Ms. Hoppenjans’ practice will focus on commercial litigation and appellate litigation.

Fellows are selected and invited into Fellowship after being evaluated on effectiveness and accomplishment in litigation and trial work, along with ethical reputation.   The LCA’s selection process is a combination Fellow input, internal research nominations by Fellows, attorney opinions, evaluation of client selection of counsel, limited input from active and retired judges, and reviews of acknowledgement and recognition by other peer reviewing sources and associations.

The purpose of the LCA is to recognize deserving, experienced, and highly qualified lawyers, to provide an outlet for scholarly authorship of legal articles on trial and litigation practice, to provide additional sources for professional development, to promote superior advocacy and ethical standards in the practice of law, to assist in community involvement by its membership, and to advance a superior judiciary, by taking relevant positions on issues or legislation affecting judicial compensation and/or benefits, as well as those affecting the American litigation processes.

American Inns of Court are designed to improve the skills, professionalism and ethics of the bench and bar. An American Inn of Court is an amalgam of judges, lawyers, and in some cases, law professors and law students.  Each Inn meets approximately once a month both to “break bread” and to hold programs and discussions on matters of ethics, skills and professionalism.

Looking for a new way to help lawyers and judges rise to higher levels of excellence, professionalism, and ethical awareness, the American Inns of Court adopted the traditional English model of legal apprenticeship and modified it to fit the particular needs of the American legal system. American Inns of Court help lawyers to become more effective advocates and counselors with a keener ethical awareness. Members learn side-by-side with the most experienced judges and attorneys in their community.

American Inns of Court actively involve more than 25,000 state, federal and administrative law judges, attorneys, legal scholars and law students.

Credit to Finance Monthly

Dowd Bennett was named the joint winner of the Commercial Litigation Law Firm of the Year by The Finance Monthly Law Awards.  The Law Awards celebrate excellence in the profession across private practice, the public sector, commerce, industry, and the Bar. It is unquestionably one of the most distinguished law awards events of the year for the legal profession.

This year recorded the highest number of votes in the awards history. Thousands of entries were received throughout the year. 
The Finance Monthly editorial team conducts a huge research process to supplement the nominations.  Finance Monthly magazine combines the votes along with the research data in finalizing the shortlist and overall winners. The combination of this and Finance Monthly’s own research has made these awards the most comprehensive and incisive reflection of the commercial legal market.

For more information visit www.finance-monthly.com.

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. — The Missouri Supreme Court on Tuesday sided with several online travel companies in a dispute over hotel and tourism taxes.

At issue was a lawsuit filed by St. Louis County and the St. Louis Convention and Visitors Commission against several companies that help with hotel and motel bookings. The companies contract with hotels for discounted prices and then sell the rooms to the public for a higher price while remitting the discounted price to the hotel operator and keeping the remainder. According to court documents, St. Louis County and the commission had argued that the booking companies should pay the taxes for the price difference.

But a unanimous state Supreme Court disagreed Tuesday and ruled for the companies, concluding that they were not required to pay the taxes.

Defendants included companies such as Prestige Travel Inc., Expedia Inc., Hotels.com, Priceline.com and Orbitz Inc. The companies argued, according to court documents, that the taxes applied to hotel or motel operators and that the businesses ran travel websites. The firms said that the difference between the discounted price the businesses got from a hotel and the higher price charged to customers was compensation for the reservation services and not a room charge.

A trial court had dismissed the lawsuit over the tax dispute after a new Missouri law took effect that stated the taxes were limited to the payment received by the hotel operator while stating that travel agents and other intermediaries were not to be considered hotel operators.

The Missouri Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld the constitutionality of that law. The court said the online travel companies would not have had an obligation to pay the hotel tax because it was levied only on those operating a hotel or motel. In addition, the state high court said the online travel companies would not have been liable for the tourism tax because they do not provide sleeping rooms and that tax was focused on those who receive payment for use of a sleeping room.

An attorney who represented the companies did not return a call seeking comment. A lawyer who represented St. Louis County and the St. Louis Convention and Visitors Commission before the state Supreme Court was involved in a case outside of Missouri and not immediately available to comment Tuesday.

Sourced from: Forbes, MSNBC, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

The case is further detailed in the Experience section of our site.

Victorious lawyers reveal their strategies

Want to rack up your own wins? Read the inside story of some of the year’s legal tours de force

By Allison Retka, Missouri Lawyers Weekly
To Norm Siegel, when it comes time to begin the tumultuous settle­ment process, common ground is the best place to start.

Even if the case involves con­tentious issues and the two sides wildly differ on a settlement value, “we try to focus on things we can agree on,” said Siegel, a Kansas City attorney with Stueve Siegel Hanson.

Leave numbers out of the picture and speak openly with opposing counsel about less contentious elements, Siegel said, such as the structure of the settlement or its non-monetary components. Building trust during the earlier, easier parts of a settle­ment will help you negotiate its thornier parts.

Siegel is one of a handful of lawyers who secured the largest plaintiff and defense victories in Missouri in 2010, as reported to Missouri Lawyers Weekly. His leadership of two national class action suits brought in a combined $20.4 million in settlement dollars for consumers and nabbed the No. 7 and No. 12 plaintiff wins on the list.

Below, other victorious attorneys reveal the strategies that helped them nab multi-million dollar settlements and verdicts, or successfully spare their clients from simi­larly hefty amounts.

Costly defense strategy pays off

In an attempt to prove that their wood was not to blame for a structure collapse that killed a man, Heartland Wood Products Inc. authorized defense attorney Debbie Champion to hire an expert to build an exact replica.

In a wrongful death trial in New Madrid County, defense attorney Debbie Champion played an expensive game of “show-not-tell” that prompted a jury to clear her client of negligence.

The client, Heartland Wood Products Inc., faced the claims over the death of Sikeston resident Lance Simmons. While construct­ing a home for his family, Simmons, 30, fell from a broken truss and died. His family alleged Heartland Wood Products supplied the wrong type of wood for the project and bore the fault for his death.

Heartland Wood Products did admit that it supplied Simmons with the wrong grade of wood. But Champion countered that Simmons and his father bore the fault for departing from installation instruc­tions and inadequately securing the truss.

To prove this, Champion hired engi­neering expert, Kirk Grundahl, who con­structed a replica of the accident scene in a warehouse in Wisconsin. Grundahl conducted experiments on the replica, and showed that if installed properly, the lower grade of wood remained intact, even as his workers strolled along the truss and sat at its peak.

Champion showed videos of Grundahl’s experiments to the jury.

“It was a very expensive process to rebuild the entire frame of a house,” Champion said. When she first approached Heartland Wood Products with the idea for the re-creation, which ended up costing tens of thousands of dollars, the company’s leaders hesitated.

“They met and met and met again,” she said. “Finally, they said, ‘Let’s get this done.’

“You have to make a decision as to what it’s worth to explain this to the jury.”

The financial risk paid off for Champion’s clients, who were facing a $2 million last demand. The New Madrid County jury de­liberated just over an hour before return­ing with a defense verdict. They decided Lance Simmons was 50 percent at fault for his death and his father, James Simmons, was 50 percent at fault.

Champion, who also successfully de­fended Dierbergs from a $1.2 million slip-and-fall case last year, achieved the de­fense verdict while maneuvering around the always-difficult issue of directing fault towards a deceased individual loved and missed by his family.

“There was not a minute where I didn’t re­alize that I was dealing with the legacy of… a man who was very loved,” she said. “But people make mistakes. We tried to under­score the importance of not trying to blame an improper party for those mistakes.

“It’s not a blame issue. It’s simply a fact issue.”

Forcefully exposing excuses

It’s not the easiest task to humanize a billion-dollar company, but Jim Bennett did just that and, for his efforts, won a $7.6 million verdict for Creve Coeur-based Monsanto.

The St. Louis County win nabbed the No. 17 spot on Missouri Lawyers Weekly’s list of top plaintiff victories.

“The jury awarded us exactly what we asked for — every penny,” said Bennett, an attorney with Dowd Bennett in Clayton.

Monsanto had sued Houston-based ConocoPhillips over its two-year failure to deliver enough petroleum coke from a California refinery to a Monsanto manu­facturing plant in Indiana. Monsanto used the fuel to make Roundup herbicides.

The contract breach marred a fairly healthy 40-year relationship between the two companies, and to highlight that long corporate history, Bennett called upon some institutional knowledge: Dan Schettler, a retired Monsanto executive.

“He took the jury through every portion of the contract,” Bennett said. “It was re­ally nice to have a person who essentially took ownership for the reason Monsanto signed the contract.”

Bennett also used technology to expose the shifting explanations that ConocoPhillips representatives gave for the delivery errors. While cross-examining defense witnesses, Bennett would solicit the witness’ current stated reason for the error. Then, Bennett would play a clip from the same witness’ vid­eo deposition, exposing his prior excuse and projecting the inconsistent testimony onto the wall of the courtroom.

One witness sat there while Bennett con­fronted him about 10 separate inconsistent statements he made. Bennett said he didn’t follow up the video clips with further ques­tions; he let the inconsistencies speak for themselves.

“It has much more force that way,” he said.

Struggling with gaps in evidence

Bereft of crucial medical records and lacking the depositions of any treating physicians, Richard Hunsaker nonetheless fended off a hefty medical malpractice suit lodged against his client.

His victory captured the No. 8 defense win in Missouri last year.

Hunsaker, an attorney with Edwardsville, Ill.-based Heyl, Royster, Voelker & Allen, achieved his defense victory in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri, an odd venue for a medical mal­practice case. The suit was filed in federal court for the same reason evidence in the case was so hard to track down: the plain­tiffs are Israeli citizens.

Maizie Avichail sued St. John’s Mercy Health System and nurse Geraldine Jones — Hunsaker’s client — alleging her 9-year-old daughter, identified as T.A., suffered brain damage after a 2003 surgery she re­ceived in St. Louis. While recovering from a tongue reduction surgery, T.A.’s oxygen saturation levels dropped notably for a four-hour period.

Avichail claimed her daughter, who was born with an overgrowth syndrome, was never the same after the surgery. T.A. was prone to violent tantrums and unable to attend a traditional school.

Hunsaker said it was hard to obtain med­ical records housed in Israel, and he wasn’t able to depose any of the doctors who treat­ed T.A. before or after the surgery.

That lack of evidence left big gaps in the case, he said.

“I don’t know there’s any case I’ve had where I’m going in without all the re­cords,” he said.

To fill the gap, Hunsaker called in autism experts, who testified that the onset of puber­ty may have caused T.A.’s changes in behavior. At one point, he emphasized the absence of evidence for a strategic purpose: to highlight the plaintiff’s decision to not produce the doc­tors who treated T.A. after the surgery.

“I argued that because the plaintiff had the burden of proof, the jury ought to con­sider why they didn’t bring commentary on that point,” Hunsaker said.

In another stark difference between a state malpractice case and a federal mal­practice case, Hunsaker faced a time con­straint for his closing argument. In a cir­cuit court case, he usually speaks for 45 minutes. In the Avichail case, he had less than 25 minutes to make his point.

Ten minutes before his rose to give his ar­guments, Hunsaker made a decision. “I had to really streamline my closing,” he said.

He focused solely on the actions of Jones, his nurse client. Once Jones realized that T.A.’s oxygen saturation dipped, “she was all over it,” he said. “She called the sur­geon. She even stayed beyond her shift to help out.”

He told the jury, “You should judge her by the most important thing she did that day as a nurse. And no one’s critical of her response.”

The jury deliberated for about two hours before returning a verdict for the nurse and hospital defendants.

Copyright 2011 Missouri Lawyers Media