Let’s Not Settle for a Flawed Legal System

Last spring’s elections proved one thing: If you spend enough money and advertise on television nonstop for four weeks, you can convince people to do just about anything. That’s exactly what the trial lawyers did, and to their credit it worked. Propositions 200, 201 and 202 were defeated by an estimated 39% of eligible voters in California.

The trial lawyers will tell us the election results prove that civil justice reform is not important to Californians. But we know better. Just about everyone agrees (except the trial lawyers) that serious reform is desperately needed to improve California’s civil justice system. We’ll see more ballot initiatives dealing with this issue. Why should citizens be forced to use the initiative process to enact sound public policy?

Shouldn’t we look to our state Legislature to enact this reform? After all, isn’t that why we elected them in the first place? Sadly, this is not happening, although not for lack of effort on the part of some legislators and Gov. Wilson. In fact, many bills dealing with legal reform have been introduced in previous years, only to be killed in committees or on the floor.

The problem is that the same trial lawyers who spent $10 million dollars to defeat Propositions 200, 201 and 202 have plied certain numbers of the legislature with large campaign contributions to vote against reform. And why not? With no united voice to let them know how the taxpayers felt about lawsuit abuse, those legislators had no reason not to vote against the bills.

What has been missing from this process is the involvement of the voters. Everyone understands and probably fears getting sued. In 1995, it cost every family of four in the United States an estimated $1,200 in hidden “lawsuit abuse taxes.” That’s what businesses and manufacturers pass on to each of us in the price of goods and services they provide as a result of defending themselves against frivolous lawsuits. And since they are approximately 2,300 new lawsuits filed in California each day, you start to understand why so many of these business owners choose to settle out of court rather than defend themselves, even if they did nothing wrong.

It gets worse. Our legal system is giving California the dubious distinction of leading the nation in verdicts of $1 million or more. We live in a state where not only is it socially acceptable to file a lawsuit with little or no merit in hopes of a generous out-of-court settlement, it is encouraged because “the other side will probably want to settle anyway.”

That is the definition of lawsuit abuse. The consequence of this is that businesses ultimately decide that California’s legal system is intolerable and either relocate out of state or close down altogether.

But you can fight back. You can send a message by writing to your local elected officials telling them that you want anti-lawsuit abuse legislation enacted in Sacramento. Give them another voice to listen to besides the wealthy trial lawyers.

Lawsuit abuse affects us all. Under the current system, we all pay and we all lose.