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tedfrank Profile picture
tedfrank
@tedfrank
Dir. of Litigation, @hamlinclaw, free speech; plus fights for consumers against class action abuse. “Ted Frank is good at Twitter.” — Reuters. On my second 🫀.
4 subscribers
Aug 4 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
🧵

So in February 2024, a bunch of Hamas supporters, coordinated by NGOs, illegally shut down roads for miles at various DC choke points. Of course DC prosecutors don’t care, so @HamLincLaw brought a class action on behalf of trapped drivers. /1 Image Case page and complaint here:

Motions to dismiss filed a few months later, and the team started reviewing them. Counsel for one of the civil terrorist defendants and her NGO made arguments quoting cases we hadn’t seen. Did we miss something? /2hlli.org/faoro-v-jvp/
Mar 29 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
We filed our omnibus response to ninety pages of motions to dismiss late last night in the class action against Hamas supporters for their traffic blockade of O’Hare Airport last April. /1 Image
Image This is a case about a mass tort, not free speech or civil disobedience. There’s an irony because, even as defendants try to characterize their violence as “free speech,” they’re filing a motion complaining that an allegation in our complaint should be stricken as “dangerous.” /2 Image
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Mar 3 • 6 tweets • 3 min read
The @HamLincLaw lawsuit is apparently so “baseless” that the press release doesn’t dare mention that it’s a class action suing over illegal pro-Hamas traffic blockades. Funny, because Dissenters was sure proud of the harm inflicted on innocent victims when it was happening. /1 Image Activists chained themselves within PVC tubes in a premeditated “action” to “cause pain.” That’s never been protected free speech. And if Chicago-area officials won’t enforce criminal law, we’re proud to represent victims seeking civil redress. /2hlli.org/ohare-gaza-pro…
Jan 28 • 26 tweets • 13 min read
Anyone hoping the Epstein files will implicate people not already implicated is going to be very disappointed. Boies Schiller represented a bunch of putative victims and left no stone unturned, suing everyone remotely involved with Epstein, including JP Morgan Chase, who was guilty solely of letting Epstein park his money there, and coughed up $290 million rather than face a New York jury and the New York press; and the FBI, whose culpability isn't even tertiary.
And with dozens of clients and years of work, lawyers sued all of two celebrities: Alan Dershowitz, who they had to apologize to in a $0 settlement when the only person accusing him turned out to be unreliable and someone who the government couldn't dare call to the stand in trial; and Prince Andrew, who settled with exactly one putative victim lucky enough to get a photo with him, probably finding it cheaper than the reputation hit and inconvenience of being dragged to America and being in the headlines for months in a he-said she-said case where he was utterly unsympathetic, and perhaps at the command of the queen to make the case go away.
Which makes sense: why would Epstein risk his freedom and fortune to find out if any of the rich friends he was sucking up to shared his weird predilections for underage teenagers? His emails with Bill Gates, long made public, showed how Epstein operated. He liked collecting celebrity exposure by offering his plane and his island retreat and other trappings of luxury to famous politicians and celebrities; rich people like hanging out with other rich people who treat them normally and don't ask them for anything other than reciprocal philanthropic donations; and universities are happy to send celebrity academics to meet with 7-digit donors, and the celebrity academics rely on the universities to do due diligence for them.

Also, Oswald and Sirhan each acted alone. I am shocked shocked that MDC employees are incompetent.

"Recorded video evidence for August 9 and 10 for the SHU area where Epstein was housed was only available from one prison security camera due to a malfunction of MCC New York’s Digital Video Recorder system that occurred on July 29, 2019. While the prison’s cameras continued to provide live video feeds, recordings were made for only about half the cameras. MCC New York personnel discovered this failure on August 8, 2019, but it was not repaired until after Epstein’s death. As detailed in this report, like many other BOP facilities, MCC New York had a history of security camera problems.

"The available recorded video footage from the one SHU camera captured a large part of the common area of the SHU and portions of the stairways leading to the different SHU tiers, including Epstein’s cell tier. Thus, anyone entering or attempting to enter Epstein’s SHU tier from the SHU common area would have been picked up by that video camera. Epstein’s cell door, however, was not in the camera’s field of view. The OIG reviewed the video and found that, between approximately 10:40 p.m. on August 9 and about 6:30 a.m. on August 10, no one was seen entering Epstein’s cell tier from the SHU common area. The OIG determined that movements captured on video before and after those times were generally consistent with employee actions as described by witnesses and documented in BOP records."

oig.justice.gov/sites/default/…

x.com/bolkonsky35/st…
Oct 24, 2024 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
Back in the ICU after the first and most minor of three procedures, albeit an incapacitating one. The third one will be a doozy.

I must say, if they’re not going to allocate organs to the highest bidder like a civilized society, they should really do it by FICO or LSAT score./1 Anyway, not dead yet, will try to tweet through it. Aspire to be first heart transplant recipient to argue in SCOTUS since this has crushed some other dreams.

Encourage more of your burlier south Texas Type-O friends to ride motorcycles recklessly in the meantime I guess.
Oct 13, 2024 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
🧵

When ICE raided a chicken processing plant in Mississippi and forced it to fire 700 illegal immigrants, minimum-wage Americans went to work there and earned more money taking the newly vacant jobs, while idle Americans took the newly vacant minimum wage jobs. /1 nytimes.com/2019/12/28/us/…
Aug 22, 2024 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
There’s so little anti-black racism in the USA that the Democrats have to invent it with fake narratives about the Central Park Five, who were paid millions of dollars for their violent rampage against innocent victims. Citation for what, that Democratic politicians rewarded them with millions of dollars of taxpayer money, or that they were convicted by a jury of violent crimes that four confessed to and in the fifth case was caught red-handed with the pipe he used to beat parkgoers with?
Aug 6, 2024 • 19 tweets • 6 min read
Reply with the best RFK tweets. 🧵 Image Image
Apr 18, 2024 • 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, 2024 • 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, 2024 • 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.