Jury Still Out on Indictment of Suit Filers
Monday’s column was not long enough to include all the criticism and applause I received for my complaint against our overly litigious society.
As I have noted, one lawyer protested that there are not as many lawsuits per capita as in earlier times; and, indeed, I found dubious evidence that people were more litigious in 1639 in Accomack County, Va., than they are today.
Charles J. Mazursky, of Mazursky, Schwartz & Angelo, conceded in a letter to my editor (with a gracious copy to me) that some “unmeritorious” cases are filed, but argued that the legal system usually weeds them out.
“As a practical matter,” he said, “a lawyer working on a contingency fee is not going to take a case unless there is a good chance of a recovery.” So we are protected from our own folly by the lawyer’s sense of self-preservation.
“In the real world,” he observed, “people do sustain serious, catastrophic and fatal injuries, and contrary to Mr. Smith’s suggestion, it isn’t always the victim’s fault nor is it fate or an act of God.”
Contrary to Mr. Mazursky’s suggestion, what I said was exactly what he said--”tort lawyers hold that somebody is responsible for every accident, and it isn’t the victim. God, fate or luck has nothing to do with it.”
In an evidently facetious footnote, Mr. Mazursky refers to my back injury, suffered when I fell while rising from a swivel chair--”do you think that if the manufacturer had built the seat a little higher off the floor. . . ?”
Get thee behind me. I fear, as attorney David A. Rosen suggested, that “you, the victim, were the only one responsible for your accident.”
Rosen, by the way, chided me for repeating what I admitted might be an apocryphal story: about the burglar who fell through a skylight of a building he was trying to break into and sued the owners for his injuries.
Dr. Harry Perelman sends me a paragraph from “The Terrible Truth About Lawyers,” by Mark H. McCormack (Beach Tree Books/William Morrow, 1987), that reads as follows:
“While in the process of attempting to burglarize a school, a man fell through a skylight. The company that insured the school was ordered to pay $260,000 in damages and to give the would-be burglar $1,500 a month for life.”
By the way, Commissioner Douglas G. Carnahan of South Bay Municipal Court sends me a copy of “Is Litigation Necessary,” a piece he wrote for the Daily Journal, in which he observed: “Most experienced judges, polled independently, would quickly agree on a single adjective to describe most of the litigation they see: stupid.”
Carnahan said that our proliferating litigation is a result of our educational system’s failure to teach literacy and moral values. “It doesn’t make sense to engage in behaviors that everyone recognizes as beneficial only to trial lawyers.”
Like me, Carnahan was reproached by the vigilant Mazursky in a letter to the Journal. “Obviously, Carnahan has been jaded by a multitude of seemingly insignificant cases that clog the courts. . . . After all, what recourse does the little guy have to vindicate his rights other than the legal system?”
In a mea culpa, Carnahan responded: “It’s hard to see, as Mazursky points out, how an injured plaintiff, for example, who lacks negligence of his own, can be blamed for having to sue to vindicate his rights, especially if he is facing the entrenched power of a corporate defendant and its insurance company.”
About my recent accident, Bob Hall of Gavilan Hills points out that swivel chairs are unstable, and the manufacturer might be liable. But knowing me, he says, I’ve probably had the chair for 30 years and the manufacturer is 75 years old and living on Social Security with no insurance. Not a good candidate for a lawsuit. The builder of our house might be sued for making the floor of my den uneven, but he is probably dead.
“That leaves us with the time-honored fall guy in most accident cases--the owner of the property. . . . There’s no escaping the obvious--you sue yourself. I doubt the insurance company cares who gets hurt, as long as they can settle out of court for, say, 10%. You sue yourself for $500,000 and we’re talking 50 K.”
Out of the 103,000 lawyers in California, I should be able to find one who’d take the case.