Lawyers See Insurance Vote as 90% Victory

Leaders of the California Trial Lawyers Assn., holding what their president termed “a victory luncheon,” expressed great satisfaction Friday with the results of the insurance initiative wars as reflected in Tuesday’s election.

Hundreds of trial lawyers and their invited guests at the Sheraton Universal cheered a series of awards to participants in the lawyer-financed Proposition 100 campaign and the successful effort to defeat the insurer-backed Propositions 101, 104 and 106 on Tuesday’s ballot.

J. Gary Gwilliam, the Trial Lawyers Assn. president, said it really did not matter that Proposition 100 was defeated, while Ralph Nader’s Proposition 103 won, because the lawyers had accomplished most of what they had set out to do anyway.

Preemptions Not Needed

He noted that two key features of Proposition 100 were its preemptions against the provisions in Proposition 104 establishing a no-fault system and against Proposition 106’s limits on trial lawyers’ contingency fees. Since neither of these initiatives passed, those preemptions were not necessary, so Proposition 100’s defeat did not matter to the lawyers as much as it might have, Gwilliam said.

“We were 90% successful,” Gwilliam said in an interview. “We consider it a big victory. We set out to accomplish two things this year: not let the insurance industry initiatives pass and to pass insurance reform.

“We still believe Proposition 100 was better, more reasonable than 103. But Proposition 103 represents a step forward. I called (103 campaign Chairman) Harvey Rosenfield and congratulated them and told him that we’re very, very pleased with their success.”

Gwilliam said that, overall, “We have changed the nature of the debate from tort reform to insurance reform. That’s what the voters said they wanted. That’s what we accomplished.”

Contribution reports showed that the Trial Lawyers Assn., as well as individual lawyers and law firms, gave more than 70% of the more than $15 million used to finance the Proposition 100 campaign.

Support for Regulation Cited

Proposition 103 got little, if any, trial lawyer money, but in some cases the measure reflected the trial lawyers’ views, putting all the sacrifices required to lower insurance rates on the backs of the insurers and none on the trial lawyers or the legal system.

Both Propositions 100 and 103 called for future state regulation of insurance rates, and the man who will succeed Gwilliam as the Trial Lawyers Assn. president in December, Harvey Levine, took note of this Friday. He said the election made clear that the public preferred regulation to no regulation. He noted that both the badly defeated Propositions 101 and 104 had taken a position against such regulation.

“The election created an awareness as to what the insurance situation really is,” Levine declared.

“From the parochial interests of the CTLA (California Trial Lawyers Assn.), it was a total victory,” agreed Will Glennon, a key staff member of the lawyers’ lobbying office in Sacramento.

But Glennon cautioned that the Trial Lawyers Assn. will have to show itself open to “good, efficient, fair reform in the civil justice system” when the new Legislature convenes or “this thing (the insurance crisis) will come back and hit us in the face.”

One discordant note at the CTLA convention came when state Sen. David A. Roberti (D-Los Angeles), the Senate’s president pro tem, warned that the trial lawyers might not have won a lasting victory.

“I advised them that they got breathing space and they should use that wisely,” Roberti said Friday.

One solution pressed by insurers in the past for lowering insurance costs has been changes in the legal system to reduce lawsuits and restrict pay-outs. Insurers are expected to press such solutions again next year, against the lawyers’ interests, regardless of what the courts and other authorities do with Proposition 103.

Nancy Drabble, a CTLA staff member, said that Roberti had said very clearly in his speech that while the trial lawyers had succeeded in knocking out severe contingency fee limits called for in Proposition 106, they should probably come up with some reasonable fee limits on their own. If such limits were adopted by the Legislature, they might head off new proposals for more severe restrictions.

Roberti also told the lawyers they should discipline themselves to control practices that annoy the public.