Lawyers and Liability Rates

I found the letter by Robert Steinberg (Dec. 7), president of the California Trial Lawyers Association, criticizing Ernest Conine, predictable and typical of remarks I have heard from other lawyers in the last ten years. I have found that Mr. Conine’s remarks on this subject reflect a deep understanding of the seriousness and depth of the problem.

Lawyers are blind, ignorant or “lawyering” when they pretend innocence of their destructive roles in the ongoing liability-insurance crisis confronting so many now. Their constant legal and verbal attacks on doctors, businessmen, insurance companies, professionals, manufacturers, governmental agencies and all the others they constantly, almost automatically, list as defendants would be almost laughable if they were not so ridiculous and so damaging to our entire economic system.

I would find it difficult to believe their possible ignorance if I had not had conversations with some who only confirmed it with their uneducated, impractical, unrealistic remarks.

Their often-expressed concern for their plaintiffs, the “poor victims of our society,” would be more believable if the lawyers’ own acts were a little more charitable and less exploitive. The plaintiff lawyers, without having endured one moment of pain or shedding one drop of blood, feel entitled to 35%-50% of awards or settlements to plaintiffs. In cases where a death is involved, the lawyers have not suffered the loss of a loved one but they sometimes receive for their hours of lawyering a large percentage of the amount determined needed for the support for the widow and children of the deceased. I would hardly call the present system “fair compensation of victims.”

The members of this New Elite being created are arrogant in their use of power. They manipulate the legal system and are destroying what they are supposed to be protecting. Other lawyers appear to stand by helplessly as a few destroy the reputation of an entire profession.

One of the most damaging aspects of this whole mess is that these lawyers now have the money to support legislators who will dance to their tunes. Over and over again, efforts to bring needed reforms to tort laws have been blocked by the lobbying efforts of the California Trial Lawyers Association. As a judge told me about the CTLA;”They know who to give the money to and when.”

It has been a frustrating experience watching this process. Sincere people who have studied it have made many suggestions which have generally been ignored. One I suggest to people caught up in this problem:Don’t just do nothing or just write the newspapers;instead, write, telephone, or visit your elected representative and suggest or demand that he or she act in your behalf and not just for the benefit of a relatively small group of lawyers.

You will be doing deserving plaintiffs a service as well as all the other people now paying too much for goods, services, insurance coverage and taxes. We can’t afford the present system, and it had better be reformed before all the good doctors, businessmen, manufacturers, teachers, lawyers, architects, builders, realtors, accountants, truck owners, etc. give up in disgust. Then where will we be?

FLORENCE RICHARDS

Whittier