NJ Business Matters: The Blog of the CIANJ

What's next...

Thank you to NJ Business Matters for welcoming us as a guest blogger this week.  For more information about the New Jersey Lawsuit Reform Alliance (NJLRA) and civil justice issues in New Jersey, please visit www.njlra.org often.  To join our mailing list, please visit http://www.njlra.org/join.html.

What's next for NJLRA?  We are going to continue to look at the growing problem of out-of-state plaintiffs coming into New Jersey to sue our companies and we will seek to educate our elected officials about how our laws can be reformed to be more in-line with those of other states.  We will soon be working to have several pieces of legislation introduced to accomplish this and will let you know more about them when they are pending in the legislature.

We will also continue to monitor the courts for opportunities to weigh in with amicus briefs that share the business community's perspective with our judges.  If you are involved in a case or know of one where NJLRA can be helpful, please contact us.

We hope you will consider NJLRA a resource for your business about litigation matters and we will continue to work closely with CIANJ to represent the business community in our courts and in the New Jersey Legislature.

Same leopard, different spots.

NJ Lawyer magazine published a story last week ("Perhaps a new name for ATLA?" May 2,2008 by Dana Sullivan) informing us that ATLA-NJ, the American Trial Lawyers Association, New Jersey chapter, plans to change its name to the New Jersey Association for Justice.  This follows a name change at the national level to the "American Justice Association" and changes at the state level in several states, including Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida.

NJ Lawyer reports:

Members are expected to vote on the name change in October.

"This has nothing to do with our not being proud of our being trial lawyers," said Amos Gern, ATLA-NJ president, during the organization's annual Boardwalk Seminar on Thursday in Atlantic City.

Two years ago, the national organization changed its name to American Association for Justice (AAJ), and Gern acknowledged the change was made for public-relations reasons. So now the local unit is preparing to follow suit and eliminate "trial attorneys" from its name.

Despite Mr. Gern's protests, it seems clear that this change is a nationally coordinated effort to hide the fact that these groups work to promote the interests of plaintiffs attorneys, not justice.  This Orwellian strategy will not change the public's mind about abusive litigation, however. 

Tell us your story...

Have you or your company been the victim of lawsuit abuse?  If so, the New Jersey Lawsuit Reform Alliance (NJLRA) wants to hear your story.

NJLRA is collecting stories of lawsuit abuse from around New Jersey and from all industries so that we can share them with legislators, jurists and decision makers.  Data and state rankings are powerful, important facts that help us inform our leaders about the problems in New Jersey's civil justice system.  But sometimes they need to hear an anecdote about how a lawsuit destroyed a business or racked up millions in attorneys fees without helping a consumer.

So please tell us your lawsuit abuse story today.  Simply go to http://www.njlra.org/html/index.html now and click "Share your story." 

Thank you.

The Plaintiffs are coming...

The New Jersey Lawsuit Reform Alliance (NJLRA) has joined with the NJ Business and Industry Association and the Healthcare Institute of NJ to submit a friend of the court briefing to the NJ Superior Court's Appellate Division in Briest v. Wyeth.

The plaintiffs, Laura and Robert Briest, have lived in Virginia their whole lives. In 1998 and 1999 Mrs. Briest was prescribed and took (in Virginia) Premphase, a hormone replacement drug manufactured by Wyeth. In 1999 she was diagnosed with breast cancer. In 2004, nearly five years after she stopped taking the drug and after her diagnosis with breast cancer, Mrs. Briest sued Wyeth under New Jersey's Product Liability Act, arguing that the premphase caused her breast cancer.

Why did this Virginia resident and her husband sue in New Jersey?

Virginia's statute of limitations does not allow her to bring suit more than two years after the date of her injury and would not allow the suit. Because Wyeth is headquartered in New Jersey, the Briests and their lawyers decided to take advantage of NJ's more permissive statute of limitations and bring suit here, arguing that since Wyeth is headquartered in NJ the State has a vested interest in the case. The trial court allowed the suit, and Wyeth has appealed.

This ruling creates an uneven playing field for New Jersey companies that hurts New Jersey's economic competitiveness. The result of this ruling is that New Jersey companies will now face suit under the worst of either of two states' laws, whichever is more favorable to the plaintiff. Should everyone who wants to sue Ford be able to choose which law, Michigan's or their own state's, is better for them? Since companies like Ford and Wyeth do business in all 50 states (and many countries), it makes more sense that the laws of the state where the transaction occurred should be applied.

Is it any wonder that today an estimated 93% of pharmaceutical mass torts in New Jersey are brought by out-of-state plaintiffs? Unfortunately our laws are more favorable to plaintiffs than those of many other states and - even more unfortunately - many of our courts are allowing people from around the nation to sue under them.

Meanwhile, New Jersey consumers - and taxpayers - are forced to wait in line behind plaintiffs from other states who are eager to cash in on a suit against our compananies. New Jersey courts should serve New Jersey residents and our businesses, not plaintiffs from around the nation seeking to sue our companies.

Stay tuned for the results of this appeal.

It's not always about the consumer

Last week in New Jersey Superior Court (in Atlantic County, no less) a NJ woman, Lauren Coyle, filed a class action lawsuit against AriZona Iced Tea and its parent companies alleging that they are illegally marketing their product as "100% natural" when in fact the product contains high fructose corn syrup.  She is seeking damages for herself and everyone in NJ who purchased an AriZona iced tea in the past six years.

What, specifically, is she seeking? Aside from attorney's fees (bingo) and a court order preventing AriZona from marketing its product as "100% natural," she is seeking to be reimbursed for the difference between a premium, i.e. "100% natural," beverage and an ordinary one. What is that, about 25 cents?

As with many class action suits brought under the New Jersey Consumer Fraud Act (CFA), the only people who will benefit from this suit are the lawyers, who will run up enormous fees in discovery and trial costs. The average consumer who is alleged to have been defrauded will see little, if any compensation.

The CFA was designed to allow individual consumers who have been defrauded by a business or sold a defective or harmful product to seek compensation. The fact that Ms. Coyle and her lawyers think that they can benefit from this suit exposes just how far our law and our courts have strayed from these ideas. Ms. Coyle could have simply turned the bottle around, read the ingredients and found high fructose corn syrup among them, and returned her iced tea to the store. Or she could have asked the company for her money back. Instead, consumers who have truly been harmed will now wait in line behind Ms. Coyle and the millions of people who purchased AriZona Iced Tea during the past six years while the court sorts this out.

Her lawyers now stand to make a lot of money. Ms. Coyle, barring punitive damages, might take home tens of dollars. The rest of us will get a coupon.

What are New Jersey businesses telling us about the tort system in NJ?

This past December the New Jersey Lawsuit Reform Alliance released a study of New Jersey businesses' attitudes about our state's tort system, conducted by the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University.  The Commerce and Industry Association of NJ and the NJ State Chamber of Commerce graciously allowed us to survey their membership, and many of the readers of this page may have participated in the survey. 

The results of the survey are available here.  What did you tell us?

According to this study, 89% of NJ businesses agree that lawsuits drive up the cost of doing business and the same percentage agree that these costs also increase the amount of money consumers pay for goods and services. 

About 40% of you have been threatened with a lawsuit in the past five years, and one-third of you have actually been sued.  Fifty-nine percent of the businesses we surveyed do not think that the courts treat defendants and plaintiffs equally and, of those 59%, 93% think that the courts favor the plaintiffs.

Most disconcerting, 25% of the respondents said that they had seriously considered relocating outside of NJ because of the state's civil justice climate.

We all know that there are many reasons that New Jersey is a tough place to do business.  Do we really want to keep lawsuits on that list? 

Why now?

Why was the New Jersey Lawsuit Reform Alliance created?  Yesterday the Star-Ledger published an op-ed that I wrote detailing just how bad New Jersey's civil justice climate has become.  You can read it here.

Unlike other bad tort jurisdictions, most of which allow local plaintiffs to sue major corporations from around the world in their local courts (think Mississippi), New Jersey is gaining a reputation for allowing plaintiffs from around the nation to sue our corporations here in New Jersey.  Merely allowing these suits to be brought here in New Jersey is a problem, but when New Jersey law is more plaintiff friendly it becomes a serious problem for a New Jersey-based business and another nail in the coffin of the economic competitiveness of our state.

As I write in the Star-Ledger, 93% of the mass pharmaceutical torts in our state courts have been filed by out-of-state plaintiffs.  Ninety-three percent.  Is it any surprise that New Jersey's share of pharmaceutical jobs in the nation declined from 20% in 1990 to just over 13% in 2005?

The New Jersey Lawsuit Reform Alliance (NJLRA) was created to address this problem.  NJLRA advocates for reform to ensure that New Jersey's civil justice system treats all parties fairly and discourages lawsuit abuse.  NJLRA and its members believe that a fair civil justice system resolves disputes expeditiously, without bias and based solely upon application of the law to the the facts of each case.  Such a system fosters public trust and motivates professionals, sole proprietors and businesses to provide safe and reliable products and services while ensuring that truly injured people are compensated fairly for their losses.

This week I will be blogging more about NJLRA, New Jersey's civil justice system and ways that we can improve our laws and our courts to address this growing issue. 

I hope you will visit our website at www.njlra.org to learn more.