Trial Lawyers' Influence
Personal injury lawsuits and other tort claims represent a $40 billion per year industry built upon the abuse and misuse of America’s legal system by contingency-fee lawyers. While these trial lawyers (or plaintiffs’ lawyers or personal injury lawyers) have long claimed to champion “the little guy,” their injured and uninjured plaintiffs are often drawn into a legal process that primarily just expands trial lawyers’ finances and political power.
The Lawsuit Abuse Cycle
The abusive business strategy used by many plaintiffs’ lawyers involves:
– Expanding the scope of civil law to create new forms of lawsuits
– Building wealth using lawsuits and the threat of lawsuits against wealthy defendants
– Using the additional wealth to build political strength to support efforts to start the cycle again
– As billionaire trial lawyer Dickie Scruggs explains, plaintiffs’ lawyers find courtrooms, or “magic jurisdictions,” as he calls them, where the judge is friendly to the plaintiffs’ bar and where personal relationships often seem to outweigh the law. Therefore, huge verdicts can easily be won against out-of-town defendants with deep pockets.
– Areas that have been targeted for abuse by the plaintiffs’ bar are often those with the least fair and reasonable litigation environments (see page 18 of the 2006 U.S. Chamber of Commerce State Liability Systems Ranking Study).
Lawsuit Profits Build Venture Capital and Political Capital
The political power of plaintiffs’ lawyers expanded greatly beginning with the tobacco lawsuit settlement, when billions were paid to plaintiff lawyer firms. Since then, tobacco has been supplanted by handguns, lead paint, cheeseburgers, mold and various other targeted issues for “money-making” lawsuits.
The finances plaintiffs’ lawyers take in from lawsuits can become “seed money” for expanding a political base and investing in the next type of novel lawsuit. Many state judges, legislators, and governors, as well as Members of Congress, have been elected based on campaign money raised from the plaintiffs’ bar.
Moreover, trial lawyers are lobbying powerhouses in Congress and state capitols across the country. Using their unrivaled political influence, plaintiff lawyers frequently block common-sense legal reforms from being enacted and help preserve the out-of-control status quo that they find too profitable to abandon.
Trial Lawyer Influence Litigation Impact
Our Legal System Takes a Hit:
In addition to finding friendly courtrooms and using money to build political power, other tactics of the plaintiffs’ bar include:
– Building huge plaintiff classes in class action lawsuits to increase court awards and settlements
– Using unsubstantiated science and novel legal theories to create new classes of plaintiffs and new bodies of “evidence”
– Partnering with state attorneys general in order to file lawsuits on behalf of government entities
o As just one example of class action abuse and trial lawyer greed, a lawsuit over movie rentals resulted in class members receiving only coupons for future movie rentals while their lawyers received $9 million in fees and expenses.
As trial lawyers’ wealth and political influence are used to manipulate our legal system, American citizens pay the price – through lost job opportunities, diminished access to healthcare, higher consumer prices and reduced access to courtrooms filled with frivolous cases. The overall high cost of our tort system means that every American pays an average of $835 annually, according to Tillinghast/TowersPerrin’s annual report on the costs of the U.S. legal system (Read Tillinghast/TowersPerrin’s 2008 update on U.S. Tort Costs.) Americans will continue to pay the price until trial lawyers’ abuses of the legal system are reined in once and for all.
