KAYE AS SHOP STEWARD
She’s "juiced." . . . How often do we get to hear Chief Judge Judith Kaye utter that phrase? At least once. The impetus? Judicial pay (and, to be fair, the possibility of reform in Albany.) In an address to the New York State Bar Association’s House of Delegates on Friday, Kaye called the lack of pay raises for judges the “ultimate assault on judicial independence.” The chief judge said “the unseemly scenario in which judges have to lobby politicians for a cost-of-living raise must come to an end,” the New York Law Journal reports. “The chief judge, who has run the court system for 14 years, said she has never previously seen 'this level of frustration and anger and despair' among judges, adding that ‘It is simply inappropriate for our judges to be involved with what they now have to do, which is campaign . . . in order to secure equitable compensation,’ ” Kaye is pushing legislative reform that would retroactively increase judicial pay and provide for automatic cost-of-living increases going forward. “I am juiced,” Kaye told the bar group. “Do stay tuned.”

CROOK QUOTA
Crooked lawyers on Long Island and crooked court clerks in upstate New York . . . Newsday reports that Long Island attorneys have been responsible for $31 million in theft in the last 25 years and that they account for 19 percent of the lawyers caught stealing statewide, although they only make up 13 percent of the attorneys registered throughout New York. The Lawyers Fund for Client Protection has for the first time put pressure on local bar associations to find a solution to the problem, Newsday says. The Nassau Bar Association says the criticism is unfair, but local bar leaders say they support tough prosecution, better education and other preventative measures, to stop lawyers from stealing. (Frequently escrow money is taken.)

SMALL CHANGE
Money has been funneled in another direction in the small-town justice courts throughout New York state. The New York Times illustrates the problem with the story of clerk Ruth Milk, who routinely tacked $35 onto parking fines and took the extra cash. The Times says it is looking at the problems tracking the “big money that moves through the state’s smallest courts.” (Milk, a clerk for the justice court in the western New York town of Perry, made off with about $60,000, state auditors found, and in 2005, another clerk was discovered to have taken nearly $40,000 from the court’s coffers.) More than $210 million passes through the small-town “justice courts” each year in bail, fines, and fees. “One of the most intractable problems those officials face is the courts’ miserable record with money, which has been lost, stolen or mishandled in case after case. State investigators have discovered financial records in disarray, missing or simply nonexistent.” The Office of Court Administration is soon going to require town and village courts to conduct audits — but the punishment for not complying is “less than sweeping,” the Times reports, noting that the list of “delinquent local governments” will simply be sent to the state comptroller's office. (The OCA says it will hire 12 new auditors to keep tabs on the justice courts.)

 
ANOTHER GROUND ZERO SUIT 
The family of a man who worked at Ground Zero and in April died of a rare lung disease is suing the city for $20 million, the New York Post reports this morning. Mark DeBiase died of pulmonary fibrosis — the same illness that afflicted police officer Cesar Borja, who also worked among the ruins of the World Trade Center. (Borja died last week after a much-publicized illness.) The suit alleges that the city failed to provide him with the protective gear that would have prevented Borja, who helped bring cellular phone service back to the WTC site shortly after the towers fell, from breathing in toxic dust. Andrew Carboy of Sullivan, Pappain, Block, McGrath & Cannovo is representing DeBiase’s wife, Jean Marie. The city’s law department, which faces thousands of related wrongful death cases that are consolidated, said it had not yet seen the papers in the suit. No word on what judge will hear it.

 
AMBITION SOARES
You haven’t seen the last of David Soares. He’s the District Attorney  capable of scaring the political machine, the one who “sent tremors through Albany by pressuring former State Comptroller Alan G. Hevesi, a fellow Democrat, to plead guilty to a single felony charge and to resign last month.” Since then, Danny Hakim reports in The New York Times, Soares said his office has received numerous tips about wrongdoing in state government. It is beyond a doubt that Soares is ambitious, although Hakim couches this characterization in careful language. The important thing to remember is that “ambitious” and “DA” doesn’t have to be a dirty combination. Maybe Soares, who was born on the Portuguese-speaking Cape Verde Islands and saw his brother deported from the United States on drug charges, does have aspirations for higher office and the proclivity to step on toes. (He has called the war on drugs a failure that “provides law enforcement officials with lucrative jobs and deemed prison building an American 'economic development strategy,'" according to the Times.) The 37-year-old says his ambitions are to bring “one standard of justice” to Albany. The success or failure of his efforts at rooting out corruption without regard for political affiliation will speak for themselves.

 
PRETTY PAYOUT
The Post adds up the city's personal injury bill last year, looking at the biggest tort payouts of 2006. A $9.5 million settlement in a Brooklyn car-crash topped the list, and the year's total came to a cool $477 million. The paper notes that the city had a relatively inexpensive year for settlements: "last year is the lowest since 2000, when the city paid out $425 million in personal-injury cases."