82% of Americans agree that personal injury lawyers who file lawsuits over medicines and other healthcare remedies are more interested in making money than in helping their clients.

• No longer seeing malpractice as a lucrative area for litigation since enactment of reasonable limits to jury awards in some states, personal injury lawyers are turning down malpractice cases that they once jumped on. Instead, they are looking at other areas of the healthcare system that can produce bigger windfalls. ("Malpractice Suits Quashed by Law," Corpus Christi Caller Times, September 19, 2004)

• In 2002 alone, trial lawyers earned $40 billion from lawsuit awards. (A Report on the Lawsuit Industry in America, The Center for Legal Policy, Manhattan Institute, 2003)

• Some personal injury lawyers have given little regard to whether plaintiffs they represent have actual injury, and instead pull in as many “victims” as possible into their lawsuits to get larger payouts. Heart screenings sponsored by law firms for Fen-Phen litigation plaintiffs were described by a judge as “the envy of Henry Ford." A review of close to 1,000 of these screenings found that 71 percent had been manipulated to misrepresent actual heart damage. ("Science Takes Role in Product Liability," The Associated Press, February 11, 2005)

• The fraud recently discovered in Texas silicosis litigation prompted the judge deciding the case to write, “These diagnoses were about litigation rather than healthcare . . . These diagnoses were manufactured for money.” It was discovered in the trial that almost all of the 10,000 plaintiffs were diagnosed by the same nine doctors, who were paid by law firms to provide mass x-rays for them. ("The Silicosis Sheriff," The Wall Street Journal, July 14, 2005 (subscription required))

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