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Key Reference Citations (KRC)

Increased Litigation

• “Personal injury lawyers, who encourage people to sue anyone over anything, have helped erode the concept of personal responsibility in America. Now, anytime something goes wrong, the reaction is to find someone to blame and file a lawsuit in hopes of hitting the ‘lawsuit lottery’."  (California Citizens Against Lawsuit Abuse website (www.cala.com), “Take Responsibility – Stop Lawsuit Abuse”)

• “Man, we’re going to sue everybody.  You have anybody in mind?”  (California Citizens Against Lawsuit Abuse website (www.cala.com) quoting Dickie Scruggs, personal injury lawyer, “Are Lawyers Running America?” TIME, July 17, 2000)

• In the 1990s, class action filings skyrocketed by more than 1,000% in state courts and 300% in federal courts.  (Institute for Legal Reform website, “Facts & Figures” citing Federalist Society 1999) 

• “Every 2 seconds in America, a new civil liability lawsuit is filed. The total annual cost to our economy for liability lawsuits is a whopping $246 billion—that’s twice the amount Americans spend annually on new cars and trucks. And according to the President’s Council of Economic Advisors, up to two-thirds of that price tag is made up of unwarranted or frivolous costs”.  (AJP, Dieter Zetsche and Steven B. Hantler, “Emerging Threat: Jackpot Justice in the U.S.”, “The Scoop at Chrysler Group” intranet site, May 2005)

Escalating Jury Awards

• The American tort system is intended to compensate the plaintiff for harm suffered as a consequence of the defendant’s negligent or intentional act; it is not intended to unjustly enrich the plaintiff.  Our legal system should work to make injured parties whole, not rich, and yet this is often precisely what happens. Settlements and awards have escalated so significantly in the last two decades that today they are often astronomical and at times obscene.  More so when you consider that often times there is simply no relationship between the amount of the award or settlement and the harm suffered by the plaintiff. (Comments by the editor.)

• Million-dollar plus awards have increased dramatically in recent years:

• “In 1994-1996, 34 percent of all verdicts that specified damages assessed awards of $1 million or more. This increased by 50 percent in four years; in 1999-2000, 52 percent of all awards were in excess of $1 million.”  (KRC:  HHS Report, “Confronting…” p. 9)  

• “From 1993 to 1999, the median jury award in the U.S. went from $500,000 to $1.8 million.  Those figures do not include punitive damages.” (Institute for Legal Reform website, “Facts & Figures”)

• The median jury award increased 43 percent from 1999 to 2000. By 2001, more than half of all jury awards exceeded $1 million and the average jury award increased to $3.5 million.  (KRC: Manhattan Institute, Trial Lawyers, Inc., p. 12 citing Shannon and Boxold, Jury Verdict Research  2002; Press Release, Jury Verdict Research; Tanya Albert, Malpractice Awards Hit Jury Jackpot)

• “As late as the 1980s, jury verdicts higher than, say $50 million still counted as sensational and unusual, but by the end of the century only a billion-dollar verdict could be counted on to merit front page treatment; an award in the mere hundreds of millions from L.A., Miami, or one the Jackpot Belt states might barely qualify for the fine print in the back of the business section.”  (KRC: Olson, The Rule of Lawyers, p . 238)

• “Fear of runaway-size verdicts is one reason even a long-shot suit is apt to be bought off with a settlement if a judge has consented to certify it as a class action.  (Scruggs, for one, has boasted that his favored strategy to force a settlement is to ‘[r]aise the stakes so high that neither side can afford to lose’.)"  (KRC: Olson, The Rule of Lawyers, p. 87)

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