Morelli Ratner PC works with a wide variety of cases, but our primary focus is on:
When there are large numbers of claims associated with a single product, they may be part of a mass tort. It basically means that an act of negligence on the part of an individual or company resulted in injuring many people. Many factors are considered when deciding if a claim should be part of a mass tort.
Law360 reported at the end of last week that the U.S. House Judiciary Committee, controlled by the House’s Republican majority, has passed tort reform legislation that purports to fight frivolous lawsuits.
According to the newswire,
Committee chair and the legislation's author Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, said the reforms outlined in the two-page bill would reduce hundreds of thousands of frivolous law suits that proliferated after the 1993 law relaxed federal rules around mandatory sanctions.
"Lawsuit abuse has become too common in American society partly because the lawyers who bring these cases have everything to gain and nothing to lose," Smith said in a statement. "Plaintiffs’ lawyers can file frivolous suits, no matter how absurd the claims, without any penalty."
Don’t expect this bill to pass in the Senate, where it has yet to leave committee. If the law were by some machinations to pass in the Senate and House, we ought not expect it to curb a single frivolous lawsuit.
Lamar Smith’s quote above elides a very simple economic fact – the filing of frivolous lawsuits is already not in anyone’s interest, least of all in the interest of trial lawyers. Plaintiffs’ attorneys routinely spend tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars of their own money to prosecute large civil actions. Thanks to the near-universal adoption of the contingency-fee model for plaintiffs, trial lawyers have no reason to take on bogus cases and, indeed, powerful incentives not to. (Another crucial benefit of the contingency–fee model: plaintiffs who are otherwise too poor to afford top legal counsel – the vast majority of them, by the way – are able to get a good lawyer).
This bill, therefore, amounts to posturing.
While the criminal justice system grows ever harsher towards the poor, it becomes laxer still in its treatment of crimes committed by the rich and powerful. In the Times, Gretchen Morgenson and Louise Story last week detailed how the Justice Department has adopted a policy of allowing Wall Street elites to avoid prosecution by policing themselves.
These trajectories in the criminal justice system – at the local, state, and federal levels – have been accompanied by a corresponding shift in the civil justice system towards making it harder and harder for plaintiffs to even receive their day in court.
Lamar Smith’s bill is part of that process. The Democratic-controlled U.S. Senate, however, is unlikely to have anything to do with this bill, so this latest offense against individual rights will probably be forestalled.
-Benedict P. Morelli and David S. Ratner
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