Dear readers,

After eight years of writing about topics such as excessiveness, liability standards, and trial strategies, we’ve decided to retire Guideposts.

Rest assured that Mayer Brown will continue to share its analysis of litigation topics via Legal Updates, webinars and seminars. You can stay in the loop by subscribing to receive firm mailings

Adding to the list of sad things that happened in 2020, my long-time friend and mentor Andy Frey retired from Mayer Brown at the end of the year. Although Andy will remain available to consult on punitive damages and other matters as needed, I will greatly miss our regular collaboration in the effort to make the law of punitive damages fairer and more rational.

Andy joined Mayer Brown in 1986 after a lengthy stint in the Solicitor General’s office, where he served as Deputy Solicitor General with responsibility for the criminal docket for 13 years. During his time in the SG’s office, Andy helped steer the Supreme Court to fundamentally revise its constitutional criminal-procedure jurisprudence in several critical respects. In addition, he developed an appreciation and knowledge of the purposes of criminal sentencing that later informed his approach to punitive damages.
Continue Reading A Tribute To Andy Frey Upon His Retirement From Mayer Brown

ILR15077-HarrisReportCongratulations to the Chamber of Commerce’s Institute for Legal Reform for its recently issued report on the legal climate of the various states. The report is a thoroughly researched and elegantly presented compilation of information about various elements of each state’s legal climate. Based on a survey of in-house counsel, the report ranks the states

Way back in the prehistoric era of the worldwide web, Mayer Brown’s appellate group created what was, at the time, an innovative new web site. It was among the first legal web sites to incorporate sound (oral argument recordings) and archive vast amounts of information (the brief bank).

But times have changed and our web

Object-DefribillatorAny time a state supreme court is asked to recognize a new tort duty, its decision necessarily will affect the potential availability of punitive damages.  Hence, I consider it newsworthy that in a decision issued on June 23 the California Supreme Court declined to impose on retailers a duty to maintain automatic external defibrillators on