Businesses File More Suits Than Citizens

This news release  at Public Citizen reveals:

• The people who most take advantage of the legal system are the business interests lobbying to curtail citizen’s legal rights: U.S. businesses file lawsuits four times more often than individuals, according to an analysis of states and counties that keep such data. Moreover, businesses are 69 percent more likely to be sanctioned by federal judges for filing frivolous lawsuits than are tort plaintiffs and their attorneys, according to an analysis of the 100 most recent cases where such sanctions were imposed.
• Tort lawsuit filings have decreased 9 percent overall from 1992 through 2001, according to a joint tracking project of the Conference of State Court Administrators, the Bureau of Justice Statistics and NationalCenter for State Courts. The filing data from 30 states represent a total of 74 percent of the U.S. population. When adjusted for population growth, tort filings declined by 15 percent, from 269 to 228 per 100,000 over that period.

As I've mentioned before, tort reform proposals never include caps on damages for financial injury cases, such as when one company steals the intellectual property of another.  Financial injury verdicts are larger and more commonplace than personal injury verdicts, but since corporations are often the recipients of financial injury verdicts, they don't want them capped.  Hypocritical?