Slapp Frivolous Lawsuits
When you look into tort reform rhetoric, you often see the same phrases and terms being used over and over again. “Frivolous lawsuits” is one. “Junk lawsuits” is another. “Lawsuit abuse,” “abusing the system,” “abusing the Constitution,” and so on and so on.
When you look at the people who are accused of doing these things, you generally see one or two people. One person accuses a doctor of medical malpractice, or one person accuses an insurance company of dealing in bad faith, or one person accuses a supermarket of not clearly marking a wet floor.
It is fairly amazing to us how these corporations that are often worth billions of dollars howl like a toddler with a scraped knee over lawsuits that would barely even show up in their ledgers at the end of the fiscal quarter. But apparently every penny counts, even when a lawsuit is completely justified and deserved. So the insurers and the corporations fund tort reform groups who call these lawsuits “unfair,” or an “abuse,” and they demand protections for themselves that won’t apply to regular private citizens, and often they get them. They get “caps” on damages that limit the amount of money that they would have to pay out. They get unrealistic standards of proof of negligence. They get loopholes and asterisks and all manner of legal bulletproofing that will eventually lead to corporate invulnerability if it is allowed to continue. We don’t know about you, but living in a country where corporations are considered above the law fills us with a great deal of apprehension.
We also notice that there is an immense double standard when it comes to how the court system is used. Corporations who decry frivolous lawsuits against them have no qualms about jamming the court dockets with cases over the meanings of clauses and verbs in contracts. Corporations who found tort reform organizations while engaging in multiple lawsuits. Do as I say and not as I do.
One particularly glaring example of this sort of thing is called a SLAPP suit. SLAPP stands for Strategic Lawsuit against Public Participation. A more understandable way of putting it would be to call it a “bury the defendant in legal costs to get him to shut up” lawsuit. As a small scale example, let’s say that a college student gets his car towed, even though he had the right to park his car where he did. This student then has to pay around $120 bucks to get a car back that should not have been towed. He then goes home and starts a Facebook page entitled “This Towing Company is Terrible.” Soon, the Facebook page has 800 people who like it, and the college student finds himself on the receiving end of a $750,000 lawsuit from the towing company.
The fact that the college student has every legal right to post or write or say whatever he wants thanks to the First Amendment means that this case should not have been filed in the first place. Nor is it likely that the college student has $750,000. If this lawsuit were to be successfully taken to its conclusion, the towing company is not likely to receive anything from the college student except ramen noodles and half of a twelve pack of Milwaukee’s Best. But that is not the point of the lawsuit. Court cases cost money, particularly if you are the one being sued. The towing company has the money to hire an attorney to prosecute the case. The college student most certainly does not have the money to hire a defense lawyer. So he would have two options: beg for a settlement or go broke fighting the case that he would eventually win.
If that sounds like an unlikely scenario, bear in mind that all of this has actually happened to a student in Michigan, as reported in The New York Times. Justin Kurtz is staring down bankruptcy because he dared to speak out against a company that towed his car.
And it isn’t just towing companies that have engaged in these lawsuits. Property developers have filed them against citizens groups.Fast food chains have filed them against environmental activists.Religions have filed SLAPP’s against people who criticize them. Titans of industry. Big Business. In other words, the exact same groups and organizations that howl and moan and legislate against “lawsuit abuse” have no real qualms about actually engaging in lawsuit abuse. What else would you call filing a case that you know you can’t win?
When you go to the American Tort Reform Association website and type “SLAPP “into the search engine, you get no results, which we find strange considering that this organization purports to be against lawsuit abuse. Maybe they have a different definition of the word “abuse.” Maybe “abuse” means “when non-wealthy individuals dare to use the court system.” Maybe “abuse” means “any legal action where we aren’t the plaintiffs.” Regardless of which glossary the tort reformers are working from, we can certainly tell a double standard when we see it.
Greenberg and Bederman is a personal injury law firm located in Silver Spring, Maryland. We are currently helping residents of Virginia, Maryland and Washington, D.C. who have been injured in car accidents, bicycle accidents, pedestrian accidents and cases of medical malpractice, as well as any instance where someone was injured due to the actions of someone else. If you or a loved one has been injured due to no fault of your own, contact Greenberg & Bederman today for a free legal consultation.
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Tort Reform is used as a legal weapon in Texas against Texans.
When there are laws on the books preventing the common man from getting accountability, no telling what will happen.
Providing a link to a video showing how Tort Reform is working out in Texas, or not.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JT7rxa21_Xo
Or, just Google Cleveland Mark Mitchell, and click on youtube.
Thank you for your time,
Cilla Mitchell
A Texas nurse and vet