The Case for Tort Reform in Florida
December 10, 2010
Florida businessman John R. Smith makes a compelling case for tort reform in Florida and demonstrates why seizing the state’s civil justice system from Trial Lawyers Inc. is at the top of the agenda for incoming Governor Rick Scott and the new legislature. Money graphs:
“Lawsuit abuse is a threat to our small businesses, where lawsuit costs drive up the price of goods and services, which consumers pay for. Plaintiff lawyers get rich while economic growth declines. Kids can’t play in schoolyards because of the hundreds of claims for playground accidents. Our reputation dissuades many businesses from locating here, and convinces professionals to move away.
“What’s to be done? Well, I’m a fan of reducing the personal injury bar to rubble, then bringing them to a boil.”
Smith quickly concedes that his “shock and awe” plan for Florida trial lawyers isn’t politically correct, so he’ll settle for capping Powerball-sized damage awards, curbing “junk science” in the courtroom, medical liability reform and other reforms to dissuade frivolous lawsuits.
Elections Have Consequences: Taking Back our Courts from Trial Lawyers Inc.
December 8, 2010
Newly elected governors in Pennsylvania and Florida are counting on strong Republican majorities in their legislatures to quickly push through meaningful tort reform early next year.
In Pennsylvania, Governor-elect Tom Corbett has called on the GOP majority in both houses to deliver a bill within six months. One key reform: reinstating Pennsylvania’s Fair Share Act, which modified abusive liability rules that allowed plaintiffs’ lawyers to hold a defendant liable for 100 percent of any damage award even if that defendant was only responsible for 1 percent of an injury. Corbett has also called for an end to venue shopping, which allowed trial lawyers to file claims in tort-friendly jurisdictions. Business groups such as the NFIB and Pennsylvania Manufacturers Association are rallying behind the plan.
In Florida, William Large of the Florida Justice Reform Institute says the election of a Republican supermajority has created a “tremendous opportunity” to pass legislation bottled up for years by the state’s trial bar and its former allies in the legislature. One bill likely on the fast track is a common sense measure that would allow a jury to apportion fault among all responsible parties, not just corporate defendants. As Jose Gonzalez of Associated Industries of Florida told one reporter:
“It’s a fairness issue. Right now, a jury [in an auto liability case] only heard about a faulty seat belt or bad roof. They don’t hear that the driver was on 10 different kinds of drugs and ran off the road.”
Elections have consequences – and it seems one message voters sent this November is that it’s time to take back our courts from Trial Lawyers Inc.
Trial Bar Shifts Focus from Congress to Obama Admin
December 6, 2010
The trial bar has lost its tort-friendly majority in Congress, so Tiger Joyce, head of the invaluable American Tort Reform Association, expects the personal injury lobby to shift its focus to the Obama Administration.
First on the agenda: getting the Obama Treasury Department to create a new loophole in the tax code to encourage speculative lawsuits. Under a scheme being pushed by the national trial bar lobby, U.S. taxpayers would actually underwrite lawsuits by giving contingency fee lawyers the ability to write off the costs of investing in new cases. Cost: $1.6 billion.
How the Trial Lawyer-Litigation Complex is Killing the American Spirit
October 11, 2010
Philip K. Howard has a gem of a piece outlining how the Trial Lawyer-Litigation Complex is destroying the American spirit of entrepreneurship, individual opportunity and civic responsibility. A few highlights:
“The sheer volume of law suffocates innovative instincts, while distrust of lawsuits discourages ordinary human choices. Why take a chance on the eager young person applying for a job when, if it doesn’t work out, you might get sued for discrimination? Why take the risk of expanding production in another state that requires duplicating legal risks and overhead? Why bother to start a business at all?”
“Over the generations, the American spirit of individual opportunity has been manifested not only in new businesses, but in the civic and public life as well – in the culture of barn-raisings and boy scouts and cake sales. These deep roots of our culture … have also atrophied before our eyes. Hardly any social interaction is free of legal risk.”
“America can’t move forward until it cleans out this legal swamp. The accretion of law has made democracy inert – a sludge heap of programs and entitlements swarming with special interests – while also slowly suffocating the American spirit.”
DC Residents Socked with Huge Litigation Tab
October 11, 2010
Front page story in today’s Washington Post: “DC’s Other Thriving Industry: Lawsuits…City Paid $50 million from 2007 to 2009 to settle range of complaints out of court.” Full article here.
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.
Green Eyeshades Present Gift to Trial Bar
August 18, 2010
Think that companies are going to be straining under the weighty disclosure requirements and regulations of the new Dodd-Frank financial reform? Or that our nation’s employers will be bogged down with the new health care reform law and its mandates? Afraid to consider the impact Cap and Trade legislation might have on the private sector…not to mention on the length of the Federal Register?
Ah, but wait – there’s more! The green eyeshade army is preparing to unleash a set of rules that not only ratchets up publicly traded companies’ compliance costs, but also opens the floodgates to a torrent of new litigation. Read more
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
Worth a Look
July 29, 2010
Kevin Underhill, a partner at Shook, Hardy and Bacon, runs a great blog called Lowering the Bar dedicated to demonstrating that “legal humor” isn’t an oxymoron. Some of the most recent gems include this post on a lawsuit against a store that “failed to warn the plaintiff that playing with a sharp sword … would result in the plaintiff slicing his hand.” (h/t Walter Olson) Then there’s the $4.25 million verdict in the case of the missing pet turkeys in South Carolina. You gotta read it to believe it.