The Cookie Monster will get you

**j2k4** · 02-06-2005, 02:09 PM

Originally Posted by lynx

Obviously there would be cases which are borderline and no doubt the lawyers would be able to get insurance to cover these instances, but if there were too many they would rapidly find themselves unable to get insurance. The result would be to change their ways or go out of business.

Sort of like Doctors, huh?

**vidcc** · 02-06-2005, 04:38 PM

Originally Posted by lynx

If the lawyers rather than the plaintiff were made responsible for the costs where a case is deemed frivolous that would soon cut the number of such cases.

Obviously there would be cases which are borderline and no doubt the lawyers would be able to get insurance to cover these instances, but if there were too many they would rapidly find themselves unable to get insurance. The result would be to change their ways or go out of business.

Of course, it then depends on someone ruling that the case was frivolous in the first place, which might not be quite so easy.

This would be a different approach to what kerry proposed....to make the lawyers the target and not the claimant.
@ all
J2 and hobbes have been pointing to large payments...and blaming the lawyers. It is however the jury that awards those and there are not as many as one would be given to believe. In the case of frivolous suits capping the payouts would not stop the practice. The lawyers need to be given accountability to stop the cases getting to the courts in the first place. How can one blame the lawyers and not wish to make them directly accountable?

I find people that sue fast food chains for causing their obeseity objectionable and they have no case to go to court with.

Genuine lawsuits are the reason we have the safety we enjoy here today. Make it affordable for companies to be loose with safety standards and they will be.

deal with the system to reduce frivolous cases..... leave the genuine ones alone

**hobbes** · 02-06-2005, 05:21 PM

The jurors are manipulated, and the insurance companies know this, and settle out of court in most cases. Vidcc, get it through your head that lawyers are initiating suits they know will win. This is manipulating the system for personal gain, aka stealing. (This is the whole mentality behind frivilous suits to begin with. You want to try and psychologically win over the jury as you know the actual case has no merit)

I will tell you from personal experience, jurors are scary. I got stuck in a box with 11 Jerry Springer watching idiots. Set a well trained slick lawyer against these dolts, manipulate their emotions and make them literally cry. Congratulations, you have just found a cashcow. The prosecution talks about poor babies, the defense has no such emotive retort.

How can you explain a situation where nobody does anything wrong and yet the prosecution gets $50,000 in an out of court settlement?

Also how do you explain that, as I mentioned before, it actually works in regard to University based practices.

How do you explain that 50% of the private practice doctors in the Rio Grande Valley are currently being sued and those associated with University hospitals are not?

When insurance companies are released from the fear of the huge suit, they will stop settling out of court and start defending their clients.

What happens then is that the frivolous suits are dropped because the lawyers know that can't get the quick out of court settlement.

I think caps will work because this is already in practice and it does.

Certainly this is one approach and it applies well to the medical aspect of this. But as you pointed out this may not be generally applicable as a manufacturer may skimp on quality assurance because he is now free from any huge lawsuit.

But that would address only the legitimate suits, the frivolous ones would be dropped as before.

As an addition1- (Actually Vidcc said this above, so I am fully agreeing with him on this point.)

I think the law firms should bear the burden of frivolous lawsuits. They need to compensate those they accuse for court cost and emotional injury.

You may say "shouldn't the client pay". In reality the clients have no money, so that is pointless.

If you want cardiac surgery, you do not just go to a doctor and tell him what you want. He needs to evaluate you and based on his assessment he decides whether he wants to operate or not. He does not operate so he can charge you for the procedure, he operates because he believes that you will benefit from the surgery.

Lawyers should have the same role. They need to assess whether the claim is valid or not. They should bear the brunt of bringing frivolous cases to court, just as a surgeon who poorly evaluates his patients soon loses his license to practice.

Addition 2
Why don't lawyers get paid based on time spent preparing the case and have their fees be independent of what the client gets. You get $5000 for a case whether you client gets $5000 or 50,000,000 dollars.

That way when Edwards says that he is fighting for the little guy against big business, it will actually have some meaning. It means he has chosen the case out of a desire to help, not for the huge settlements.

It seems that answer is not one way or the other, but both to some degree.

**vidcc** · 02-06-2005, 05:51 PM

Originally Posted by hobbes

The jurors are manipulated, and the insurance companies know this, and settle out of court in most cases. Vidcc, get it through your head that lawyers are initiating suits they know will win. This is manipulating the system for personal gain, aka stealing.

Get it through your head that i am for making the LAWYERS accountable get it through your head that you are blaming the lawyers and i am saying take the lawyers to task

I will tell you from personal experience, jurors are scary. I got stuck in a box with 11 Jerry Springer watching idiots. Set a well trained slick lawyer against these dolts, manipulate their emotions and make them literally cry. Congratulations, you have just found a cashcow. The prosecution talks about poor babies, the defense has no such emotive retort.

How can you explain a situation where nobody does anything wrong and yet the prosecution gets $50,000 in an out of court settlement?

cost assesment, the insurance company is not doing what it's paid to do (defend it's clients) because it is there to make profit

Also how do you explain that, as I mentioned before, it actually works in regard to University based practices.

How do you explain that 50% of the private practice doctors in the Rio Grande Valley are currently being sued and those associated with University hospitals are not?
could it be that people paying high prices are more likely to sue for anything they feel is less that perfect?
When insurance companies are released from the fear of the huge suit, they will stop settling out of court and start defending their clients.

What happens then is that the frivolous suits are dropped because the lawyers know that can't get the quick out of court settlement.

I think caps will work because this is already in practice and it does.

I don't agree with caps because they punish genuine cases where it would be obvious that more is justified.... what are appeal courts for?... the most i would find acceptable is that the judge in each case concerned should be allowed to either set the maximum the jury can give based on the case or reduce the jury suggested amount...on a case by case rule. That way companies won't have affordable risk to reduce standards to and excessive payouts would be contained

Certainly this is one approach and it applies well to the medical aspect of this. But as you pointed out this may not be generally applicable as a manufacturer may skimp on quality assurance because he is now free from any huge lawsuit.

But that would address only the legitimate suits, the frivolous ones would be dropped as before.

As an addition1- (Actually Vidcc said this above, so I am fully agreeing with him on this point.)

I think the law firms should bear the burden of frivolous lawsuits. They need to compensate those they accuse for court cost and emotional injury.

You may say "shouldn't the client pay". In reality the clients have no money, so that is pointless.

If you want cardiac surgery, you do not just go to a doctor and tell him what you want. He needs to evaluate you and based on his assessment he decides whether he wants to operate or not. He does not operate so he can charge you for the procedure, he operates because he believes that you will benefit from the surgery.

Lawyers should have the same role. They need to assess whether the claim is valid or not. They should bear the brunt of bringing frivolous cases to court, just as a surgeon who poorly evaluates his patients soon loses his license to practice.

Addition 2
Why don't lawyers get paid based on time spent preparing the case and have their fees be independent of what the client gets. You get $5000 for a case whether you client gets $5000 or 50,000,000 dollars.
I agree but that would go against the USAs "market forces ethic surely
That way when Edwards says that he is fighting for the little guy against big business, it will actually have some meaning. It means he has chosen the case out of a desire to help, not for the huge settlements.

It seems that answer is not one way or the other, but both to some degree.

What is needed is a clear set of guidelines by which the law community can make assesments of what is a valid case...break those guidelines and the lawyers should be held accountable.

**hobbes** · 02-06-2005, 07:03 PM

Ok, I got it through my head and I want theirs.

could it be that people paying high prices are more likely to sue for anything they feel is less that perfect?

Hmmm, do you really believe that?

No, they are being enticed by lawyers to file suits via telephone calls and TV ads. The Rio Grande valley is filled with minmum wage workers who have nothing to lose.

A local lawyer shows what he has made for people and they stand there holding wads of cash saying "Thank you, Jim Adler" Jim Adler, the tough, smart lawyer, call me!

The fact the University system is capped is the sole reason they are hounding the private sector.

The cost assessment also ties in here. You can save time and money throwing a fraction of the desired settlement at claimants to make them go away. This is cheaper in the long run than getting some ridiculous penalty if a case goes to trial.

A cap puts the insurance companies back on your side and the frivolous suits (the ones we want to eliminate) go away.

It just simply works well for the medical field, but it does have limitation in general application (see below).

Anyway, you cannot sue for less than perfect results, you can only sue for negligence. A fine point, often lost on the jury. Bad thing happened to poor man, rich doctor in BMW---easy call.

To move the discussion forward, I think, as you commented, that capping the jurors is a good idea and that judges should be allowed to award damages over and above the cap. This would be helpful in those real cases in which safety standards were overlooked and people suffered real harm.

That is why we have judges right? It can be a tough call, but that is what they are there for. I think a jury can get fooled by a frivolous suit, but as Judge Judy once said, "Don't piss on my foot and tell me it's raining".

I agree but that would go against the USAs "market forces ethic surely

You would get paid for the time you spent working on the case, which is what your job is. The settlement is for your client, not you.

And don't call me Shirley.

**hobbes** · 02-06-2005, 07:18 PM

One additional point as to why I have been harping on lawyers stealing money.

This conversation started with J2 talking about caps and you stated that Kerry/Edwards were promoting penalties for frivilous suits.

Now, neither of us has objected to that point at all.

But considering that Edwards was exactly that type of lawyer (as I tried to illustrate with the cerbral palsy cases) at one time in his career makes one wonder if it was just a hollow campaign slogan.

And also the actual mechanism of how one places a definitive label that a suit was frivilous is hard to invision. Just because one loses a lawsuit does not make it frivilous, so what about a suit makes it clearly frivilous and who decides?

**vidcc** · 02-06-2005, 07:34 PM

Do you think the "cookie monster" or her lawyer in this case was expecting to get anything like 250k?...do you think that the cap would have prevented this case coming to court as J2 suggested?

**j2k4** · 02-06-2005, 07:38 PM

Originally Posted by hobbes

One additional point as to why I have been harping on lawyers stealing money.

This conversation started with J2 talking about caps and you stated that Kerry/Edwards were promoting penalties for frivilous suits.

Now, neither of us has objected to that point at all.

But considering that Edwards was exactly that type of lawyer (as I tried to illustrate with the cerbral palsy cases) at one time in his career makes one wonder if it was just a hollow campaign slogan.

And also the actual mechanism of how one places a definitive label that a suit was frivilous is hard to invision. Just because one loses a lawsuit does not make it frivilous, so what about a suit makes it clearly frivilous and who decides?

Quite right.

Thank you for clarifying, Hobbes.

**hobbes** · 02-06-2005, 07:41 PM

Originally Posted by vidcc

Do you think the "cookie monster" or her lawyer in this case was expecting to get anything like 250k?...do you think that the cap would have prevented this case coming to court as J2 suggested?

As I said, it is not one way or the other, but a combination. Both methods have their merit.