If you’ve seen the documentary film, Hot Coffee, you may recall the great soundbite from our very good buddy Victor Schwartz, General Counsel for the American Tort Reform Association, who talks about how false descriptions of lawsuits – or even completely made up ones – are pushed out there by his other buddies. Not intentionally. Ahem, cough, cough. In fact, pushing out false descriptions of lawsuits intended to outrage the reader or listener have been the cornerstone of the “tort reform” movement for years. In Hot Coffee, you’ll see U.S. presidents as far back as Ronald Regan engaging in this behavior.
It’s not like these PR stunts are any big secret. Even if you haven’t seen Hot Coffee (HBO Signature is showing it again this month – check your listings!), we know that Snopes.com, a website that debunks urban legends, found that a list of six crazy “real lawsuits” circulating around the Internet since May 2001 was entirely made up, once causing media critic Howard Kurtz to come down hard on U.S. News & World Report owner Mort Zuckerman for repeating them. See also Stephanie Mencimer’s article, “False Alarm; How the media helps the insurance industry and the GOP promote the myth of America's ‘lawsuit crisis,’” or professors Haltom and McCann’s book Distorting the Law; Politics, Media and the Litigation Crisis, which we talked about here.
Yet it is honestly still surprising to me when members of the media decide not to become the “tort reform” movement’s unwitting agents by promoting misleading, exaggerated or completely wrong descriptions of lawsuits. So here’s a shout out to Fayetteville, North Carolina reporter Gene Smith, in his blog “Y’Think?”, who bucked the trend with a brutally honest critique of a U.S. Chamber of Commerce Institute for Legal Reform “Top 10 Crazy Lawsuits” BS list. To wit:
[T[here’s no mention of the disposition of those cases, although the chamber did provide a link to the stories on which its Top Ten were based, and that made further research possible.… I count five dismissals (so far), and predict the same fate for the other plaintiffs.
Some filed their own actions. Why does that matter -- expense? Nah. It doesn’t cost that much to file something. Most who filed their own stuff probably did so because no lawyer would risk his reputation placing that kind of crap before a judge.
More important is that I found no evidence that any of the chamber’s Top Ten meritless cases has cost businesses (Oh: and, of course, pee-pul) anything more than a modest fee to answer the complaint and prepare to finesse it in a single motion if it comes to court. There’s not a bankruptcy on the list -- not even an itty-bitty fine.
And this matters … why?Because (A) The Top Ten were posted by the chamber’s Institute for Legal Reform, a title that implies a need for a fix, and (B) the Institute’s annual roll call “helps to remind us that abusive lawsuits affect real people and real businesses, and can have harmful results to lives, jobs, and even our economic growth."
Please specify the harm to lives, jobs and economic growth caused by the 10 cases the chamber found representative of what it would have you believe is the norm or, at least, commonplace.
In North Carolina, you’re too late. We’ve already “reformed” because it’s hard not to become an instant convert (see above) if you stop thinking too soon. In addition to the “contributory negligence” doctrine that keeps you from recouping your full losses from an auto accident, our state now sports a new limit on liability if you’re wronged by a surgeon or some other provider of a product or service. (Nationally, we do the same for oil spills and nuclear mishaps.)
Feeling more secure yet? Enjoy the yuks. You’re the one who'll be paying the bill.
Ironically, this comes just as this year’s poster-child case for dreadfully-irresponsible reporting of jury verdicts was actually dismissed altogether, a case covered in the Center for Justice & Democracy’s report, Headline Blues, on which we reported here. As noted in the report, while every headline about this case at the time mentioned the eye-popping $322 million asbestos verdict, rarely was there any mention in the stories "the fact that state law automatically and severely caps both non-economic and punitive damages in Mississippi. The highest any punitive damages award can be in Mississippi -for companies worth more than $1 billion - is $20 million. And non-economic damages are capped at $1 million.”
People deserve to know the truth, right? They sure don’t deserve to be played by PR campaigns and lobbying agendas. At least Mr. Smith figured it out.
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