gambian descent. And the lawyers paid to defend this suit won’t be descendants of slaves, either. Imagine reprinting this email in your complaint as evidence of racial discrimination. Image
Sep 11, 2023 • 6 tweets • 3 min read
The damage from having the North Tower fall on WTC 7 combined with seven hours of uncontrolled unsuppressed fires on six lower floors caused thermal expansion of steel beams and floor framing; a steel girder connected to an internal critical column detached and the building then suffered a progressive chain of structural failures taking the whole building down.



Pretty confident that if you duplicate those unique circumstances without any attempt to put out the fire, other tall buildings will fall too.

If it wasn’t a fire, the “smallest blast capable of failing the building's critical column would have resulted in a sound level of 130 decibels (dB) to 140 dB at a distance of at least half a mile.” But none was heard.nist.gov/pao/questions-… Twitter killed the link to the NIST report for some reason. nist.gov/world-trade-ce…
Aug 2, 2023 • 13 tweets • 5 min read
Unpopular opinion: the new indictment really weakens the appearance of impartiality of the legitimate Florida indictments.

By its standard, the Bush administration could’ve prosecuted the Gore campaign team and RFK Jr. and Trump could’ve prosecuted Larry Lessig. Abandoning a conspiracy after you’ve taken an overt act to “defraud the United States” only after the U.S. Supreme Court defused the dangerousness of the conspiracy is still a criminal act. (That the Fla. Supreme Court also acted on your behalf just makes them “criminals” too.)
Mar 7, 2023 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
Except tough on crime policies absolutely reduce the number of crimes.

1. Career criminals don’t victimize the innocent in prison.

2. And long-term, children of felons do better in life when the felons are locked up.

Stop #underincarceration. You know what doesn’t work in reducing crime? “Rehabilitation” and “addressing the root causes.”
Oct 30, 2022 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
Saw this in @SCOTUSblog. Wait, what? Affirmative action doctors *double* the chances of black infant survival?!? Sure enough, that’s what the brief says. Let’s look at the study in the footnote. https://t.co/O7YjighTyysupremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/20/2…
May 8, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Kavanaugh is due for an 8-digit inheritance and has a pension worth millions. It was economically rational for him to borrow to smooth lifetime consumption. And he got a big lump sum of back pay in a class action award. Any credit card conspiracy theory is #BlueAnon. Note also that Kavanaugh’s multimillionaire parents can give their only child Kavanaugh, his wife, and his two kids $128,000 in 2022 without incurring gift taxes (and similar smaller amounts in previous years), and it would never appear on a government disclosure form.
May 8, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Can someone explain to me the practical difference in state abortion law in 2023 between the hypothetical Roberts opinion upholding the MS law without “overturning Roe” and five justices signing on to the Alito draft with minor tweaks? Seems more like 90% of a loaf than half. Like, it’s not like the Left would look at the hypothetical 4-2-3 or 3-3-3 Roberts decision as they’ve dodged a bullet. Why would a conservative clerk risk his career for that? Not like state bars give conservatives the benefit of the doubt.
Apr 27, 2022 • 11 tweets • 3 min read
My favorite part of the 30 hours I waste every two years on CLE is finding and taking the class that discusses the cases I’ve won in the last eleven years. Today’s air flight presents that occasion to listen to a downloaded lecture. And, score, the lecturer remembered to put the words “Ethical Duties” in the title, so I get professional responsibility credit.

Wonder if he’ll mention that no class counsel has ever faced disciplinary consequences for unquestionably unethical Rule 23(e) behavior.
Mar 23, 2022 • 11 tweets • 5 min read
Jackson’s decision in US v Hawkins was in 2013. Hawkins is in his 20s now, and would’ve been out of prison for 8 years. Did he reoffend? Is he a productive member of society today?

I don’t know, but it seems like a more fruitful journalistic inquiry than each side’s punditry. Seems like a real slam dunk for one side or the other: “KBJ was soft on crime and there were innocent victims as a result” or “KBJ wisely accounted for the particularities of the case in front of her and now Hawkins is a family man with a job.” Which is it? Why is no one asking?
Mar 5, 2022 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
But you know whose LSAT score I really want to see? Joe Biden’s. Kamala Harris went to UC Hastings on an “opportunity” program, suggesting her LSAT was below the ~36 median for that law school. (Also, an African-American who got a 36 LSAT in 1986 would have ended up at a Georgetown-level law school.) Harris went on to flunk the bar.
Feb 1, 2022 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
The suit seems meritless on its face. Flores has a plausible case that the Dolphins owner is an unfair jerk and that the Giants violated the Rooney Rule: but there’s no federal cause of action for either.

The class allegations have fatal typicality and commonality problems. Now, there’s dirty laundry here, and some owners might get disciplined by the NFL over it. Previous violations of the Rooney Rule resulted in a six digit fine; I’d expect a seven-digit fine here if the Giants conducted a sham interview.
Feb 1, 2022 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Giving in to the professionally offended never satisfies them because they don’t have any setting other than offended. washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/… Red Mesa High School isn’t poor and underachieving because someone admired an NFL team thousands of miles away and took advantage of its need for a publicity stunt to blunt the last group of professionally offended. The Washington Football Team owes it nothing.
Mar 11, 2021 • 37 tweets • 12 min read
1) Because of affirmative action, African-American law students good enough to get into Georgetown Law end up going to Harvard and Stanford instead.
2) Georgetown Law has to dive deeper into the pool to get a racially balanced class.
3) As a result, there's mismatch. /1 4) Because of mismatch, African-Americans attending Georgetown Law are less qualified than average students, and perform worse in school.
5) Law professor Notices this and feels "angst," is recorded Noticing. /2