Sick of Lawsuits Newsletter

View the April 2008 edition of
Sick of Lawsuits Update!

HTML

April 2008

• The Worst Places To Get Sued In America
  

  "By the time most law students have finished the first year of law school, they've had the responses 'yes' and 'no' surgically excised from their thoughts and replaced by the signature American legalism—'it depends.' And it does. Any attorney worth his salt knows a client's fate frequently depends on the location of the courthouse deciding it. Horse thieves never fared well in frontier courts, but outlaws like Billy the Kid did. Even now, the worst place for an oil company to get sued is not necessarily the worst place for an investment bank. Still, defense attorneys largely agree that a few locales are worst-case-scenario venues. 'There is a high degree of stability in what most people think are the most problematic places to get sued,' said Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of The Rule of Lawyers. 'If you put pins on a map for the top 50 most outrageous verdicts, bizarre run-away juries and so forth, you would find this belt around the Gulf Coast that runs from southern Texas across Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama and Florida. These are also some of the places people consider the worst places to get sued.'"
  

• Trial Lawyers: No Alibi for Greed
  

  "Several of the richest and most powerful plaintiffs' attorneys in America may soon be shuffling off to federal prison - further tarnishing the negative image surrounding trial lawyers. Class-action tort king Melvyn I. Weiss pleaded guilty last week to federal criminal charges related to his role in a scheme to give kickbacks to plaintiffs in lawsuits filed by his firm, Milberg Weiss. One of Weiss' former partners, William S. Lerach, was sentenced last month to two years in prison after pleading guilty to his role in the scheme. Then this bombshell hit: Richard F. 'Dickie' Scruggs pleaded guilty March 14 to trying to bribe a judge in Mississippi. Scruggs burnished his reputation as one of the most feared lawyers in the country after taking on Big Tobacco and reaching a $206 billion settlement in 1998 on behalf of 46 states. The case was the subject of the movie The Insider. In the world of trial lawyers, the trio of convictions was like finding out that Ruth, Gehrig and Mays took steroids and fixed baseball games."
  

• Small Victories for Tort Reform
  

  "Foes of lawsuit abuse have been writing gleefully about the fall of Dickie Scruggs, Bill Lerach and Melvyn Weiss. All three lawyers are likely to spend time in jail for plotting to bribe a judge (Scruggs) or paying kickbacks (Lerach and Weiss). Good riddance. Locking them up will stop them from further damaging America – at least for a few years. But it's a small victory for reformers. New members of the parasite circus will just step forward to take their place. And what these aggressive class-action and securities lawyers do legally is more damaging to America than the crimes that Scruggs, Lerach and Weiss committed. They broke laws to cheat other lawyers out of some loot, but at least that barely hurt the public. […] America needs judges willing to say 'no' to legal bullies. America also needs the legal standard that works in most of the world: 'loser pays.' Without reform, the parasites will take away your money and your choices."
  

• Wisconsin's Judicial Revolution
  

  "On Tuesday, for the first time in over four decades, Wisconsin voters turned out an incumbent justice of their state supreme court. The election showed that, given a clear choice, voters usually prefer a judicial conservative to one with an activist bent. The Wisconsin Supreme Court certainly bent the rule of law over the past four years, as a 4-3 liberal majority became the nation's premier trailblazer in overturning its own precedents and abandoning deference to the legislature's policy choices. Thus the defeat of Justice Louis Butler at the hands of Burnett County Judge Michael Gableman has national implications. A recent study in the University of California-Davis Law Review found that Wisconsin is the eighth most-cited state supreme court by other judicial bodies. Its rulings play a larger role in shaping court decisions elsewhere than those of courts in states such as New York, Florida or Texas. In addition, 38 states elect all or part of their appellate-level judges by popular vote. Judge Butler's defeat sends a signal that a judge who dramatically oversteps traditional boundaries can be brought to account."