Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Posts Tagged ‘Manhattan Institute’

“Trial Lawyers Inc. — California”

The Manhattan Institute Center for Legal Policy (with which I’m affiliated) this week unveils a “new comprehensive study of the devastating impact of California’s lawsuit industry” entitled “Trial Lawyers Inc.: California”. It builds on 2003’s much talked-about “Trial Lawyers Inc.” report and, like that one, has been assembled by Jim Copland of the Institute.

Tomorrow (Apr. 14) from 10 to 2 at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco, the Manhattan Institute and the Pacific Research Institute are sponsoring an event (details) to call attention to the new report. Panelists include Jim Copland, Steven Hantler of DaimlerChrysler, and John Sullivan of the Civil Justice Association of California; there follows a keynote luncheon speech by author/TV host Catherine Crier, introduced by PRI’s Sally Pipes. P.S. The study has now been posted on the web, and is here. And Jim has an op-ed in the San Francisco Examiner (Apr. 13).

(cross-posted at Point of Law)

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Welcome Baltimore Sun readers

On Thursday the Baltimore Sun quoted me saying unflattering things about Stephen L. Snyder, the successful local attorney who’s taken out very costly ads ostensibly aimed at attracting a $1 billion case (see Feb. 16). I said Snyder has probably has made it onto the Top Ten list of tasteless lawyer-advertisers, having particularly in mind the cheesy way his website flips off would-be clients whose cases, however meritorious, lack a big enough payoff (Jennifer McMenamin, “In search of a $1 billion case, fielding 100 calls”, Baltimore Sun, Feb. 16)(reg). A week earlier the same paper quoted me commenting on the likely impact on civil litigation of a federal grand jury’s indictment of the W.R. Grace Co. and seven of its current or former executives; the charges arise from the widely publicized exposure of townspeople and others to asbestos hazards from the company’s vermiculite mine at Libby, Montana. (William Patalon III, “Grace’s plight made worse”, Feb. 9).

And: Rob Asghar of the Ashland (Ore.) Daily Tidings devoted two recent columns to the problem of overlawyering and was kind enough to quote my opinions (“Law and disorder”, part 1 (Feb. 7) and part 2 (Feb. 14)). NYC councilman David Yassky, sponsor of the let’s-sue-over-guns ordinance that I criticized in the New York Times two weeks ago (see Feb. 6), responds today with a letter to the editor defending the legislation (Feb. 20). My Manhattan Institute colleague Jim Copland, writing in the Washington Times on the passage of the Class Action Fairness Act, quotes my Feb. 11 post on the subject (“Tort tax cut”, Feb. 15). Finally, the New York Sun covers a recent Institute luncheon at which I introduced ABC’s John Stossel (Robert E. Sullivan, “John Stossel Chides the ‘Liberal’ Press for Spinelessness”, Feb. 9)(sub-$).

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Senate passes Class Action Fairness Act

By a 72-26 vote, with 18 Democrats and Vermont’s Jeffords joining a unanimous roster of Republicans, the Senate has approved this bill, which would 1) move most interstate class actions from state into federal court and 2) regulate various practices such as the use of coupon settlements. House approval and a Presidential signature are expected in short order, giving the returning Bush administration its first major legislative victory and dealing a rare defeat to the Association of Trial Lawyers of America. Such defeats have been so rare that CAFA, though hardly radical and not a little watered down from earlier versions, probably constitutes the most ambitious tort-reform measure to pass at the federal level in recent decades. (New York Times).

For some of this site’s past posts on the bill, see Apr. 25-27, Jun. 12-15 and Jun. 25, and Sept. 28, and Oct. 21, 2003. Jim Copland and others have wall-to-wall coverage of the new developments at Point of Law, including posts on the roll call; background (including links to four past Manhattan Institute studies on the issue); the “magnet-court” problem; and last but not least, a new Manhattan Institute study by Yale law prof George Priest taking a closer look at some widely circulated statistics about class settlements, and opining that CAFA would be a useful if limited first step in addressing the problems raised by such litigation.

Elsewhere on the web, some plaintiff’s-side observers are pointing out that the new rules ushered in by the bill will likely be actively beneficial to the practice of some lawyers who specialize in filing such suits (though detrimental to others’), and that some businesses that get sued are likely to find their position worsened (not only may they find it harder to enter cheap coupon settlements, for example, but they may face a proliferation of one-state-only class actions). See, in particular, Evan Schaeffer and C. E. Petit (“Scrivener’s Error”). Meanwhile, Dwight Meredith perhaps surprisingly “do[es] not oppose the proposed reform of class action suits” but believes its GOP sponsors are being inconsistent, and Bill Childs wonders if there’s more to the debate besides money. Finally, Baseball Crank points out a possibly headache-making technical aspect of the bill.

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Conference next Thursday: lessons of the 9/11 fund

Next Thursday, Jan. 13, the Manhattan Institute’s Center for Legal Policy is giving a half-day symposium in Washington, D.C. on “The 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund: Successes, Failures, and Lessons for Tort Reform”. The event is at the Hyatt Regency on Capitol Hill and runs from 8:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. (agenda and registration). I’ll be on the second of the day’s two panels with very brief remarks responding to the primary paper(s). Among notable panelists are Yale Law’s Peter Schuck and Robert Reville, director of the Rand Institute for Civil Justice; Kenneth Feinberg, Special Master of the 9/11 Fund, will deliver the luncheon address.

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Welcome newspaper readers

Catching up on some overdue thanks to newspaper reporters and contributors who’ve mentioned this site, quoted me, or done both in the past few months (several of them, alas, without currently active links):

* David Boaz, “New York’s Big Think”, New York Post, Dec. 5 (an excellent piece on the Manhattan Institute);

* Jon Robins, “A pair of lawyers who could change the world”, The Times (London), Nov. 2 (on John Edwards’s debate performance);

* Itai Maytal, “Too Early To Give Up on Edwards’s Star”, New York Sun, Nov. 4 (on Edwards’s prospects on departing the U.S. Senate);

* Heidi J. Shrager, “State’s law guardian system in need of overhaul”, Staten Island Advance, Sept. 28 (on the need for reform of New York’s law guardian system, under which lawyers are appointed to represent the interests of minors and others not able to look out for themselves);

* Kate Coscarelli, “Police protect, serve — and sue”, Newark Star-Ledger, Sept. 12, reprinted at Wilentz, Goldman & Spitzer site (on legal doctrines allowing police officers injured in the course of their duties to sue allegedly negligent private parties (see Aug. 31);

* David Isaac, “USG Corp.: Election And Elation For Wallboard Maker”, Investor’s Business Daily, Nov. 5 (on post-election prospects for asbestos legislation);

* Ed Wallace, “Wheels: You Can Fool Some of the People…”, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Oct. 3 (on network crash-test journalism).

For other press mentions, check our “About the site” page.

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America’s worst export?

One of the reasons that The Monk supported the revolutionary and quite extensive tort reform that the Texas Legislature passed last year (commonly still known as “House Bill 4”) is that trial lawyers have a tremendous capacity to find ways to, er, protect their clients’ interests no matter how many pathways to victory, loopholes in previous laws or damage caps are put in place.

And this ingenuity is being exported from US courts to international tribunals. As James Pinkerton’s column notes, “the trial lawyers, entrepreneurial as always, have found new courts – world courts – to play in. And they have found allies among activists and fortune-hunters who dismiss traditional democracy and diplomacy in pursuit of their goals.”

Yipes.

UPDATE: for more on the Inuit lawsuit noted in Pinkerton’s column, check out Point of Law’s item noted by this site’s editor here. For those of you just tuning in, Point of Law is Overlawyered’s companion site that (as its own description states) “is a web magazine sponsored by the Manhattan Institute that brings together information and opinion on the U.S. litigation system.”

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Liveblogging the ballot measures tonight (at Point of Law)

As readers of this site know, voters in six states are considering legal-reform initiatives on today’s ballot. At my other website, the Manhattan Institute’s PointOfLaw.com, I’m planning to post regularly updated live coverage tonight of election returns on the measures, with special attention to any instances where the vote totals prove to be close. (I might also post the odd comment on other races of interest.)

The ballot measures are: Florida’s Amendment 3 (limiting lawyers’ med-mal fees), lawyer-sponsored Amendment 7 (removes confidentiality of medical peer review) and Amendment 8 (strips licenses of doctors who lose three malpractice verdicts); Wyoming’s Amendments C and D (authorizes legislative limits on med-mal awards); Oregon’s Measure 35 (limits med-mal awards); Nevada’s Question Three (limits med-mal awards) and lawyer-sponsored Questions Four (undercuts med-mal reform) and Five (forbids legislative reductions of liability); Colorado’s lawyer-sponsored Amendment 34 (expands right to sue over alleged construction defects), and California’s Proposition 64 (narrows scope of s. 17200 “unfair competition” law).

The timing: Florida polls close at 8 pm EST, Colorado and Wyoming at 9 pm, Nevada at 10 pm, and California and Oregon at 11 pm. I’m in the Eastern time zone, and intend to stay up until 2 am (11 pm Pacific) if that’s needed to follow any still-unresolved contests.

How readers can help: I’ll have access to standard online sources that cover these sorts of votes (big-city papers, Secretary of State websites) but in the past those sources have sometimes been slow to post totals, especially on “down-ballot” issues. I won’t have much access to local broadcast sources, for the most part. If you’ve got fresh news on your state to report, such as a local news organization’s calling a ballot contest one way or the other, email me at editor (at) pointoflaw – dotcom.

Once again, the liveblogging tonight will be going on at Point of Law, not here. [cross-posted from Point of Law, with slight changes][bumped 2:30 pm]

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