I’m a trial lawyer for injured people and businesses at The Beasley Firm, founded in 1958. Our clients have been awarded over $2 billion through hundreds of verdicts and settlements in excess of $1 million. We’re listed in Super Lawyers, Best Lawyers in America, U.S. News’s Top Lawyers, et cetera. The [...]
Toot! Toot! All Aboard the Baloney Train!
Hardly a week goes by without an insurance company, a big corporation, or one of their lobbying groups complaining about "the cost of litigation," usually prefacing the word "cost" with hyperbolic adjectives like "soaring" or "exploding," with the implication that, somehow, injured plaintiffs or their lawyers are to blame. Yet, whenever we see an actual example of a party engaging in absurd tactics to make litigation more costly and difficult, it always turns out that the defendant or their insurance company is to blame. Although trial is typically the most expensive part of any case, the vast majority of cases ... Continue Reading
The Real Economic Impact of Product Liability Tort Reform
Via Overlawyered and TortsProf, I saw that a new law review article came out last week in the Vanderbilt Law Review, “Products Liability and Economic Activity: An Empirical Analysis of Tort Reform’s Impact on Businesses, Employment, and Production” by Joanna Shepherd. As a products-liability lawyer (and an armchair economist), I was excited, so I printed out a copy, sat down with my highlighter, and, unfortunately, didn’t even make it past the third page without gnashing my teeth in frustration: Specifically, we know surprisingly little about whether products liability law suppresses economic activity, and which, if any, reforms might improve ... Continue Reading
Why Civil Defendants Want To Be In Federal Court: Judicial Vacancies
Today the Supreme Court holds oral arguments in Standard Fire v. Knowles, a Class Action Fairness Act (CAFA) case. According to the defendant, an insurance company, the case involves plaintiffs' attorneys “manipulating their complaints to evade federal diversity jurisdiction” by stipulating to the class recovering less than $5,000,000, the CAFA threshold that allows defendants to remove class actions from state court to federal court. According to the plaintiff, an Arkansas homeowner who alleges the insurance company routinely failed to pay for general contractors’ bills in home repairs, the issue here is just another example of the 70-year-old rule that a ... Continue Reading
The Worst Lawsuit Defenses of 2012
My workload has been heavy lately, as has life in general, so I figured it was time for a diversion. It’s the end of the year, and thus unfortunately almost time for more deceptive “most frivolous lawsuits” lists, so here’s a retrospective of the worst lawsuit defenses I recall from 2012, a retrospective on the evils of water-soluble chalk, the violent propensities of classic Kung Fu movie fans, and the layman’s understanding of how a penile implant should work. (5) Artist Drawing On Sidewalk With Chalk Deserved To Be Handcuffed, Arrested And Prosecuted For “Blocking Pedestrian Traffic” One ... Continue Reading
Fungal Meningitis In Steroid Shots And The Power of Incentives
The human body is both a marvel of engineering capable of jamming decades of memories and the programming to run a 100 trillion cell body into a brain the size of a football, and a slipshod jury rig. Ever since Hippocrates (“the father of spine surgery”) prescribed the first treatments for back problems — various combinations of baths, massages, and hanging upside down, all in all not too different from today — humanity has been dealing with chronic back pain. Even apart from classic deformities like kyphosis and scoliosis or a traumatic injury, the human back is just plain prone ... Continue Reading
WSJ Clueless About Philadelphia Mass Torts Lawsuits
Just in time for Mesothelioma Awareness Day (which is tomorrow), yesterday the Wall Street Journal recycled the same canned attack on the Philadelphia Complex Litigation Center that the Chamber of Commerce and other special interests have been pushing for some time. (See here and here for more about the attacks on Philadelphia’s courts.) Ashby Jones at the Wall Street Journal retreads over Judge Pamela Dembe’s remarks about out-of-state plaintiffs from early 2009, taking the Chamber of Commerce’s bait hook, line and sinker: When the Philadelphia court system faced budget cuts in early 2009, an influential judge there invited plaintiffs ... Continue Reading
Concern Trolling Over Class Action Fees (Egg Purchaser Antitrust Edition)
“Let your greatest cunning lie in covering up what looks like cunning,” said Baltasar Gracián, the 17th Century Jesuit priest who wrote about how to survive in a post-Machiavelli world. These days, when tort reformers aren’t busy trying to stack the decks against consumers and injured people, they’re busy concern trolling, claiming to be looking out for the little guy while really waging war against the lawyers who take the risks and put in the time to make things right for the folks injured and cheated by corporate greed. Via Overlawyered, Daniel Fisher at Forbes — who as far as I ... Continue Reading
Chamber Of Commerce Study: Big Business Says Tort Reform Not Needed
Yesterday, the U.S. Chamber Institute for Legal Reform released its “2012 State Liability Systems Ranking Study,” which asked lawyers and senior executives at companies with over $100 million in annual revenues what they thought about being sued. That’s like asking Yankees fans what they think about the Red Sox. Seriously, here’s the “Methodology” for the Chamber of Commerce’s “study:” The final results are based on interviews with a nationally representative sample of 1,125 in-house general counsel, senior litigators or attorneys, and other senior executives who are knowledgeable about litigation matters at public and private companies with annual revenues of ... Continue Reading
Tort Reform “Policy”: Injury Plaintiffs Should Always Lose
Over on Twitter, where all the major debates of our time are reduced to the length of text messages, I got into a discussion with Ted Frank. For those of you who don’t know Ted Frank, he’s a prominent “tort reform” advocate. Ted and Walter Olson are among the only “tort reform” advocates who offer substantive commentary and aren’t just whining hypocrites, which is why you’ll see them (as Point of Law and Overlawyered) in my blogroll over to the right. One thing led to another — like text messages among adolescents, Twitter discussions rapidly devolve either into mutual admiration ... Continue Reading
Atul Gawande Versus Sanjay Gupta On Defensive Medicine
In contrast to the demanding world of blogging, where every typo results in an avalanche of criticism, the beauty of speaking on network television in quaint soundbites and writing 750 word op-ed columns in national newspapers is that you rarely have to explain yourself. You will rarely, if ever, be put in the position where you are expected to fully explain your argument, and, hiding behind the presumed credibility of established newspapers and networks, it isn’t likely that you’ll face a thoughtful critique of your argument. Just say something and, ipse dixit, it's true. (There are, of course, rare exceptions, ... Continue Reading
