Trial Lawyers, Inc. Targeting the Environment
August 26, 2010
Manhattan Institute’s indespensible series, “Trial Lawyers, Inc,” has done a tremendous job of exposing the business model and structure of the trial bar and quantifying the damage lawsuit abuse does to our nation.
A new installment has just been released in the series, this one on the environment. The report examines how trial lawyers are going green ($$$) by ginning up mass class action environmental lawsuits. According to the report, the trial bar is charging contingency fees that eat up a third of class proceeds and doing an end-run around legislator and regulators by using the courts to enact their policy aims.
Manhattan Institute’s Jim Copeland is the author of this latest report. Jim was published in yesterday’s Investor’s Business Daily with an op-ed on climate change lawsuits, based in part on the arguments laid out in this latest report.
Tort Reform in California: Do it for the Kids
August 19, 2010
California is facing a $19 billion budget hole this year and the possibility of (once again) issuing IOUs instead of paychecks to state workers. Furloughs may soon be back en vogue, and the state’s debt rating is flirting with junk status. No sacred cows are being spared with proposals to slash spending on everything from schools to health care services.
But there are some California workers who are doing very well, thank you. You guessed it: trial lawyers.
Our friends at California Citizens Against Lawsuit Abuse are out with a new study that examines the staggering amount of money that California public school districts are spending each year on litigation. The study, “Lessons in Lawsuits: The Impact of Litigation on California’s Schools,” examines three years’ worth of legal costs at 12 California public school districts - including verdicts, settlements and lawyer fees.
The result? Litigation cost those 12 districts nearly $100 million over three years. Tom Scott, CALA’s executive director, said that this money could have “paid the salaries of more than 1,530 teachers, purchased nearly 600 new school buses, bought more than 1.1 million school desks or purchased 246,762 desktop computer packages.”
Of course all these whopping legal costs have a dire impact on the education of California’s children. Here’s an excerpt from the report:
“In June, the state Department of Education identified a record 174 of California’s school districts that were financially troubled, up 38 percent from January. Across the state, tens of thousands of teachers were pink-slipped this year, told the funding for their positions – to educate the next generation of Californians – was unavailable. In Los Angeles, the L.A. Unified School District (LAUSD) has cut disabled children’s programs, including shutting down 200 classrooms and an entire campus dedicated to serving the disabled and reducing busing for these students. The Kern High School District (HSD) was forced to auction off and recycle items like buses and student desks to raise money for its general fund. Travel for athletic teams and field trips also have been eliminated.”
Those students in Kern County, CA might be interested to know that while they were seeing their desks auctioned off, the district was spending $2.3 million defending against lawsuits.
Sounds like a healthy dose of legal reform would be a good first step toward closing the yawning budget gap in the Golden State.
Important New Study from RAND
August 9, 2010
The RAND Institute for Civil Justice is out with an important new study on the asbestos litigation morass, specifically:
- 54 asbestos bankruptcy trusts have been established through June 2010, “with an considerable acceleration in the number of trusts established in the second half of the 2000s.”
- 9 more trusts are in the pipeline, “with undoubtedly more to come.”
- In 2008, approximately 575,000 claims were paid at a cost of $3.3 billion. Read more
The Importance of Getting the Right Judges
June 30, 2010
In a recent address, Patrick Hanlon of the University of California-Berkley School of Law noted that “critical tort reform” has helped reduce frivolous litigation, but – perhaps unintentionally – pointed out the importance of getting the right judges on the bench.
According to Hanlon:
“ … plaintiffs and their lawyers are still able to pick the best forum for favorable judges and juries sympathetic to their cases and more inclined to side with them in their tort actions. ‘Surprisingly, overall, judges seem to have had a much greater impact than the juries have in creating anti-business litigation environments,’ he pointed out.”
Could there possibly be a better argument for why businesses and their advocates should fight schemes like “merit” selection, which typically give legal special interests such as trial lawyers enhanced power to decide who will control our courts?
Litigation Costs Hurting New Jersey Schools
June 29, 2010
Think tort reform is a “business” concern? Read this article which reports on the toll litigation costs take on school district budgets.
“The average New Jersey school district allocates approximately $26,000 each school year for litigation expense. in seven districts, this figure was higher than $500,000 for the 2009-2010 school year.”
In one district - School District of the Chathams - legal expenses are budgeted to be $1.26 million for 2010-2011. This is the kind of money that could be spent on “textbooks and teachers and field trips and fund things for kids,” says the district’s business administrator.
Instead, it will go to lawyers.
$$$ for Trial Lawyers, “Owners Manual Update” for Class Members
May 27, 2010
From Overlawyered.com: My lawyer got $35.1 million…and all I got was this lousy piece of paper.
More On Michigan Case: “Who Knew Carbon Monoxide Kills”?
May 26, 2010
Walter Olson at Overlawyered links to a great piece by Daniel Fisher of Forbes. (I blogged on this earlier this week).
Fisher’s piece, “Who Knew That Carbon Monoxide Kills?”, concerns the lawsuit over the death of a Michigan man by carbon monoxide poisoning. The man, an experienced mechanic, died while repairing his car inside his closed garage while the engine idled. His family charges the muffler repair kit manufacturer with failing to warn about the dangers of repairing mufflers indoors.
The trial judge dismissed the case for reasons, Fisher notes, “that should be obvious to anyone born in the 20th Century.” Namely, running an engine inside a closed garage is dangerous! Read more
Starbucks Suit: What Happened to Personal Responsibility?
May 21, 2010
Court Koenning of the Houston Citizens Against Lawsuit Abuse has a common-sense piece in the Southeast Texas Record worth a quick read. He writes: “We need to realize that every dilemma or personal disappointment is not fodder for a lawsuit and does not warrant a treasure trove of cash.”
Legal Reform Falters in South Carolina
May 4, 2010
South Carolina ranked 39th on the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s 2010 list of state legal climates – well behind its neighbors in North Carolina (17th) and Georgia (27th). So after the state House passed strong, bipartisan legal reform legislation, what does the state Senate do? Water down the bill to the point of irrelevance – or worse, according to Fitsnews.com.
Cam Crawford of the South Carolina Civil Justice Coalition calls the current version “unacceptable” and called on Senators to put some teeth back in the bill. Read more
Jet-Setting Trial Lawyers
May 4, 2010
Earlier this year, the trial bar scored a big victory at the expense of doctors and patients when both the House and Senate balked at including medical liability reform in health care reform legislation.
Today, the Altanta Journal Constitution offers an up-close look at two of the trial lawyers helping to drive health care premiums higher.
The AJC profiles Tommy and Adam Malone, the father-son trial-lawyer dynamic duo. It was in ruling this spring on one of Adam Malone’s cases that the Georgia Supreme Court overturned the state’s pain and suffering awards cap.
In between flights on their private planes and visits to homes in the Bahamas and Palm Beach, the two convince Georgia juries to award their clients multi-million dollar verdicts.
Their take? 40%. Read more