Cyrus Dugger
The “Tortellini” Has Arrived With a Vengeance
Two great posts from the new tort deform blog “The Tortellini.” The first post dispels the myth that corporate interests are the underdog “victims” of a public advocacy onslaught by trial lawyers:
Where the Money Goes The chamber’s tax returns offered up other salacious details, like the salaries of its top execs. In 2004, chamber prez Tom Donohue raked in $1.8 million. ILR president Lisa Rickard made $535,000. The tax returns suggest that the chamber’s female execs could use the services of a good trial lawyer. Suzanne Clark, the chamber’s executive vice president and COO made $531,000 in 2004, while the guy below her, VP Robert Josten, made $738,000. (ILR chief Rickard must have lobbied hard for a raise, as her salary in 2003 was only a little over $300K.) But back to that $40 million figure. Chamber heads often claim that big business is the helpless victim of the all-powerful trial bar, but the tax returns make clear the chamber is the big dog in this fight. The ILR’s tort reform budget comes on top of the $70 million annual budget for the chamber itself. Just for the sake of comparison, the Association of Trial Lawyers of America spent about $7 million on lobbying in 2005, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The chamber’s Institute for Legal Reform spent $20 million.(link)
The second post addresses the issue of mandatory arbitration agreements that we have discussed on Tort Deform a few times:
Asinine Arbitration Clauses and Loony Liability Waivers For the past nine years, the Michigan tort reform group, M-Law, has run a contest for the best wacky warning label as way of illustrating the absurd consequences of the nation’s litigiousness. Media people like John Stossel love to pick up on these “don’t use heat gun as a hair dryer” sorts of labels, which are, I must admit, occasionally very funny. But there’s a corollary to the wacky warnings, which you might call “crazy contracts,” or the extremes to which businesses will go to prevent people from suing them. They appear in even the most benign transactions these days, evidence of serious paranoia in the business community. You can’t buy a Dell printer cartridge online without first waiving your right to go to court if Dell’s cartridges kill your printer. Similarly, liability waivers dot everything from HMO contracts to ski resort lift passes. My father once found an arbitration clause in a Utah hospital admissions’ form. (He didn’t sign, and no one noticed.) I’m not a lawyer, so I often wonder, can these contracts really be enforced? And how to get around them? (link)
Posted at 10:51 AM, Nov 03, 2006 in Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
