Articles Posted in Frivolous Lawsuits

A poll recently released by the Defense Research Institute found that an overwhelming majority of respondents found that our civil courts are fair.

Check out the DRI’s release here. Note that the headline says “41% Doubt Fairness of Civil Courts” when the article explains that 58% expressed confidence in court decisions.

There are other interesting nuggets here as well. 83% said that the side with the most money for lawyers usually wins. That’s really interesting in terms of personal injury litigation, where generally only one side has money for lawyers, and the other side only has a lawyer at all because of the existence of a contingent fee agreement.

One of the biggest names in the “legal blog” field is Overlawyered.com, primarily written and edited by Walter Olson. The site’s self-description states:

“Overlawyered.com explores an American legal system that too often turns litigation into a weapon against guilty and innocent alike, erodes individual responsibility, rewards sharp practice, enriches its participants at the public’s expense, and resists even modest efforts at reform and accountability.”

I love the site, and read it nearly every day even though as a trial lawyer I am clearly on the other side of the debate. I often disagree with Mr. Olson, but over the years I have grown to respect the work he does.  He was even kind enough to speak one year to my Insurance Law class at the University of Baltimore School of Law.  We agree on more than I thought we would.  But, either way, I think Overlawyered is usually intellectually honest. One of the main things we see on Overlawyered is sharp critiques of lawsuits seen as frivolous or unfair.

Hot of the presses is a new “study” on “Tort Liability Costs for Small Business” from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s tort reform propaganda ministry, the dubiously named “Institute for Legal Reform.”

Your Sources Matter

This report wears the sheep’s clothing of objectivity, but an examination of the sources and methods it uses reveals the wolf beneath. Consider this:

The Baltimore Sun and The Daily Record report a new lawsuit involving a high-level staffer of the City Solicitor’s Office.

There are three government employees involved in a 5 million dollar lawsuit against a Domino’s pizza franchise in Ocean City, Maryland. DeMaune Millard, Mayor Dixon’s chief of staff, Jonathan Carpenter, a state Department of Transportation executive, and Donald R. Huskey, an assistant city solicitor, are the plaintiffs.

These three folks are suing the pizza place because they were denied service and because it took the restaurant’s staff approximately ten minutes to let them back out of the restaurant after the decision not to serve them. These plaintiffs were in O.C. for the annual Maryland Association of Counties conference in August 2008. They left an official event that ended at 10:30 p.m. at about 1:30 a.m., and were shortly thereafter buzzed into a nearby pizza place. They say they weren’t drunk and were denied service for no reason.

I see and hear a lot in the media about frivolous lawsuits.

Apparently, these are a huge problem. It has even led to the creation of a wildly popular and wholly fictional forwarded e-mail describing the facts of these ridiculous, frivolous lawsuits. It is called the “Stella Awards”, and circulates every few months to create public awareness of what a danger these stupid lawsuits are. They are called the “Stella Awards” because Stella was the first name of the Plaintiff in the infamous McDonalds “hot coffee” case.

It turns out, however, that the lawsuits profiled in the “Stellas” are pretty much completely false. So that doesn’t help much in the quest to find out about these frivolous lawsuits that are such a problem. I continued searching on the web.