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PBW, you are correct. I will cease and desist.

03Lightningrocks wrote:I hate that woman so much I could not click the play button. She sickens me with disgust every time I see her. Odumbell is beginning too do the same thing for me.

What she says is:

But we have to pass the bill so that we can, uh, find out what is in it.

She's dumber than a mud fence, which shows that you can go a long way on just being vicious without much smarts.

This says it more eloquently than I ever could...

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wgoforth wrote:Annoyed man....have you seen that the state is now requiring lawyers to be buried 12 feet down? Yeah, seems that deep down lawyers are great guys!

Actually, I don't despise lawyers as much as my rant indicates. I just despise a broken system, which is broken in part because a segment of the legal industry, which has had a sweet deal at everyone else's expense for far too long, is trying to protect its rice bowl. I don't give a bag of dirt about their rice bowl. Why should I? They don't give a bag of dirt about my cost of health care. They can go....

...well, you know what I mean.

marksiwel wrote:

74novaman wrote:Or Tort Reform?

Really when you look at it people are suing doctors at the same rate as they were in the 80's 90's its just with inflation its more money buts in % its about the same.

Tort reform just makes it harder for the non rich to sue.

Not that our Torts process is perfect or anything

[rant]

That argument is the refuge of an industry that doesn't want to see its cash cow gored. Medical malpractice attorneys have a unique opportunity to fix the problem themselves by taking the moral high ground and refusing to take cases that their experience has taught them are nonsense. They don't. Instead, they cynically pursue the suit anyway, knowing that they are going to get a big fat paycheck anyway — because they know that there will be a settlement in most cases since malpractice insurers will rather pay the settlement than pay to litigate. That is a cynical, ethically indefensible abuse of the system. Of course the problem is that attorneys get to decide what is ethical and what isn't, even though it doesn't take a legal genius to see the basic corruption of that system.

Loser pays is the solution to that. Any attorney who advises a client to pursue a frivolous suit and then loses, risks facing competence charges brought by their client before the Bar when their client has to pay the costs of losing a frivolous suit. And that applies to the wealthy plaintiff as well as well as the poor plaintiff. Justice should be blind, and the consequences for frivolity should not be excused just because you are poor, any more than the consequences of malpractice should be visited upon the poor to a greater degree than upon the rich. And there is no justifiable reason to insulate attorneys from the effects of legal frivolity.

If a complaint is legitimate, then plaintiff's attorney stands a very good chance of winning, and the cost of trial goes to the loser. If a complaint is frivolous, then plaintiff's attorney stands a very good chance of losing, and the plaintiff gets to pay the cost of being a punk. However, plaintiff then gets a chance to recoup his losses by suing his attorney for giving him bad legal advice, and now the shoe is on the other foot, where it's needed to be for a long, long time. The pendulum swung waaaaaaaaaaayyyy to the legal profession's side and then got pinned there artificially by ATLA and other organizations of legal professionals who are over-represented both as seat holders and hallway sharks in Congress. It is way past time for the pendulum to swing the other way in the interest of private citizens' pocketbooks.

I'm all for attorneys making money for legitimate reasons, and I hope they make a ton of it because I am a capitalist at heart and they should be able to earn a good living based on the cost and work invested in education and establishing a practice. But I don't want them to make a red cent by representing a client without regard to the legitimacy of their complaint when there is no possibility of their not coming away with a settlement — not based on the merits of the case, but based entirely on the cost of litigation.

That is the entire point of the whole thing right there. Malpractice lawsuits render malpractice meaningless when they are no longer based on the legitimacy of the complaint, but rather on a cost of settlement versus a cost of litigation calculation. Civil litigation involves an element of risk for the plaintiff and his/her attorney in every facet of civil law except malpractice (and possibly P.I.) That is not to say that genuine medical malpractice doesn't exist. It definitely does (as does legal malpractice). It just needs to be taken seriously for what it is, and not as some industry cash cow for a privileged class of attorneys.

Who regulates doctors' malpractice behavior? Attorneys.

Who regulates attorneys' malpractice behavior? Other attorneys. That's just a little too convenient in my book, and it is a recipe for exactly the system we have right now.

Any attorney who takes a malpractice case he knows to be illegitimate simply because he/she is guaranteed a settlement payout is no better than the lowest ambulance chaser and he/she heaps dishonor on the profession.

I wouldn't use an attorney like that for stink bait.

BTW, in case this sounds like attorney bashing, my best friend is an attorney who brings honor to his profession. I've known a number of honorable attorneys over the years, and I have nothing but the highest regard for them. I just see a system that is broken, and I calls 'em like I sees 'em.

...or maybe I'm an idiot of the nth magnitude. I just REALLY don't like what I see, and legal frivolity is not the only cause of the dysfunction, but it definitely contributes to it, and it definitely can be controlled if the political will exists to do so. Sleazy people are always going to be sleazy, and they will find other ways to manipulate the law to their advantage, but that is not an excuse to not reform a law if it will close off at least one avenue available to sleaziness.

[/rant]

Many of you know I used to work in an ER. At the time, we had an ER doctor named Bruce Fagel. This is what he does now. I remember talking to him when he was preparing for his Bar exam. I asked why he wanted to be a lawyer since he already had a good career as a doctor. He replied that he was motivated to become a malpractice defense attorney. He told me that, at the time anyway, 95% of malpractice suits never get to trial, but of the remaining 5%, the doctor wins most of the time. He said that this was because in the other 95%, the malpractice insurer, who is the decision maker in whether or not to litigate, decides that the settlement is cheaper than litigating, even though litigation would be found in favor of the doctor most of the time.

So he became an attorney, and all his high-falutin' standards went out the window once he realized that being on the plaintiff's side is where the real money is. Today he is one of Beverly Hills' most prominent malpractice attorneys. What a putz.