Your Prescription for Cheerios is Ready

Posted by admin in Op-Ed on March 10th, 2010

AJP President Dan Pero has a featured op/ed in this morning’s Washington Times.

This must read exposes the absurd over-reach of the current FDA.  This type of government over-regulation is strangling free enterprise and the job creating businesses that employ our friends and neighbors.  Dan does a better job telling the story than we do but here’s a picture that appears with the op/ed that while maybe not worth a thousand words made us chuckle over our morning bowl of Cheerios.

Nice work Dan!

screen-shot-2010-03-10-at-95731-am

, , , , , ,

No Comments

Have Suit Will Travel - Lose Coat Will Sue

Posted by admin in Uncategorized on March 10th, 2010

What do you do if you’re a Texas personal injury lawyer who forgets his $800 leather jacket at an airport when boarding a flight?

Since you can afford an $800 jacket and you’re a personal injury lawyer you could probably afford to buy a new one.

Or since you make your living bringing personal injury lawsuits you could threaten . . . to sue the city where the airport is located, the concession where you think you left it and the airline!

That’s what William Ogletree, a Houston trial lawyer chose. The Ogletree case is just one more example of lack of personal responsibility that runs rampant these days. For more of the gory details read this article from the Southeast Texas Record.

, , , , ,

No Comments

The Public Gets It

Posted by admin in News on February 25th, 2010

Like many Americans we’ll be paying close attention to tomorrow’s Health Care Summit.  A new national survey by Public Opinion Strategies includes the following very interesting finding:

When asked an open-ended question about the one or two reform ideas they would most like to see emerge from the meeting, Republicans and Independents would put medical liability much higher on the agenda than what is being discussed in Washington.

Needless to say we couldn’t agree more.  The need for medical liability reform is the sleeping giant of the health care debate.  By embracing it Democrats could score a hat trick: a) find enough common ground to get agreement with Republicans, b) tackle one of the major cost drivers that is essential to actually getting control of health care costs, and c) catch up with the public!

But will the trial bar let them do what’s good for the country?  Do we really need to answer that?

, , , , , ,

No Comments

Nuisance Lawsuits Cost 500 Jobs

Posted by admin in News on December 11th, 2009

Just when we get a glimmer of hope on the unemployment front, Washington Times reports that nuisance lawsuits are going to cost 500 West Virginian’s their jobs!


A Pittsburgh-based coal company, CONSOL Energy, will lay off nearly 500 of its West Virginia workers next year and its CEO blames environmentalists dead-set against mountaintop mining who have waged “nuisance” lawsuits for the job loss.

One again a broken legal system collides with a struggling economy to cause even more pain among hard working families.  Read the full story here.

No Comments

In Michigan retroactivity risk

Posted by admin in Uncategorized on December 9th, 2009

AJP President recently penned this editorial in the Detroit News.

Dan shines the spotlight on the predatory trial lawyers who would not only choke Michigan’s health care and bio science sectors but do so retroactively.

The plaintiff lawyer plan is to make it easier for trial lawyers to file abusive lawsuits against pharmaceutical and bioscience companies — not to mention doctors, nurses and pharmacists — even when they strictly follow U.S. Food and Drug Administration rules.

Aren’t more job killing lawsuits the last thing a state like Michigan needs right now?

No Comments

What can you do in 8 hours and 20 minutes?

Posted by admin in News on November 18th, 2009

Eight hours and twenty minutes.

For some it’s a typical working day with a twenty-minute lunch break.

For others it’s the time it takes to travel coast-to-coast with a connecting flight.

But for Dallas trial lawyer Joseph Kendall it’s the amount of time he needs to lace up his track shoes and sprint to the courthouse to try to squeeze some dough out of a $26 billion deal. Apparently Kendall has super-powers that allow him to digest huge business deals, pen a lawsuit challenging them and deliver them to the courthouse all in a single day!

Forbes Magazine reports that while Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hatahway’s $26 billion to bid to buy Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corp hit the newswires at 6:30am - Kendall filed suit to block the deal a mere 8 hours and 20 minutes later!

For most folks, Buffett’s bid was a welcome sign that the Oracle of Omaha was willing to make a huge investment in America’s railroads. But to trial lawyers like Kendall it’s just another firing of the starter’s pistol for a race to the court house to seek a payday when there’s been no harm committed.

In a piece titled The Lawyers Go After Buffett Forbes articulates the implications of this sordid tale in detail. A couple of highlights include:

Berkshire’s offer of $100 a share was a 31% premium to the previous day’s closing price and only a little below the railroad’s all-time high of $113 a share in May 2008. But according to the suits drafted within hours of the deal’s announcement, management could–and should–have gotten more.

With a speed that stretches the bounds of credulity, lawyers file suits soon after a takeover is announced in hopes of settling the case for a generous fee.

In the case of takeovers, lawyers sue hoping the ultimate purchase price is increased. If it happens they can petition the judge for a percentage of the increase, claiming it is due to their litigation.

In an interview with Dow Jones Newswires, Jerry Davis, chairman of the $310 million New Orleans fund, said he approved the lawsuit against Burlington Northern for “shareholders to determine whether the Buffett offer is the best available deal, whether other offers have been properly analyzed.”

In theory, a lawsuit is supposed to reflect the plaintiff’s good-faith belief that duties have been breached.  In this case, apparently the lawsuit is designed to determine whether that has happened at all.”

Please read the entire Forbes piece to fully appreciate the economic drag caused by these types of pirate lawsuits. It’ll make you wonder how many jobs could be grown by ridding the courts of this type of selfish profiteer that does little but toss sludge into our economic engine.

No Comments

House Dems on Med Mal Reform: “Just Kidding!”

Posted by admin in Op-Ed on November 17th, 2009

Remember President Obama’s talk about pilot programs to test medical malpractice reform as a way to control health care costs?  Well, it’s looking more and more like it was all done with a wink and a nod to the trial bar.

The Washington Times editorial “Chloroform for tort reform” exposes the truth:

With several restrictive qualifications and entirely at the discretion of the secretary of Health and Human Services, the provision, indeed, promises “an incentive payment” for states to try lawsuit reform. Then comes the kicker, though: The bill allows such incentive payments only if “the law does not limit attorneys’ fees or impose caps on damages.”

This provision is a poison pill. Fee limits or damage caps are the two most popular lawsuit reforms in states across the country, and they are demonstrably effective at cutting malpractice-insurance rates and attracting more doctors to the states that embrace them. To pretend to encourage tort reform while punishing states that actually implement reforms is akin to encouraging a diet while assessing fines for losing weight. It’s dishonest, and it ought to be a deal killer.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is behind the ploy that suggests a cynicism beyond the pale.  While it’s heartening that the Congressional majority believes that publicly opposing legal reform is hazardous to one’s political health it’s equally distressing that they may just get away with their disingenuous plan to kill it with a poison pill.

It’s time to step up, speak out and shine a spotlight on this sham.

, , , , ,

No Comments

AJP Briefs U.S. Supreme Court

Posted by admin in News on November 6th, 2009

In July, AJP filed an amicus curiae brief in the U.S. Supreme Court on the constitutionality of state laws prohibiting corporations from exercising political speech by making candidate-related expenditures. The high court invited briefing on the question of whether the Court should reverse its 1989 decision in Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce that allows states to ban corporate sponsored political speech.

In its brief, AJP Counsel Cleta Mitchell and her litigation partner, Michael Lockerby, of the Foley & Lardner, LLP, law firm, urged the high court to invalidate as unconstitutional on First Amendment grounds the myriad state laws that prohibit corporations from making candidate-related expenditures in state elections.

As AJP told the Supreme Court in its brief:

“While silencing AJP solely because it is a corporation, [state laws barring corporate political speech] leave voters free to hear the viewpoints of AJP’s political opponents, who are not subject to the same political speech restrictions as those imposed on AJP. AJP was formed to combat the well-organized efforts of trial lawyers to influence state legislation and policies related to civil justice reform. Personal injury lawyers actively engage in the political process to protect and promote candidates and policies that oppose, repeal, or chip away at tort reform laws. Trial lawyers are able to use their “immense aggregations of wealth” to engage in unlimited political speech, while AJP and its members are not.”

The Supreme Court’s ruling could come at any time.

If AJP is successful, it will be a huge victory for the business community in fighting the trial bar, which for too long has had the resources and legal protections to support and oppose candidates, while AJP has been severely restricted in the manner in which its voice - and that of its members - can be heard.

Click Here to download the brief.

, , , , , , , , ,

No Comments

Trial Lawyer Congress to States: “Don’t Even Think About It”

Posted by admin in News on November 1st, 2009

It’s never a surprise when the Democrat Congress pulls a muscle carrying water for the trial bar. But now the lawsuit obsessed pairing is demanding that states embrace their agenda or pay a price.

The evidence is buried in Nancy Pelosi’s 1,900 page health care bill.  Why so long? Capitol Confidential at Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government has a theory:

It is much easier to dispense goodies to favored interest groups if they are surrounded by a lot of legislative legalese. For example, check out this juicy morsel to the trial lawyers (page 1431-1433 of the bill):

Section 2531, entitled “Medical Liability Alternatives,” establishes an incentive program for states to adopt and implement alternatives to medical liability litigation. [But]…… a state is not eligible for the incentive payments if that state puts a law on the books that limits attorneys’ fees or imposes caps on damages.

The trial-lawyer majority in Congress is not only telling state’s how to do their own business, they’re banning a proven savings method simply because the trial bar doesn’t approve. The trial lawyers majority has exposed their true colors:  opposition to any meaningful reform of the medical malpractice system.

Since when do state’s need approval from Congress to try to control health care costs or run their own legal systems?

Medical malpractice reform is a proven two-fer.  It creates a more rational court system and could achieve huge health care savings according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office. From the Washington Post on October 9, 2009:

Lawmakers could save as much as $54 billion over the next decade by imposing an array of new limits on medical malpractice lawsuits, congressional budget analysts said today — a substantial sum that could help cover the cost of President Obama’s overhaul of the nation’s health system.

New research shows that legal reforms would not only lower malpractice insurance premiums for medical providers, but would also spur providers to save money by ordering fewer tests and procedures aimed primarily at defending their decisions in court, Douglas Elmendorf, director of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, wrote in a letter to Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah).

Perhaps the lesson here should be never be surprised when Congress torpedoes a good idea - especially when the trial bar opposes the good idea.

, , , , , ,

No Comments

An 83% solution - that’s dead on arrival

Posted by admin in Op-Ed on October 1st, 2009

Serious students of health care reform recognize you’re hard pressed to achieve meaningful savings without reforming the malpractice system that forces doctors to practice defensive medicine.

And serious students of politics realize that asking the party of the trial bar to embrace meaningful legal reforms is as likely as the Washington Nationals mounting a late run for the pennant.

Philip K. Howard lays it all out in a piece titled “Why Medical Malpractice Is Off Limits” from the Wall Street Journal.

The upshot is simple:  A few thousand trial lawyers are blocking reforms that would benefit 300 million Americans.

The American public also favors legal overhaul.  A recent Common Good/Committee for Economic Development poll found that 83% of Americans believe that “as part of any health care reform plan, Congress needs to  change the medical malpractice system.”

But of course the trial bar has a stranglehold on scores of Capitol Hill Democrats who are protecting their deep-pocketed benefactors at nearly every turn.

Congress now realizes it can’t completely stonewall legal reform.  But what has unfolded so far is a series of vague pronouncements and token proposals - all of which assiduously avoid any specific ideas that might offend the trial bar.

The real tragedy is that trial lawyer greed both hurts legitimate victims and is trumping a solution that so many different experts agree is worth a try.

But under the current system, 54 cents of the malpractice dollar goes to lawyers and administrative costs, according to a 2006 study in the New England Journal of Medicine. And because the legal process is so expensive, most injured patients without large claims can’t even get a lawyer. “It would be hard to design a more inefficient compensation system,” says Michelle Mello, a professor of law and public health at Harvard, “or one which skewed incentives more away from candor and good practices.”

As for the trial bar’s cry that they’re the only guardian of victims of medical mistakes - well Howard puts that claim to the test.

Trial lawyers also suggest they alone are the bulwark against ineffective care, citing a 1999 study by the Institute of Medicine that “over 98,000 people are killed every year by preventable medical errors.” But the same study found that distrust of the justice system contributes to these errors by chilling interaction between doctors and patients. Trial lawyers haven’t reduced the errors. They’ve caused the fear.

Former Sen. John Edwards, for example, made a fortune bringing 16 cases against hospitals for babies born with cerebral palsy. Each of those tragic cases was worth millions in settlement. But according to a 2006 study at the National Institutes of Health, in nine out of 10 cases of cerebral palsy nothing done by a doctor could have caused the condition.

So as they used to say “follow the bouncing ball.”  It’s in the Democrats court now - unless of course the trial bar has already snatched it and hid it in their pocket.

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

No Comments