Justinian C. Lane, Esq.

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Anti-Republican Rant With Interesting Facts About Tort Reform

As readers of this site know, I've never made attacks against either political party.  That's because I don't feel that tort reform is a partisan issue.  Therefore, I'm not going to say whether I agree or disagree with the anti-Republican stance of this interesting article.  But I will point out these excerpts I found quite enlightening:

"Corporations with revenues of $1 billion or more have an average of 86 lawsuits pending at any given time. Most of this litigation is employment/labor disputes, contract disputes and intellectual property cases. They hate it when the public gangs up on them, but they love suing each other and are quite aggressive. Citigroup has reserves of over $7 billion for litigation expense and that is just for defense; one wonders what their "offense" budget is."

"If damage awards beyond direct compensation for injury are limited to $250,000, consider this outcome when a victim "wins": 40% of the award is paid in taxes, leaving $150,000; and then your attorney gets 30% of $250,000, or $75,000, leaving the victim with $75,000 to, perhaps, apportion over the 60 or so remaining years of a severely handicapped child who was victimized by a medical error. Is this the kind of justice we must tolerate in order to preserve the system? "