Well “tickle my ass with a feather” if Hammerman didn’t put the hammer down on Buddy Caldwell and the apparently illegal contracts he let to his political supporters like Allan “Show me the money” Kanner, who is evidently is sleeping while on tower in Judge Barbier’s courtroom. None of this is a particularly new topic for us as Slabbed has covered the MDL litigation as well as the crash and burn of Ex Rel Branch but the grandaddy of Buddy Caldwell blogging is over at the Hayride with my colleague Scott McKay. We’re gonna get to Scott in a second but first Hammerman:
Yeah Buddy, Allan Kanner got lucky alright and you need a seeing eye dog if you are paying an attorney $600.00 an hour to sleep on the job.
Scott McKay over at the Hayride broke the transcript. He also had this in a follow up post that nails it:
There is additional context to the Kanner-Barbier-Caldwell donnybrook. We’re told by a friend in the legal community that Kanner and Barbier hate each other. We’re also told that Kanner really is a good attorney, but that once that case went in front of Barbier it was suicide to have Kanner sitting at the attorneys’ table. So when the judge singles out Kanner for abuse from the bench that’s nothing less than a the judge taking a chance to stick a knife in a guy he can’t stand. Who’s our attorney, by the way, and a damn expensive one, at that.
So we’re shelling out $600 an hour for this train wreck. And here comes Caldwell, who, asked about Barbier dissing his lead hired-gun outside counsel attorney in the trial transcript, thinks it’s a good idea to trash the judge for his level of attention to the trial.
The Buddy system in action, ain’t it grand.