IS IT REALLY OVER?
Tucker, William
like tobacco litigation exhausts itself something comes along to take its place.” Yet as events have unfolded over the past year, it is becoming apparent that the tide may have turned....
...The law requires that when the plaintiffs and defendants are from differ-ent states, the case can be bumped up to the federal courts...
...The price of settlements has come way down...
...While Madison had seen awards of $16 million, $34 million, and $250 million from 2000 to 2003, the largest ver-dict since has been $500,000 for a single mesothe-lioma case...
...Monster-sized verdicts have tapered off noticeably...
...Faced with dis-proportional court costs, defendants usually paid thelawyersafewmilliondollarstogoaway.Plaintiffs collected coupons or credits toward their next pur-chase while the lawyers were paid in cash...
...Evolutionary change has also come from within...
...Often they rose from humble beginnings—as John Edwards never fails to remind us...
...Because Mississippi law said store in the county—was named at least one of the defendants must be located co-defendant in hundreds of lawsuits...
...showed a distinct tendency to favor plaintiffs and (The trial lawyers got $30 billion on that one...
...The absolute APRIl 2008 THe AMeRIcAn sPecTAToR 23 number of jury trials has declined, even though thousands more suits are being filed...
...Sure enough, Jefferson County quickly became a plaintiff’s paradise...
...After the original manufacturers went insol-vent, plaintiffs’ attorneys cast their net wider and wider, dragging in Bethlehem Steel, Kaiser Alumi-num, Combustion Engineering, Babcock & Wilcox— almost the entire roster of American heavy industry...
...For every gusher there have been plenty of dry holes...
...Two years later, 60 Minutes sent a news team down to investigate...
...It’s like playing Whack-a-Mole,” says Lisa Rickard, president of the Institute for Legal Reform at the U.S...
...This has curbed forum shopping and limited the power of partisan local judges to decide national issues...
...Deep-pocketed defendants have become aware of the trend...
...Founder Mel Weiss has refused to admit guilt and will be tried this year...
...The effort by manufacturers, businesses, and insurance companies to convince the public that ordinary citi-zens are paying for these million-dollar verdicts seems to be succeeding...
...became target practice...
...Meanwhile, applications for medical licenses have jumped 50 percent and there are now 2,500 young doctors on waiting lists for a Texas practice...
...They’re entrepreneurs...
...He and his son Zach were indicted for allegedly offering ferried a good distance to a $40,000 bribe to a state judge who was hearing his Nashville by helicopter.dispute with another law firm over the division of a $26.5 million legal fee in Hurricane Katrina litiga-Cigarette buyers would be notified of their refunds tion...
...But the influx of doctors into Texas proves that malpractice reform does work...
...Voters are not being swayed by these front groups that are trying to weaken the system that holds insurers, pharmaceuticals, and oil companies accountable for their wrongdoing and negligence...
...Since Milberg Weiss’s demise, shareholder suits have dropped by more than half...
...Growing enforcement of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 has also been effective in addressing “strike suits”—the tactic of filing nui-sance suits on behalf of millions of unknowing shareholders, suits that corporations would rather settle than litigate...
...I had an associate who had grown up in Jefferson County,” recounted Scruggs in an interview...
...Milberg Weiss Bershad Hynes & Lerach, a San Diego firm, made hundreds of millions during the 1990s by suing Silicon Valley start-ups over unexpected movements in their stock...
...Under public pressure, Judge Daniel Stack took over Judge Byron’s docket in 2004 and signifi-cantly changed the tone of the courtroom...
...The ‘Vanishing Trial’ phenomenon could just as easily be called ‘The Amazing Success of Judicial Case Management,’” says John Lande, director of the Program in Dispute Resolution at the University of Missouri School of Law...
...David Bershad, along with two other associates, has pleaded guilty and is cooperating with prosecutors...
...Trial lawyers are now using state nuisance laws in product liability suits so they don’t have to prove physical harm but only economic damage...
...hospitals—reformers implemented a well-planned agenda that usually consisted of the following: finan-cial caps on jury-awarded non-economic damages (“pain and suffering...
...But that doesn’t mean tort reformers aren’t worried...
...25 or pylesp@spectator.org...
...O’Quinn has an antique car collection alone valued at $100 million...
...If current trends continue, we may be able to weed out unjustified claims and con-centrate awards on those who have been truly harmed,” says Mark Behrens, counsel to the Coalition for Litigation Justice, an industry-funded group...
...and accident victims in need of Meanwhile, Scruggs found himself back in court emergency care had to belast November on an entirely different matter...
...Disputes are resolved without ven-turing into non-economic or punitive damages and lawyers are often eliminated altogether...
...A study done for the U.S...
...When researchers at Johns Hopkins University gave the same set of x-rays to a group of independent professionals, they found a rate of only 4.5 percent...
...SV 40 is also the center of some unconventional AIDS theories...
...In no time, they turned up a few 26 THe AMeRIcAn sPecTAToR APRIl 2008 former jurors who said they had been promised part be willing to settle at any amount rather than going of the settlement for bringing in a favorable verdict...
...In an ominous front-page story, “Hard Case: Job Market Wanes for U.S...
...APRIl 2008 THe AMeRIcAn sPecTAToR 29...
...Attorneys from Jefferson County (Beaumont) such as Wayne Reaud and Walter Umphrey became the “Gulf Coast Pirates” in the 1970s, gutting the major oil compa-nies in the region for use of asbestos in their East Texas refineries...
...before another jury...
...within the state, Bankston’s Pharmacy in adopted a 2003 omnibus package that: 1) ended joint-and-several liability, 2) limited non-economic dam-ages to $750,000, and 3) curbed punitive damages...
...The Association for Conflict Reso-lution, the American Arbitration Association, the Judicial Arbitration and Mediation Service are all thriving...
...When at one point a gating on their own behalf...
...It’s nothing for a company like Merck to spend $100 million on its defense where our resources are much more limited...
...Democratic majorities in the House and Senate may yet help the trial lawyers bounce back...
...Judges Settlement, in which the states had won $240 billion...
...Judges in some jurisdictions began consolidating dissimilar claims, making it impossible for defendants to weed out dubious cases...
...Kenneth Frazier, Merck’s lead counsel, devised an absolutely brilliant strategy,” concedes Russ M. Herman, of New Orleans, who was one of the lead plaintiffs’ attorneys...
...W hile Judge Jack was puncturing silica litigation and prompting greater scrutiny of asbestos cases, the Texas state legisla-ture was reforming medical malpractice...
...John Torkelsen, a Princeton, New Jersey economic con-sultant who had long testified on behalf of Milberg clients, was also found—like those Mississippi jurors—to be getting an illegal cut of the damages...
...But soon lawyers began piling on, filing hun-dreds of thousands of claims on behalf of people who had been only minimally affected...
...Others were reformed by judicial elections or public referenda...
...Malpractice lawsuits in Harris County (Houston) dropped by half...
...Several new grounds for mass torts—alcohol, guns, suing McDonald’s for making people fat—have sput-tered and failed to gain traction...
...It got so all our time was spent responding to law-suits,” said Hilda Bankston, the proprietor...
...If people didn’t prefer these forums, they wouldn’t be thriving...
...A trained nurse, Judge Jack became curious as to how silicosis could be differentiated from asbestosis...
...As a result, the old days when plaintiffs’ attor-neys from all over the country would drag giant corporations before unsympathetic jurors in remote areas like Jefferson County, Mississippi, or Madison County, Illinois, are gone...
...With doc-tors leaving the Lone Star State in droves, lawmakers damages have 2.2 percent more physicians per capita andruralcountieshave3.2percentmore.“Individual states still remain unprotected and access to care is in jeopardy,” says Melissa Smith, spokesperson for the American Medical Association...
...W hat bedevils such settlements is that the trial lawyers quickly find ways of burrow-ing around it...
...W hat is taking its place are various forms of “alternative dispute resolution”— arbitration and mediation held in pri-vate forums, often presided over by moonlighting or retired judges...
...place in Pittsburgh, Judge Byron responded, “I am not a Madison County judge...
...We had several contested judicial contests and it really educated the public,” says Ann Knef, editor of the Madison County Record, a newspaper funded by the U.S...
...His mother and father had taken turns being elected sheriff there for many years...
...sentiment in this Democratic bastion is so strong that With so many plaintiffs’ lawyers flocking into residents once refused to patronize a new Jack-in-Madison County, doctors and hospitals almost the-Box because it was built with non-union labor...
...Seeing Texas succeed, 30 other states have enacted similar reforms over the last four years...
...He’s now prac-ticing criminal law...
...Fen-Phen litigation was centered in least one of the defendants must be Jefferson and at one point one-quarter of the located within the state, Bankston’s nation’s asbestos suits were being litigated there...
...Union Illinois Supreme Court...
...Finally, after the 2004 elections, the Bush administration seemed on the verge of establishing a $145 billion privately financed trust fund that would compensate victims but draw a line around the companies’ liability...
...limits on punitive damages, which often became astronomical...
...Others were reformed by judicial elections or public referenda...
...As Richard Matasar, dean of the New York Law School, told the Wall Street Journal, “We may be reaching the end of a golden era for law schools...
...The whole operation fell apart when California prosecutors discovered Milberg Weiss had long kept a stable of “lead plaintiffs” who bought small holdings in dozens of tech firms in order to be available to file at a moment’s notice...
...S till, an entire generation of pioneering plaintiffs’ lawyers—Peter Angelos, Ron Motley, Dickie Scruggs, John O’Quinn, Fred Baron, Stanley Chesley, William Lerach—has now passed the top of its game...
...The American Spectator Foundation is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit and our federal tax identification number is 23-7002632...
...Bank corporate attorney asked why the judge was pre-for several million over a $5 fee for faxing docu-siding over a case of asbestos exposure that took ments when customers pay off their home loans...
...Still another factor limiting the success of trial lawyers is the growing sophistication of juries...
...Major insurance companies cut premiums 15 percent and more than a dozen new vendors entered the market...
...but any unclaimed awards would be divided among eleven Illinois law schools, municipal drug courts, Madison county, Illinois the legal aid associations, and the Illinois Bar Foun-Why do so many judicial hellholes have the names of dation...
...Beating other law firms to the courthouse was the key to becoming lead plaintiff...
...The message has become so familiar it has jumped the fence from think tanks to JohnStossel,drive-timeradio,andDavidLetterman’s Top Ten,” complains Dan Zegart, author of Civil Warriors, writing in the Nation...
...For further information please contact Patrick Pyles, Director of Development at 703-807-2011 ext...
...District Judge Janis Graham Jack found herself facing a docket of 10,000 claims for silicosis...
...We’re very adaptable...
...But it turned out to be the best return on investment...
...Mesothelioma deaths peaked in 1991 yet the dockets went right on expanding...
...Still, recent trends are not in their favor...
...The results have been dramatic...
...In some years, Milberg Weiss filed more than half the share-holder suits in the country...
...and time limits that prevent people from suing hospitals and manufacturers years later...
...If the courts follow this practice of holding on to all the cases and not letting us try our best cases first, then we’re going to have to change our strategy...
...plaintiffs’ firms scattered like wild geese, off to the next plaintiff paradise...
...Local plaintiffs were particularly favored...
...Jay Harvey, president of the Texas Trial Lawyers Association, sees things differently...
...With its entrepreneurial traditions and a Democratic monop-oly on politics dating from the Civil War, Texas was an early hotbed of plaintiff law...
...John O’Quinn was preparing to follow his father into the auto mechanics trade when a guidance counselor at the University of Houston told him he had an aptitude for the law...
...Wayne Reaud, after establishing that asbestos caused mesothelioma, spent another decade trying to prove the disease is really caused by Simian Virus 40, which got into some early polio vaccines...
...Jefferson county, Mississippi While Texas had served as a forum for every kind of lawsuit, Jefferson County, Mississippi, specialized in one thing—dragging companies from all over Because Mississippi law said at the world into its jurisdiction for product liabil ity suits...
...The turning point seems to have come when tort reformers realized they weren’t getting much out of Washington and decided to concentrate their atten-tion in the states instead...
...Less than two months later, a jury in Judge Byron’s courtroom awarded the plaintiff $34 million...
...Judges in some jurisdictions began consoli-dating dissimilar claims, making it impossible for defendants to weed out dubious cases...
...Jackpot Justice” was broadcast the same week the In 2003, without any jury, Judge Byron rendered Mississippi legislature was considering product lia-a bench verdict against Philip Morris for $10 billion bility reform and ensured its passage...
...In October, Lerach pleaded guilty to a federal conspiracy charge and will forfeit $7.75 million to the government and pay a $250,000 fine...
...Memorial Hospital in By 2000, more than 25 percent of the mesothe-Edwardsville lost one-fifth of its staff in 2004 and lioma cases in the nation were on the docket of accident victims in need of emergency care had to be 73-year-old Illinois State Judge Nicholas Byron, ferried a good distance to Nashville by helicopter...
...Two local shops—Lakin and Simmons Cooper— Judge Byron had a particular dislike for corpo-became specialists in the type of nickel-and-diming rations and didn’t mind entertaining complaints class actions that Walter Olson calls “lawyers liti-from all over the country...
...This report was supported by a grant from the Discovery Institute...
...I am concerned with all Americans...
...Bono went on to win one more verdict for $250 million against U.S...
...They’ll never rest...
...Workers used to breathe asbestos dust all day,” says Reaud, sitting in his Beaumont office outfitted with original Western art...
...Volume permitted plaintiffs’ attorneys to make money with little more than nothing...
...Leading with medical malpractice—which always wins the support from local doctors and Several of these “judicial hellholes” imploded from their own scandals...
...They’ve let up in Jefferson County, Mississippi, and Madison County, Illinois, but they’ve only moved on to West Virginia and California...
...The $750,000 cap was put before voters as an amendment to the state constitution to make sure the judges could not overturn it—as has happened numerous times with state tort reform...
...There’s been a big shift in jury awareness...
...And so the days of the gun-slinging plaintiffs’ lawyer setting up shop in some rural backwater com-munity and summoning the corporate heads of the world to the courtroom may be fading into the sunset...
...In short, the days when a handful of trial lawyers around the country seemed to be able to extort almost any amount of money out of corpo-rate America may be drawing to an end...
...Lawyers,” the Wall Street Journal declared flatly, “A law degree isn’t neces-sarily a license to print money these days...
...They want to come to a malpractice-friendly environment,” exalts Dr...
...The plaintiff bar will undoubtedly regroup and begin a new assault somewhere over some unsus-pected crisis...
...Steel before defense attorneys decided they’d APRIl 2008 THe AMeRIcAn sPecTAToR 27 $20.90 “courier fee” to deliver closing papers...
...The partners quarreled in 2004, however, and Bill Lerach left to form his own firm, which became the lead plaintiff in the Enron suits...
...It’s getting harder and harder to start courtroom panics over products such as breast implants or Fen-Phen...
...The whole mechanism of assembly-line justice began to unravel...
...Judges have gotten very good at settling disputes in pre-trial hearings or sug-gesting they go to arbitration and mediation to avoid winner-take-all jury verdicts...
...The verdict was vigorously protested most the original presidents...
...No one has ever explained...
...abolition of joint-and-several liability, which makes all parties respon-sible for 100 percent of the damages even if they share only 1 percent of the fault (the “deep pockets” strategy...
...William Tucker is a writer living in Nyack, New York...
...Unfortunately, the whole operation fell apart when California prosecutors discovered Milberg Weiss had long kept a stable of “lead plaintiffs” who bought small holdings in dozens of tech firms in order to be available to file at a moment’s notice...
...In Madison’s depressed economy, trial lawyers became the new captains of industry...
...Strike suits” against small companies with volatile stocks have ended and one of the principals from the worst-offending firm is now headed to prison...
...Chamber of Commerce...
...Securities class-action litigation has declined in part because of a buoyant stock market...
...The avalanche of asbestos claims on behalf of the non-sick is now abating and silicosis will not be APRIl 2008 THe AMeRIcAn sPecTAToR 25 the Next Big Thing...
...Chamber of Commerce that just keeps up with developments in Edwardsville...
...While addressing a group of corporate defense attorneys in Washington in 2000, Scruggs promised: “One of these days, one of [your] industry’s lawyers in court someplace like Jefferson County, Mississippi, is going to call headquarters and say: ‘This jury just returned a $1 billion verdict.’ Just think what that will do to the company’s stock...
...Other candidates (lead paint, the gasoline additive MTBE, global warming) somehow lack the pizzazz or practicality of previous trial bar crusades...
...John Coale, who became lead plaintiff on the Bhopal chemical plant explosion, was repre-senting drunk drivers in Washington, D.C...
...Personal-injury and medical-malpractice cases have been undercut by state laws limiting class-action suits, out-of-state plaintiffs and payouts on damages...
...The jury trial is becoming an endangered species,” says Galanter...
...Damage awards began escalating and Johns Manville and Raybestos-Manhattan both filed for bankruptcy in the 1980s...
...That’s what ruined Wyeth with Fen-Phen...
...loudly by the attorneys general of other states who In any case, by the early 20th century Madison feared Judge Byron’s $12 billion appeal bond would County had already made itself the venue for 80 per-bankrupt Philip Morris and upset the 1998 Tobacco cent of the nation’s railroad injury lawsuits...
...By 2005, trial attorneys had already begun circumventing any national asbestos settle-ment by quietly switching their claims to silica dust...
...Angelos owns the bumbling Baltimore Orioles, John Edwards has flopped in his run for president...
...Everybody knew them...
...In February he was sentenced to two years in prison...
...A series of discovery proceedings in the 1970s turned up the “Sumner Simpson papers,” which established that the manufacturers had long known of the dangers of asbestos...
...As Alison Frankel described it in the American Lawyer: Judges said they couldn’t manage dockets with hundreds—then thousands—of cases, and pressed for block settlements and group trials...
...The write-down contrasts dramatically with the $21 billion Wyeth paid out for its diet drug Fen-Phen less than a decade ago...
...meteoric rise of the last generation of plaintiffs’ attorneys is not likely to be repeated...
...We’ve got plaintiff attorneys walking around saying, ‘Hey, you really spoiled it for us!’” O ne piece of legislation that has helped clean up such hellholes is the Class Action Fairness Act of 2005...
...If doctors are coming here because of malpractice reform, that sounds like it’s because they’re less likely to be held accountable for their errors,” he says...
...In Fen-Phen verdicts, five local litigants received $150 mil-lion while 800 out-of-state plaintiffs received a total of only $800 million...
...One sued U.S...
...Defendants have won several verdicts and are no longer afraid of going to trial...
...By October 2007, the company had won 11 of 16 verdicts when plaintiffs finally agreed to settle for $4.85 billion, about double what the drug had achieved in annual sales...
...Concluding that the casesbeforeherhadbeen“manufacturedformoney,” Judge Jack issued a blistering review, which led to a federal investigation...
...Filings have dropped by more than half over that period...
...These plaintiffs were secretly paid huge shares of the awards...
...For-tunately, Peter Huber’s book, Junk Science in the Courtroom, and the Supreme Court’s subsequent Daubert decision put an end to this sort of litigation...
...Today Jefferson County is Memorial Hospital in Edwardsville once again a quiet Delta farm community making its living out of cotton—although in 2004 Time noted it lost one-fifth of its staff in 2004 had the highest obesity rate in the country...
...Judge most of the railroads ran through Madison on their Byron’s decision was eventually overturned by the way in and out of St...
...Both sued H&R Block for charging a $10 filing fee for using the company’s computer terminals...
...Then they’d bring it home on their clothes and expose their families...
...O verall, then, trial lawyers areabitbackon their heels and sounding a little defensive...
...The probe soon turned up N&M, a Mississippi screening company that was the source of more than half the diagnoses for asbestosis and silicosis in the country...
...But young hotshots are not rising to take their place...
...As autodidacts, trial lawyers tend to become bogged down in crackpot theories and dubious science...
...The company signed a $3 billion agreement but thousands of claimants opted out and brought their own lawsuits, which eventually bal-looned the bill to $21 billion...
...Open debate of these issues usually won the support of the general public as well...
...It was tragic...
...Voters approved it by a 51 percent majority...
...Donald Patrick, executive director of the Texas Medical Board...
...Lerach is going to prison...
...With a population of 9,700, 86 percent of it African-American, Jefferson saw 21,000 lawsuits filed between 1995 and 2000...
...Department of Health and Human Services found that counties in states with caps on Fayette—the only drug store in the county— was named co-defendant in hundreds of lawsuits...
...Texas Fittingly, the Wild West era of tort law may have started and ended in the Lone Star State...
...Merck believes it has Plaintiffs’ firms recruited potential clients with x-ray vans at union halls and factory gates...
...Galanter noted that since the 1960s the number of civil cases that go to trial in federal court has declined from 11.7 to 1.8 percent, with similar declines in state courts...
...She soon found that more than half the plaintiffs in her case had previously made the same claims for asbestosis and only switched when Congress appeared ready to adopt the $145 billion compromise...
...In no time, for selling Marlboro Lights to Illinois smokers...
...It seemed like an over-whelming task at first because you have to tackle each state separately,” says Steven Hantler, chair-man of the American Justice Partnership, a group fighting for reform...
...Early asbestos victims died horrible lingering deaths from lung diseases, the worst of which was mesothelioma, a cancer of the linings of the lung that was a signature of asbestos exposure...
...sitting in Edwardsville, the Madison County seat...
...Working from nothing more than chest x-rays, N&M had concluded that 95.9 percent of the individuals had lung damage...
...Joe Jamail, the Houston attorney who introduced personal injury tactics to the 28 THe AMeRIcAn sPecTAToR APRIl 2008 Pennzoil-Mobil case, producing an $11 billion ver-dict and a $3 billion fee, was told by his University of Texas law instructors to look for another pro-fession...
...At the urging of the U.S...
...One of the most obvious trends is the As autodidacts, trial lawyers tend to become bogged down in crackpot theories and dubious science...
...The results everywhere have been encouraging...
...Supreme Court, Congress tried to control the hemorrhaging several times, with little success...
...Louis across the river...
...Motley is a billionaire...
...Matthew Fox Curl, a 2004 graduate from the University of Houston Law School who tried to enter Houston’s once-thriving personal injury market, found it “brutalized” by tort reform...
...Volume shifted the focus of litigation away from the facts of any one particular case, which meant that plaintiffs’ lawyers were able to generate fees from cases without compelling facts...
...ThetideturnedinafederalcourtroominCorpus Christi when U.S...
...In 2004, University of Wisconsin law professor Marc Galanter published a white paper called “The Vanishing Trial” that has created a sensation in the legal community...
...night court when he heard about the accident and hopped on a plane for India...
...Yet even in Madison County things have changed...
...But we’ve done it many times before...
...John Simmons, whose firm was headquartered in a former bank, tried to revive a local steel mill and bought two minor league baseball teams...
...Although it has never been entirely clear to the public, the personal-injury attorneys who rose to stardom over the last twenty years were long scorned by the rest of the profession as “sore-back lawyers” and “ambulance chasers...
...The American Medical Association dropped Texas from its “liabili-ty crisis” list in 2005...
...Trial lawyers see this as a threat because it “deprive[es] the rights of every citizen to a fair trial”—and also because they don’t get to collect exhorbitant fees...
...Washington state voters just approved a measure holding insurance companies accountable when they deny legitimate claims,” says Jon Haber, CEO of the former Association of Trial Lawyers of America,nowrechristenedtheAmericanAssociation for Justice...
...It’s a great day when a crack-head brings me $500,” he told the Journal...
...Plaintiffs’ firms recruited potential clients with x-ray vans at union halls and factory gates...
...Little by little, the legal cli-mate changed...
...My associate suggested if we took our cases up there we might get a better hearing for them...
...If there’s a Next Big Thing like the tobacco set-tlement waiting in the wings, it hasn’t yet appeared...
...Its success can be 24 THe AMeRIcAn sPecTAToR APRIl 2008 measured by sitting in a Texas courthouse and hear-ing potential jurors recite, one after another, that there are just too many frivolous lawsuits...
...Every time we knock them down one place they pop up somewhere else...
...Let Your Legacy Be One of Support The American Spectator in Your Will One of the best ways to ensure future generations have access to a powerful voice in conservative journalismis by including The American Spectator Foundation in your will...
...constructed airtight restrictions around its own settlement...
...It never passed...
...Pennsylvania voters just returned two pro-civil-justice state supreme court judges to the bench...
...Merck recently avoided financial disas-ter over Vioxx by vowing to try every one of 11,000 claims before juries...
...Rural jurors were only too happy to heed the plaintiffs’ attorneys’ suggestion to “send them a message” up north or wherever major corporations were headquartered...
...In one oft-employed asbestos strategy, now banned in Texas, plaintiffs’ lawyers would bundle a strong case, one involving the asbestos-linked lung cancer called mesothelioma, with many cases of lesser injury or shakier causation, and demand settlement of all of them at the same time...
...Both are free on $150,000 bail...
...Lakin took over a former oil company headquarters, so that the law firm had pipelines running across its parking lot...
...Jefferson was originally excavated by the Biloxi firm of Dickie Scruggs, originator of the Medicaid-tobacco lawsuits...
...After making millions on asbestos, Peter Angelos has spent more than a decade trying to prove cell phones cause cancer...
...Doctors, busi-nesses, and ordinary citizens can take some solace in knowing the worst has probably passed...
...Several of these “judicial hellholes”—as the American Tort Reform Associa-tion labeled them—imploded from their own scan-dals...
...Drug companies were a particularly Pharmacy in Fayette—the only drug favorite target...
...The most telling episode in the asbestos drama took place when Randall Bono, an Illinois Circuit Court judge, stepped down from the bench and become lead council in a suit against Shell Oil...
...Backwater “magic districts” where plaintiffs’ attorneys could have their way with juries have imploded and there don’t seem to be any arising to take their place...
...The Class Action Fairness Act of 2005—the only significant reform to emerge from Washington during the Bush administration—has also had a big impact, taking suits involving parties from all over the country out of narrow state juris-dictions and propelling them into the federal courts...
Vol. 41 • April 2008 • No. 3
