re: Here are the details of the lead tort reform bill for the upcoming session.

A jury in Avoyelles Parish just awarded over $13 million to a family whose kid ate an undercooked chicken nugget and got sick.

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After eating defendant's undercooked chicken nugget, a 3 year-old girl developed salmonella poisoning ("salmonellosis"). Bouts of diarrhea preceded prolonged functional constipation and possible ulcerative colitis. An autoimmune response resulted in development of chronic pain believed to be rheumatoid arthritis or fibromyalgia. Several pediatric gastroenterologists testified at trial with varying opinions on causes of the persistent conditions and prognosis.
The jury verdict assessed general damages of $10,5000,000, future medicals of $2,500,000 and past medicals of $65,000. Each parent was awarded $800,000 loss of consortium damages.
The child was 10 years-old at the time of trial. The defense introduced evidence of a relatively normal lifestyle, albeit with some residual adverse effects. A pretrial high/low agreement means the verdict likely will not be appealed.

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Rabalais v. Strategic Restaurants Acquisition Company, LLC; 2014-0205 (12th JDC 01/31/20)

Y'all sure you're ready to give everything to a jury?

The jury threshold in MS is $200 and the prescriptive period is 3 years. Our courts aren’t clogged by any stretch. There aren’t civil juries being empaneled every day. I’ve tried two of the past three jury trials in a large county over the past five months, FFS.

I’m very interested in the potential collateral source changes.

then it sounds like both sides will be on board with more juries.

Juries force both sides to get real about their case.

Put on a case with a 2 mph parking lot collision and see what the jury gives you. Conversely, try and downplay the effects of a catastrophic collision and see what you get.

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Extending prescription is a good thing. Probably 90% of suits I file are due to prescription, not a genuine disagreement I need adjudicated.

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I don't do civil work so I could be wrong, but from my experience if you have a serious claim and aren't trying to milk it, you can file suit way sooner than a year. If it was my perfect world I would shorten prescription for claims arising out of automobile accidents.

That would increase the hell out of court costs and would clog the dockets. Texas does fine with two years prescriptive period.

Bump

Yesterday, the House Committee on Civil Law and Procedure voted in favor of advancing HB9 to a full house vote.

LINK

Here's a noteworthy quote from the article:

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“These are pretty massive changes to our civil justice system that are based on pretty much a guess,” said Rep. Mandie Landry, D-New Orleans.

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The bar guy, Scott Andrews, was an embarrassment. We really need to explode our bar assoc. and start over.

From the Advocate article linked in your post: "... require lawsuits to be filed against the other driver, rather than the insurance company, called direct action;..."

Will the quote above mean I will need to increase the liability limits on my auto policy and/or buy a separate G/L umbrella-type policy to protect myself if I'm at fault in an accident?

See below, this is a joke as usual.

"Both bills also require insurance companies to reduce rates by 10% if their costs go down, unless they can prove to the insurance commissioner that the rate reduction would hurt their business enough to stop selling polices in Louisiana."

The idea is that somehow juries won’t award damages as high if they don’t know there is an insurance company in the suit with seemingly unlimited pockets.