Shining a Light on the Plaintiff's Bar

The issue of tort reform is gaining relevance in New Jersey as trial lawyers try to use the foothold gained by mass asbestos and pharmaceutical litigation to make the Garden State a destination venue for their class action suits. Regular blog readers know CIANJ is of the position that a judicial system should serve the citizens living within the jurisdiction and not be clogged by out-of-state cases that choose NJ as a venue because of our plaintiff-friendly statutes.

Today's Examiner picks up on the theme of fraudulent lawsuits, calling on the Justice Department to investigate excesses of the Plaintiff's bar,

Imagine the national outcry if hundreds of Fortune 500 corporations were discovered to be routinely falsifying their tax returns in order to qualify for tax credits worth billions of dollars.

And what if it was further learned that some accounting firms specialized in preparing fraudulent profit and loss statements to deceive the government and that the same firms also provided “experts” to help the corporations prepare equally fake supporting documents?

Does anybody doubt that there would be a bipartisan demand in Congress that would force the president to take dramatic action to investigate the scandal, identify and prosecute those responsible and recommend new laws aimed at preventing such frauds from ever again being perpetrated?

No imagination is needed to recognize the ill wind of a genuine national scandal of epic proportions blowing through the nation’s court system. It is the scandal of a relatively few well-placed class-action liability lawyers and equally corrupted professionals from other fields using false damage claims to enrich themselves by generating billions of dollars in legal fees and administrative costs, compensatory damage payments and other court-ordered reparations.

As we said in our press conference with the New Jersey Lawsuit Reform Alliance last week, every dollar a company spends defending itself from a frivolous claim represents a dollar not spent making the products that keep us healthy and that make modern life possible.

Tort fraud has already cost us up to $30 billion in just the past 15 years. Certainly our friends on Capitol Hill will act with the same speed they did when investigating corporate scandals. I'm positive of it.