Costs/compensation in US Tort system rising faster than GDP

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reached over $529 billion in 2022

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I bet Louisiana is responsible for at least $528 billion of that.

How many clients do you have lined up for injections this week?

The insurance companies will be OK.

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The injury crowd advertising that getting into a fender bender is a lottery ticket is part of the reason, as well as the schyster doctors that the lawyers send their clients to.

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Typical boogeyman. Insurance companies aren’t dumb. Courts don’t entertain bogus lawsuits. If a case doesn’t have merit, it isn’t settled on. Plain and simple.

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I’m on defense / commercial side and I do not necessarily agree with tort reform either. But when the going rate on an industrial death case is $25-30 million, expect insurance and corporate America to respond accordingly.

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Again, I’ve been doing this many years now. A case don’t progress unless it has merit. A defendant has the advantage because they know more about what they did than the plaintiff in almost every case. They know if they should settle or not.

Every one of my remediation cases settled (after years of litigation) because they knew it was beneficial after trying to sweat our clients out. The settlements were huge by most standards, but they knew what was at stake if all the facts came out.

I also remember defense firms calling my direct line to see if we had any suits ready to file when there was a lull on the docket

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Companies would love to be able to destroy people’s lives due to their negligence and not have to pay for it…

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Punitive damages are in major need of reform across this country.

Update criminal negligence laws and penalize them on the criminal side or with AG’s consumer protection division. Don’t over compensate in lawsuits as that just gets trial attorneys hard and then attempt to push anything and everything possible for punitive damages to get their 30% to 40% of that alleged victim compensation and the usually bigger punishment amount that also goes to plaintiffs.

Penalizing a company or CEO should not equate to making attorneys and their clients multi millionaires when much less makes their clients whole.

Very few frivolous liability cases progress. However, there are thousands upon thousands of fender benders and low impact slip and falls that end up costing $20k - 50k because of inflated medical bills.

The ambulance chasers won’t like this story.

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Punitive damages are in major need of reform across this country.

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While all of my clients would get rid of punatives tomorrow if they could they are based on the idea you can't send a corporation to jail. Most of the time no individual has nearly enough negligence to meet the bar of criminal negligence. Most states have a fairly high bae to even present a punitive damage argument to a jury. The larger the company the larger the award has to be to disincentivize the behavior which is the reason making a punitive argument allows for financial records to be part of the record. The argument is always based around what amount of a "fine" with ABC incorporated have to pay to stop them from doing this in the future, the number is often very high.

I also understand the sentiment that the attorneys and plaintiffs shouldn't get a huge windfall in a punitive case. However, corporations with a significant punitive liability in a case will hire a firm and pay for the use of massive resources in the classic definition of lawfare. This becomes complex litigation very quickly. You are going to have the science and medical side which requires a lot of experts and the accounting side with a lot of boring as CPA testimony. For a small plaintiffs firm this is analogous to a small CD firm taking in a capital case, it will eat up a major portion of their resources for a long period of time. There is also strong public policy reasoning behind this as well.


As for frivolous lawsuits RFK is right, they very rarely get to trial, like incredibly rarely. The disconnect is the legal vs layman's definition of a frivolous case. A case based on a legitimate cause of action is not frivolous even if the case is evaluated at far more than it is worth.