Michael Ketchmark

Last updated
Michael Ketchmark
NationalityUnited States
Alma mater University of Iowa (BA, JD)
OccupationAttorney
Years active1990–present

Michael Scott Ketchmark is an American civil trial attorney based in Leawood, Kansas. [1] He is the president of Ketchmark & McCreight, P.C., a law firm which specializes in personal injury cases. [2]

Contents

Career

Ketchmark represented the plaintiffs in over 275 wrongful death lawsuits seeking civil damages stemming from the criminal conviction of Robert Courtney, a former pharmacist sentenced to over 30 years in federal prison for intentionally diluting prescription drugs, including chemotherapy medication, for financial gain. [3] [4] A jury awarded $2.2 billion on behalf of Courtney's victims in February 2002. [5] In 2020, when Courtney was eligible to be released 7 years early due to health concerns stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic, Ketchmark and other lawyers involved in Courtney's case called on officials to reconsider their decision, which resulted in Courtney's continued prison detention. [6] [7]

Ketchmark has represented clients before the Supreme Court of Missouri. [8]

Burnett et al v. National Association of Realtors et al

Beginning in 2019, Ketchmark served as the plaintiff's lead attorney in Burnett et al v. National Association of Realtors et al, a class action lawsuit involving the sellers of over 260,000 homes in Kansas, Missouri and Illinois during the period of 2015 to 2022. [9] The lawsuit alleged that the National Association of Realtors (NAR) had anticompetitive rules that required home sellers to pay commission to the home buyer's broker, effectively resulting in inflated commissions and artificially high mortgage rates and real property values. [10] Specifically, the plaintiffs demonstrated that the NAR required sellers to make nonnegotiable commission offers of between 5–6% before listing homes on the property database, the Multiple Listing Service, without which seller's homes would have virtually no marketplace visibility. [11] On October 31, 2023, after a two-week trial a federal jury found the defendants guilty and held the NAR liable for $1.78 billion in damages. [12] Additional defendants in the case included HomeServices of America and Keller Williams Realty, among others. [13] On the same day as the jury's verdict, Ketchmark filed a larger class action lawsuit covering all home sellers in the United States who paid commissions since 2019, and is seeking $100 billion in damages. [14]

Political contributions

Ketchmark has personally and through his firm collectively donated over $1 million to Republican and Democrat political campaigns and political action committees in Missouri. [15]

See also

Related Research Articles

A multiple listing service is an organization with a suite of services that real estate brokers use to establish contractual offers of cooperation and compensation and accumulate and disseminate information to enable appraisals. A multiple listing service's database and software is used by real estate brokers in real estate, representing sellers under a listing contract to widely share information about properties with other brokers who may represent potential buyers or wish to work with a seller's broker in finding a buyer for the property or asset. The listing data stored in a multiple listing service's database is the proprietary information of the broker who has obtained a listing agreement with a property's seller.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">National Association of Realtors</span> American trade association for real estate brokers

The National Association of Realtors (NAR) is an American trade association for those who work in the real estate industry. It has over 1.5 million members, making it the largest trade association in the United States including NAR's institutes, societies, and councils, involved in all aspects of the residential and commercial real estate industries. The organization holds a U.S. trademark over the term "Realtor". NAR also functions as a self-regulatory organization for real estate brokerage. The organization is headquartered in Chicago.

A real estate agent, referred to often as a real estate broker, is a person who represents sellers or buyers of real estate or real property. While a broker may work independently, an agent usually works under a licensed broker to represent clients. Brokers and agents are licensed by the state to negotiate sales agreements and manage the documentation required for closing real estate transactions. Buyers and sellers are generally advised to consult a licensed real estate professional for a written definition of an individual state's laws of agency.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">For sale by owner</span>

For sale by owner (FSBO) is the process of selling real estate without the representation of a broker or agent. Homeowners may employ the services of marketing, online listing companies, or market their own property. Typically, they represent themselves with the help of a lawyer or solicitor throughout the sale. As in most areas, there are detailed legal requirements pertaining to sellers and disclosures they must make.

Robert Ray Courtney is an American former pharmacist from Kansas City, Missouri. In 2002, after initially being caught diluting several doses of chemotherapy drugs, he pleaded guilty to intentionally diluting 98,000 prescriptions involving multiple types of drugs, which were given to 4,200 patients, and was sentenced to 30 years in federal prison.

Robert A. Clifford is a Chicago trial lawyer and principal partner at Clifford Law Offices. Clifford's firm specializes in "personal injury, medical malpractice, mass torts, consumer and health care fraud, product liability, and aviation and transportation disasters." He attended DePaul University for both his undergraduate work and Juris Doctor, finishing in 1976. The firm was founded in 1984 to represent plaintiffs in personal injury and wrongful death cases.

Metropolitan Regional Information Systems, Inc. provides a multiple listing service in the United States. As of mid-July 2010, it served 51,171 real estate professionals in Baltimore-Washington Metropolitan Area including Maryland, Washington DC, Northern Virginia, and parts of West Virginia and Pennsylvania.

A real estate trend is any consistent pattern or change in the general direction of the real estate industry which, over the course of time, causes a statistically noticeable change. This phenomenon can be a result of the economy, a change in mortgage rates, consumer speculations, or other fundamental and non-fundamental reasons.

A real estate license is an authorization issued by a government body to give agents and brokers the legal authority to represent a home seller or buyer in a real estate transaction. Real estate agents and real estate brokers are required to be licensed when conducting real estate transactions in the United States and many other countries.

HomeServices of America is the United States' largest residential real estate services company, based on closed transactions. The company provides real estate brokerage services, mortgage loan origination, franchising, title insurance/escrow and closing services, home warranties, property insurance, casualty insurance, and relocation services.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">W. Mark Lanier</span> American lawyer

William Mark Lanier is an American trial lawyer and founder and CEO of the Lanier Law Firm. He has led a number of high profile product litigation suits resulting in billions of dollars in damages, including Johnson & Johnson baby powder and Merck & Co.'s Vioxx drug.

An exclusive buyer agent (EBA) (also known as an exclusive buyer broker (EBB)) is a U.S. real estate firm (or an agent or broker who works in such a company) that represents only buyers of real estate. EBA firms never take listings and, therefore, never represent the seller in a real estate transaction.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Realtor.com</span> Real estate website

Realtor.com is a real estate listings website operated by the News Corp subsidiary Move, Inc. and based in Santa Clara, California. It is the second most visited real estate listings website in the United States as of 2021, with over 100 million monthly active users. The site launched as the Realtor Information Network in 1995, serving as a closed network for members of the National Association of Realtors. It relaunched in 1996 as a public website displaying property listings. Since then, Realtor.com claims to be the largest real estate website in the United States, and in 2016 was valued at $2.5 billion by Morgan Stanley.

The Jacksonville, Maryland, ExxonMobil gas leak case is a series of lawsuits against ExxonMobil as a result of a February 2006 underground gasoline leak from an ExxonMobil service station in Jacksonville, Maryland.

NeighborCity was a residential real estate information and service company that rated real-estate agents in the United States, offering a way for buyers and sellers of homes to compare and evaluate agents. It was based in San Francisco.

Monsanto was involved in several high-profile lawsuits, as both plaintiff and defendant. It had been defendant in a number of lawsuits over health and environmental issues related to its products. Monsanto also made frequent use of the courts to defend its patents, particularly in the area of agricultural biotechnology. Bayer acquired Monsanto in 2018, and the company has since been involved in litigation related to ex-Monsanto products such as glyphosate, PCBs and dicamba. In 2020 it paid over $10 billion to settle lawsuits involving the glyphosate based herbicide Roundup.

Creig Northrop is an American real estate agent and broker. He is the founder and CEO of Northop Realty, a real estate brokerage.

Owen Diaz v. Tesla was a discrimination lawsuit filed against electric car manufacturer Tesla, Inc. The plaintiff, Owen Diaz, was an elevator operator at the Tesla Fremont Factory in California between 2015 and 2016. The lawsuit stated that Diaz faced constant harassment including racial slurs. According to the state's Department of Fair Employment and Housing, the Fremont factory was racially segregated and Black workers testified that they were subjected to racist slurs, racial drawings, and were given the most menial and physically demanding work. Working conditions at the plant were so unacceptable, the department stated, that many Black employees had been forced to quit. J. Bernard Alexander III, one of Diaz's lawyers, told jurors that the use of the “n-word” was pervasive and virtually everywhere at Fremont factory.

<i>Sines v. Kessler</i> Civil rights lawsuit decided in 2021

Sines v. Kessler was a civil lawsuit against various organizers, promoters, and participants in the Unite the Right rally, a white supremacist rally that took place in Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017. The trial began in October 2021, and on November 23, the jury reached a mixed verdict in which they found various defendants liable on claims of civil conspiracy and race-based harassment or violence. They also found James A. Fields, Jr., the perpetrator of the car attack against counterprotesters at the rally, liable for assault and battery and intentional infliction of harm. Altogether, the jury awarded the plaintiffs more than $25 million in punitive and compensatory damages, though this was later reduced by the judge to $2.35 million.

DEA-DOJ v. Walmart Inc. was a settlement involving the complaints and lawsuits of Walmart pharmacy, and other large pharmaceutical companies. The lawsuits were made after an official complaint issued by the United States Department of Justice and the Drug Enforcement Administration, after Walmart was accused of illegally selling opioids to their customers, despite prior laws prohibiting such actions.

References

  1. ↑ "Lawyer Directory Detail". Missouri State Bar. Retrieved 11 November 2023.
  2. ↑ "More than $20 million disbursed to victims from punitive damages awards fund, Labor Department figures reveal". St. Louis Daily Record. 25 February 2002. Retrieved 2 December 2019.
  3. ↑ Stitch, Rodney (2012). The Good, the Bad, and the Deadly. Silverpeak Publisher, Inc. ISBN   9780932438799.
  4. ↑ Class Action Litigation Report. Washington, D.C.: United States Bureau of National Affairs. 2003. p. 887.
  5. ↑ Dan Collins (25 February 2002). "Drug-Diluting Pharmacist Gets 30 Years". CBS News. Retrieved 11 November 2023.
  6. ↑ "Victims' lawyer: Drug-diluting pharmacist set to be released". Associated Press. 14 July 2020. Retrieved 11 November 2023.
  7. ↑ Katie Moore (14 July 2020). "Monster KC pharmacist who diluted medications for years to be released 7 years early". Kansas City Star. Retrieved 11 November 2023.
  8. ↑ "L.A.C. v. Ward Parkway Shopping Center, L. P." (PDF). Supreme Court of Missouri. 1 October 2001. Retrieved 11 November 2023.
  9. ↑ Elisabeth Buchwald (31 October 2023). "Realtors found liable for $1.8 billion in damages in conspiracy to keep commissions high". CNN. Retrieved 11 November 2023.
  10. ↑ "Burnett et al v. National Association of Realtors et al". U.S. Courts, Western District of Missouri. Retrieved 11 November 2023.
  11. ↑ Julian Mark (31 October 2023). "Jury awards $1.8B in realty case that could shake up brokerage commissions". Washington Post. Retrieved 11 November 2023.
  12. ↑ Mike Scarcella and Jonathan Stempel (31 October 2023). "US jury finds realtors liable for inflating commissions, awards $1.78 bln damages". Reuters. Retrieved 11 November 2023.
  13. ↑ Elisabeth Buchwald (1 November 2023). "Realtors found liable for $1.8 billion in damages in conspiracy to keep commissions high". ABC. Retrieved 11 November 2023.
  14. ↑ Katie Arcieri (1 November 2023). "Home Sellers Seek $100 Billion From 'Goliath' Realtor Groups". Bloomberg Law. Retrieved 11 November 2023.
  15. ↑ Rudi Keller (30 March 2021). "Todd Graves gets high-powered help lobbying for UM curator position". Columbia Missourian. Retrieved 11 November 2023.

Further reading

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.