What's New In Georgia

Directorship magazine, to which 15,000 corporate directors subscribe, is publishing a series of articles about the need to end lawsuit abuse and achieve legal reform at the state level.

December 2006 -The editors of Directorship believe that corporate directors should know more about the huge costs of lawsuit abuse and the trial bar's relentless effort to game the legal system to win huge payouts from companies. Some economists believe that the all-inclusive cost of the tort system is actually much higher than the $300 billion cost reported by an industry study.

An interview featuring Bernie Marcus, the co-founder of Home Depot, and Steve Hantler, AJP Chairman, has been published in Directorship. 

As Bernie Marcus points out in the interview, "The good news is that more businesses are beginning to recognize that the litigation epidemic is a terrible drag on the economy and their business. If you are a director on a board, I would like you, at the next board meeting, to ask the CEO, after he or she goes through all the numbers, including profits, return on investment and all that, 'What does litigation cost us every year?' It’s an enormous number for large and small companies, but it’s not on the balance sheet."

Click Here to Read More

Click Here for a Video Interview with Bernie Marcus 

On May 1, Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue signed into law SB 182, the medical criteria and joinder and successor asbestos-related liability reform bill. The re-enacted version addresses issues that led the Georgia Supreme Court to strike down the 2005 version of the law. As a result of this SB 182 , only those who have become sick through exposure to asbestos will be able to sue companies that used the material.

Despite plaintiff challenges to the 2005 law, the Georgia State Legislature persisted in their effort to create legislation that offered fair compensation for legitimate victims of exposure, while abiding by the Georgia state constitution. Their efforts demonstrate clarity and perseverance to limit the ability of the plaintiff bar to bring unwarranted lawsuits in the hopes of gaining fees from unmerited settlements and awards.

The new law requires a person filing a claim in Georgia to demonstrate that he or she has some physical impairment from exposure to asbestos. Under the law, others who were exposed to asbestos will not be able to sue until they become ill. The law will extend time limitations for filing such lawsuits. The law also applies to silica exposure. After constitutional challenges in the Georgia Supreme Court to the 2005 version of the law, the Georgia State Legislature rewrote the law to fix the previous flaws and ensure real victims receive fair compensation for their illness. For text of the law itself, click here:

Similar laws have been enacted in Ohio, Florida, Texas, Kansas and South Carolina.

Atlanta, GA June 9, 2005- Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue (R) today appointed his top legal adviser, Harold Melton, to the Georgia Supreme Court.  Melton, 38, is the first appointment by a Republican governor to the state’s highest court in 137 years.  He fills the unexpired term of former Chief Justice Norman Fletcher.  Melton will face re-election in 2008.

Perdue said he sought a justice who “would defer to the laws passed by the Legislature, not circumvent the democratic process.”

“Harold Melton best embodies the personal qualities, conservative principles and legal ability to serve the people of Georgia on the Supreme Court,” Perdue said.  “Harold, I believe, shares my philosophy that jurists should apply the laws passed by the legislative branch, upholding a strict constitutional separation of powers.”

Melton, who has served as Perdue’s executive counsel for two years, worked as an assistant attorney general for former Georgia Attorney General Michael J. Bowers.  Georgia Supreme Court justices serve six-year terms.  During Melton’s upcoming tenure, the Georgia Supreme Court is expected to consider high-profile cases involving civil justice/tort reform, school funding, and Georgia’s marriage amendment.

March  3, 2005 - This year, Georgians win big -- from multinational corporations to small businesses to consumers and medical providers and their patients. In mid-February, Governor Sonny Perdue signed into law one of the nation’s most sweeping omnibus civil justice reform packages. Stunned, the trial lawyers’ organizations decried the speed at which the legislation passed and was enacted – less than a month from its introduction through committees to be passed by both chamber of the Georgia General Assembly – as a “railroad job.”

For those businesses, medical providers, consumers, activists and citizens who have labored in vain for enactment of reasonable civil justice reform in Georgia, the win in February was the culmination of a two-decade struggle. The Southeastern Legal Foundation, a public interest law firm, the Georgia Chamber of Commerce, the state’s vital business community link to government, the Medical Association of Georgia, representing the physicians’ interests, and the Georgia Hospital Association, contributed time, resources, attorney insight, and passion to the process.

Major provisions of the omnibus bill signed into law include elimination of joint and several liability in all cases, replaced by “proportional share” liability; offer of judgment to encourage settlement and discourage costly litigation; expert witness reform to the standard established in the U.S. Supreme Court’s Daubert decision; limits on liability for non-economic damages in medical malpractice cases to $350,000 per provider, up to a cap of $1,050,000; raises the standard in cases against hospital emergency rooms and ER doctors to “gross negligence;” and, unique to Georgia, allows a co-defendant to move a lawsuit back to his home county if venue “vanishes” when another defendant is dropped from a lawsuit.  Read Full Story

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