Welcome, Missouri Justice Alliance
May 2nd, 2008 | By Dan Pero | Category: Missouri, Trial Lawyers |
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It’s always great to see strong voices joining the legal reform cause. So it is with pleasure that I note that the Missouri Justice Alliance, a project of the Missouri Chamber Legal Foundation, is up and running.
Composed of more than 20 businesses and associations, the Alliance says it will fight to improve the state’s legal climate for small business. The Alliance’s first agenda item will be to push a consumer protection act reform to passage.
What is this about? Remember the lawsuit a D.C.-area judge launched against a small, family-owned cleaners, seeking $65 million in damages over a pair of missing pants? It is thanks to frivolous claims like these that small business people all over the country are in danger of losing their shirt—and their pants—and everything else.
In Missouri, the Alliance-backed bill would help protect small business owners from frivolous lawsuits and limit frivolous damage awards for some types of class-actions.
For a closer look at the bill details, go to the Alliance website.
As a two time veteran of malicious, frivolous lawsuits -, one in Wilson County Kansas which is still in the process of “creeping through” the serial extension, lawyer enriching “pre-trial discovery phase in Fredonia at $150.00 per hour -, plus costs –, I am all too familiar with the malicious, frivolous lawsuit industry. But I’ve also watched the lawyers “play fast and loose” with “ethics and accountability” in their dealings with prison inmates during my 29 year career as a federal correctional officer. Beyond any doubt the “system wide” legal chicanery and unprincipled, unaccountable “head gaming hucksterism” which characterizes the profession in both the civil and criminal justice system plays a key role in generating a generalized and justifiable mistrust of and contempt for “the law” -, on both sides of the law. That often results in societal disaster -, including rage driven crime and violence. But society is not “seeing -, or addressing that side of the story”.
Restricting reform to re-structuring legislation focused solely on forcing plaintiffs to provide documentation of their actual loss and damages etc. without corresponding legislation addressing and correcting the scandal of the “attorney accountability and discipline” fiasco will enjoy little if any long term success. That is because, absent the deterrent of electorate oversight, policing and restraint authority–, the attorneys and their black robed colleagues will always find a “way around any such “reform” legislation”. And their “fox guarding the chicken house” state attorney “discipline” bureaucracy will “nod and applaud it’s approval”.
The mandatory “fix for the problem” is a voter driven electorate seizure and majority control of the state attorney “discipline” bureaucracy. HALT’’s 2006 Report Card (www.halt.org) on Missouri’s attorney “discipline” bureaucracy reveals that attorneys make up the “deck stacking two thirds majority” on the panel, only 3% of complaints against attorneys are investigated and the adequacy of discipline is rated as a “D” which is just one point from an “F”. And that is the real reason why we all have just cause to be “afraid of the lawyers”. Unless and until we the electorate legally seize majority control, administration and oversight of the 50 state “fox guarding the chicken house” attorney discipline bureaucracies -, we might as well forget about “reining in the lawyers”.
Ivan L. Fail
Sparta, Missouri