Zoe
July 9, 2004, 6:21am
81
That’s the good news. The bad news is that he is “inexperienced.” (He’s never been the Governor of Texas.)
When you google “cerebral palsy lawyers” and get 45,800 hits, that seems to indicate to me that something else is going on out there. I’m sure the breast-implant lawyers are just fighting the good fight, too.
I googled “shaved porn lawyers” and got 50,100 hits.
Something else is definitely going on out there.
Well, that IS a growth industry…
…the Washington Monthly has a superb bit of reporting on tort ‘reform’ this month .
Not only were the particulars of the Newsweek story misleading. The essence of the story was wrong, too. Newsweek’s “onslaught” of lawsuits simply hasn’t happened. According to the National Center for State Courts, a research group funded by state courts, personal injury and other tort filings, when controlled for population growth, have declined nationally by 8 percent since the 1975, and have been falling steadily in real numbers since 1996. The numbers are even more dramatic in places with rapid population growth, like Texas, where the rate of tort filings fell 37 percent between 1990 and 2000. Even in liberal California, the rate of filings has plummeted 45 percent over the past decade. And those overly sympathetic juries Newsweek derides as so eager to dole out big bucks to injured victims?
In 2001, they voted against plaintiffs in 75 percent of all medical malpractice trials, according to the federal government’s Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS).
In an interview, Taylor dismisses these numbers as insignificant compared with the tort system’s $200 billion drag on the economy. “The costs of the tort system to society have gone up astronomically,” he says. That figure, though, comes from the insurance-industry consulting firm Tillinghast-Towers Perrin (TTP), which includes in its definition of the “tort system” insurance company administrative costs and overhead and the salaries of highly paid insurance company CEOs[.]
Apparently the insurance industry has been trying to scare people about lawsuit costs for a long time:
With their profits threatened by unfavorable jury verdicts, the insurance industry started running anti-lawsuit ads targeted at jurors. For instance, in 1953, the industry ran ads in Life magazine and The Saturday Evening Post that declared, “ruled by emotion rather than facts, [jurors] arrive at unfounded or excessive awards–verdicts occasionally even higher than requested!” The ads implored potential jurors to remember that “you pay for liability and damage suit verdicts whether you are insured or not.”
<snip>
In 1962, CBS broadcast “Smash-Up,” a fictionalized docudrama that portrayed sleazy lawyers faking auto accident cases. The Insurance Information Institute, the industry’s public relations arm, helped write the script. In 1977, the venerable insurance company Crum & Forester sponsored one of the first print ads that included what would become a staple of anti-lawsuit rhetoric: the fictional lawsuit horror story. The ad told the story of a guy who collected a $500,000 jury verdict after he was injured using a lawnmower as a hedge clipper. The agency later conceded that it had no factual basis for the story, but that didn’t keep it from circulating widely in the media and in conservative political speeches.
<snip>
In 1986, Newsweek ran a series of ads sponsored by the insurance industry under the heading, “We all pay the price.” The ads warned that lawsuits were driving ob/gyns out of business, shuttering local school sports programs, and scaring the clergy out of counseling their flocks–though few of these assertions turned out to be true.
They also knew how to work the refs, and they didn’t mind lying a bit:
In a 1992 memo, [Manhattan Institute] president William Hammett explained the strategy for molding reporters into a “pro-tort reform” position: “Journalists need copy, and it’s an established fact that over time they’ll ‘bend’ in the direction in which it flows. For that reason, it is imperative that a steady stream of understandable research, analysis, and commentary supporting the need for liability reform be produced. If sometime during the present decade, a consensus emerges in favor of serious judicial reform, it will be because millions of minds have been changed, and only one institution is powerful enough to bring that about: the combined force of the nation’s print and broadcast media, the most potent instrument for public education–or miseducation–in existence.”
Over the next decade, the institute produced a blizzard of reports, conferences, op-eds, books, and mailings all decrying the “litigation explosion” and greedy trial lawyers. They cultivated sympathetic and influential journalists…But some of the institute’s “scholars” played a little fast and loose with the facts.
Take the idea of a “tort tax,” the financial hit allegedly taken by every citizen because of the legal system, which Taylor raised in his December Newsweek article. It dates back to 1988, when Manhattan Institute fellow Peter Huber coined the term in his book, Liability, and claimed that the tort system cost Americans $300 billion a year. Three years later, the figure made its way into a speech given by Vice President Dan Quayle, who blamed lawyers for wrecking the economy. After the speech, several researchers examined the methods Huber had used to arrive at that figure. Huber, they found, had simply made it up. As The Economist observed in 1992, “the $300 billion figure has no discernible connection to reality.”
The story lists the publication of a whole string of stories of outrageous lawsuit awards, which turn out to have originated from spam emails, or made up by insurance flacks. Like these:
in June 2003, in a column entitled, “Welcome to Sue City, U.S.A.,” U.S. News & World Report owner Mort Zuckerman claimed that “litigation has become our national pastime.” As proof, he offered several examples of lawsuits that illustrated the nation’s “enormous inflation of rights over responsibilities.” Zuckerman wrote, “A woman throws a soft drink at her boyfriend at a restaurant, then slips on the floor she wet and breaks her tailbone. She sues. Bingo–a jury says the restaurant owes her $100,000! A woman tries to sneak through a restroom window at a nightclub to avoid paying the $3.50 cover charge. She falls, knocks out two front teeth, and sues. A jury awards her $12,000 for dental expenses.”
The anecdotes were catchy. Unfortunately, they weren’t true. The stories had been circulating in an email for two years and had made it into several mainstream news outlets, including another Zuckerman property, The New York Daily News, which had published an email containing one of the fake lawsuits in the sports section a year earlier (with no correction). When The Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz called him on the U.S. News error, Zuckerman was unapologetic. The magazine only published a brief clarification about the fictional suits, which ended by saying, “Mr. Zuckerman continues to believe, and most Americans agree, that we live in a country where far too many frivolous lawsuits are filed each year.” When contacted by The Washington Monthly, a spokesperson for Zuckerman refused to disclose the source of the lawsuit anecdotes or to offer an explanation as to why Zuckerman would publish anything from a spam email without checking it out first.
Ah yes, the claim that it doesn’t matter that the anecdote itself is false, because it illustrates the larger point. The problem with that logic, of course, is that if factual illustrations of the problem are hard to come by, it might be that the problem itself isn’t really all that big.
BJS numbers certainly suggest the problem’s shrinking, rather than growing:
most tort lawsuits in this country–nearly 60 percent–involve simple fender-benders, and the awards are generally quite small and getting smaller. New data released in April by the Justice Department’s BJS show that in state courts, the median “jackpot” jury verdict in all tort suits was a mere $37,000 in 2001–down from $65,000 in 1992.
You may ask why you haven’t heard about this. So did the Washington Monthly reporter:
Because the Justice Department data conflict so sharply with conventional wisdom, you’d think it would have been big news. The media coverage that resulted from the new government study? Forty words in the USA Today. As of mid-August, no major media outlet had covered the study, including Newsweek.
Read the whole thing if you’ve got the time. As always, the WM is doing outstanding reporting on its shoestring budget.
From what I’ve heard he was good enough to have the ambulances chase him.
I’m neither pro Bush or Kerry, but I will say lawyers who specialize in 'birth injury cases" (we lawyers call them bad baby cases) are IMHO rather slimy. Of all the med mal cases these usually have the least ties to actual causation. The big Plaintiffs firms keep using the same expert Dr. to pinpoint the “injury” to the baby whereas many doctors will say you really can’t do that except in extreme circumstances. ACOG (american college of obstetrics and gynelcology) keeps coming closer and close to saying the link between birth trauma and cerbral palsy in your average baby is getting weaker and weaker.
But, clearly any argument on the Plaintiff side can be bolstered and defended otherwise you would have experts stricken based on Daubert (junk science) and frankly they usually are not. But these cases do have everything to do with the poor kids and how they are going to be taken care of. The jury sees this, sees deep pockets and will oftentimes award millions then apologize to defense counsel on the way out…
BTW, a bad cerebral palsy case will usually settle for around 5 million in these parts and can be work significantly more if tried and won. Most are not tried here (DFW, Texas) anymore rather they are settled. So each case is worth to Plaintiffs’ counsel around 40% of 5 million and expenses are not included in that 40% and also come out of that 5 mil.
I think I’d feel differently if we were talking about clearer negligence–like a doc cutting off the wrong limb…
And Minty hope your thing went well, but if you think insurance defense lawyers make $175-400 an hour, you are WAY in the high ballpark–even with self insured hospitals.