Recently the Minnesota Court of Appeals unanimously, and correctly it would seem, reversed a decision by a very able Hennepin County judge to dismiss a FELA case in Gallagher v. BNSF.  ((FELA stands for Federal Employer’s Liability Act, which is a century old federal law creating fault based liability for railroads when their employees are […]

Update (July 31, 2012):  There is evidence that repeated and flagrant violations of Rule 11 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure is a bad business model.   Original post (July 26, 2012):  Minnesota Litigator has previously reported on Minneapolis attorney William Butler’s wholly unsuccessful attempts to defend against foreclosure actions using the debunked “show […]

For our third profile of an interesting Minnesota litigators, we had the chance to sit down with Eric Cooperstein to talk about his ethics defense and advising practice. Cooperstein’s career has taken him from splitting time at Legal Aid and Mansfield & Tanick to the Office of Lawyer’s Professional Responsibility (“OLPR”) to administering a consent decree […]

Attorney John Murrin – of DIAL L-A-W-Y-E-R-S fame – was thrown into involuntary bankruptcy by his creditors after failing to pay over $460,000 in sanctions and costs for pursuing frivolous claims, engaging in bad-faith litigation, and failing to comply with several court orders (which led Hennepin County District Court Judge Denise Reilly to issue a bench […]

Earlier this month, the Minnesota Supreme Court heard argument in the matter involving Thomas J. Lyons, Jr., who is widely known in the local bar, if only indirectly by many, through his prolific Fair Debt Collection Practices Act complaints filed in U.S. District Court (D. Minn.).  FDCPA claims by Lyons and others represent a substantial […]