By MARYANN MALONEY
The Southern California region recently received dubious recognition from the American Tort Reform Association, as Los Angeles and Orange counties were singled out in the organization’s annual “Judicial Hellholes” report, which cites some of the most unfair civil court jurisdictions in the nation. Los Angeles County ranked number seven on the list of hellholes, while Orange County made the report’s marginally less critical “watch list.”
The report notes that Los Angeles County, once known lovingly by many plaintiffs’ lawyers as “the bank,” is suffering from a surge in “shakedown lawsuits” brought against small businesses under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Astonishingly excessive verdicts, which provide big paydays for personal injury lawyers, a troubling number of large asbestos awards and one recent string of lawsuits stemming from a practical joke at a Los Angeles firehouse were also cited as reasons the county qualifies as a judicial hellhole.
Orange County, like its neighbor to the north, also continues to suffer from a rash of disability-access lawsuits, is home to a first-of-its-kind lawsuit claiming that the popular wrinkle-reducing treatment Botox is unsafe, despite FDA approval 20 years ago and better than 15 million treatments worldwide, since then, for which reports of serious adverse effects have been very rare.
Lawsuit abuse continues to have a negative impact on economic conditions nationwide, and that’s certainly the case in California.
Every dollar spent defending against a speculative lawsuit is a dollar that will not be spent on research and development, capital investment, worker training or job creation, ATRA’s report explains. Unfortunately for those living in “hellhole” jurisdictions during this current economic downturn, it can be that much harder to find or keep a job, or find access to critical medical care as employers and physicians are driven away by the threat of costly litigation.
Of course, Southern California has not cornered the market on “Judicial Hellholes.” The ATRA report goes on to educate the public more broadly by documenting specific problems in many unbalanced civil courts while also offering solutions to those problems.
To prison
Interestingly, powerful and influential plaintiffs’ lawyers went to prison this year for their efforts to corrupt our civil justice system. To keep the public informed, ATRA added a new “Rogues’ Gallery” section to its report this year as a not-so-subtle reminder to Congress about lawmakers’ oversight and investigative responsibilities. It also included two additional sections titled “Dangerous Liaisons” and “Tort Deform.”
The Dangerous Liaisons section details the increasingly common contractual relationships between some state attorneys general and their leading political patrons personal injury lawyers. Too often these arrangements are governed by non-competitive contracts that are negotiated behind closed doors, and the contingency fees upon which these contracts are typically based give private lawyers, backed by state authority, a pernicious incentive to maximize the damage awards a defendant may be obligated to pay, even if civil justice is minimized in the process.
Tort Deform is what ATRA calls the coordinated efforts by the plaintiffs’ bar and its allies to lobby state and federal lawmakers for “trial lawyer earmarks” that expand liability and litigation. These typically hard-to-find provisions tucked into legislation may, for example, seek to provide new private rights of action, limit federal pre-emption laws, or prohibit mutually agreed upon arbitration agreements.
Fortunately, there are rays of encouragement for positive developments for our civil justice system. The 2008 report applauds two state legislative reforms that eased critical shortages of high-risk specialty physicians, and four state high court decisions that reaffirmed traditional limits on
liability.
Maryann Maloney is executive director of Citizens Against Lawsuit Abuse in Los Angeles.
