Quote:
Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
I'm a little surprised that there aren't more people itching to talk here about tort reform -- Hello! aside -- I mean, what could be more interesting? -- so perhaps I'll get the ball rolling a little. One of the tough questions is what kinds of cases are the "frivolous lawsuits" that the President keeps talking about. Take this example:
- A man provides a car for his teenage daughter to drive. Through no fault of her own, the daughter is involved in a minor fender bender. No one is hurt and the property damage is less than $2,500. The father could just turn the claim into his insurance company and be done with it. Instead, when he learns that the other driver was in a rental car and that the rental company provided the car to a driver with a suspended license, the father sues the rental car company for the property damage.
Frivolous or not?
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The thing that gets me about the tort reform crowd is that their attention is horribly misdirected. The major frivolous costs to society are not in personal injury and med mal, where at least there is an injured person being compensated, even if we feel sometimes excessively.
The big drain is the class action bar. The miniscule injury that gets blown out of proportion due to lawyer with no clients and nothing but a fat contingency on their mind. Not to mention the possibility of punitive (products liability) and treble (antitrust damages). And then there is Milberg...
