"you never really hear them advocate against the rights of corporations to sue each other and recover damages over even the most technical and banal of issues."

You never really hear Cyrus Dugger being honest about reformers, do you?

http://www.overlawyered.com/2004/06/judge_says_artist_can_make_fun.html

If the purpose of intellectual property is to boost innovation, then it should be progressively restricted. If my stitching on a pocket has 100 years of protection or 5 years, which duration best promotes innovation, the aim of Article VIII?

In the case of patents, only 1% of holders make money, whereas 100% of patent lawyers make money.

There is 95% enforcement of contracts on EBay. In the case of contract law, only the smallest fraction may be enforced due to legal costs. The aims of contract law are in utter failure, including the devastated, patently false Coasean Theorem.

So if the legal process serves to intimidate, then all parties participating, including the running dog judge must be made to pay for allowing the meritless claim.

Any result lower than 75% verdicts for plaintiffs represents an excess of meritless claims per se. The specific court should be shut down until investigations reveal what the problem is. Why are meritless claims allowed to proceed in this venue? In a judicial hellhole, the judge should be arrested and go to Federal prison on corruption charges if he has accepted so much as a dollar from the attorneys in practice in the area.

No lawyer should sit on the bench, ever.

You never hear victims (and there's a whole lot of them) supporting the "reformers". And you never will. You never hear victims condemning Cyrus Dugger, because he's right. "Reformers" never refer to the constitution, as they call for "Health Courts" and limiting victim's access to the courts or fair and just compensation for their injuries and the deaths of their loved ones.

To the victims of medical negligence and malpractice Cyrus Dugger is a hero. And to the victims of medical negligence and malpractice the "reformers" are selfish, greedy, callous and morally corrupt.

You never hear victims (and there's a whole lot of them) supporting the "reformers".

I receive many letters and emails and personal statements of thanks and gratitude from victims of lawsuit abuse.

"I receive many letters and emails and personal statements of thanks and gratitude from victims of lawsuit abuse. "

Victims like the guys who sign your paycheck?

Just kidding on the square.

I get my fair share of thanks from true victims, but I can't think of any hate mail I've ever gotten. Do you get any, Ted? My guess is that since tort reform isn't as visceral of an issue as say, abortion, no one on any side of the debate gets much hate mail.

"you never really hear them advocate against the rights of corporations to sue each other and recover damages over even the most technical and banal of issues."

They do it all the time. Like here:

http://www.overlawyered.com/2007/01/the_big_game.html

Because two people have linked to two posts on overlawyered where two different lawsuits between corporations are castigated (one posted today no less), I formally retract my statement of "never" and replace it with "almost never."

Of course, if just one post in the hundreds if not thousands written on overlawyered critiqued a corporation to corporation lawsuit, these commentators would attack me for using the word "never."

But fair is fair, I was over broad in using the word never, so I formally change my statement to "almost never."

Of course these points ignored the invitation voiced in the post.

As I say in the above post, I'd like to know if tort "reformers" support this particular case by Levi... or not.

I also repeat the larger invitation in my post.....

"Then again, maybe I’m wrong, and they oppose this particular series of corporate lawsuits by Levi Corporation.

To find out, I invite the tort “reform” supporters who read this site to weigh in on these corporate lawsuits. If tort “reformers” oppose these Levi lawsuits, where and how do they draw the line with other corporation-to-corporation lawsuits. If they support these lawsuits, why don’t they also support the lawsuits of consumers against corporations in personal injury cases?"

Let's see, on the front page of Overlawyered for February 3, we have

* My post criticizing an Overstock.com lawsuit;
* My post criticizing a National Pork Board lawsuit;
* Walter's roundup post criticizing Levi's and McCaw;
* My post criticizing the NFL;
* Walter's post raising the questionable ethics of a lawsuit of Greenlight Capital, a $4 billion New York hedge fund;
* My roundup post updating criticism of a lawsuit brought by the Maine Board of Tourism's advertising agency.

So to Cyrus Dugger, "almost never" means "only six times in the last six days." Either Dugger doesn't read Overlawyered (and has no business criticizing it), Dugger has severe reading comprehension problems, or Dugger is dishonest. Which is it?

If he was going to cite to overlawyered posts to attempt to rebut my point, I would have expected Frank to have gone back and pulled out a dozen maybe even three dozen posts discussing corporation to corporation lawsuits out of the likely thousands written on overlawyered in order to attempt to criticize me for not having read all of overlawyered's previous posts!

Instead, he has only strengthened my point by citing only to criticisms of corporation-to-corporation lawsuits posted on overlawyered after my above post (save one) pointing out how tort “reformers” rarely criticize
corporation-to-corporation was published. If there are so many examples of overlawyered criticizing corporation to corporation lawsuits, why didn’t Frank cite to previous posts, or for that matter, cite to something like six previous posts in the six days before the above post was published?

All the posts Frank links to (save one) follow, and indeed are best characterized as a defensive reaction to, the critique of my post. The only post Frank links to that went up before my post (it went up a few hours before) wasn’t even between two corporations, but between a blogger and a corporation. The entirety of that post was a two-liner: “Update to Maine Board of Tourism intimidate-a-blogger-by-litigation lawsuit: case dismissed, government official fired. [Maine Web Report; AP/Boston Globe].” – hardly an in-depth criticism of corporation-top-corporation lawsuits."

All of this again ignores the fact that Frank won’t directly address the post in its entirety and answer the question that it poses.

I repeat that question, yet gain, below.

"To find out, I invite the tort “reform” supporters who read this site to weigh in on these corporate lawsuits. If tort “reformers” oppose these Levi lawsuits, where and how do they draw the line with other corporation-to-corporation lawsuits. If they support these lawsuits, why don’t they also support the lawsuits of consumers against corporations in personal injury cases?"

Cyrus continues his dishonesty.

I have better things to do than to go through thousands of Overlawyered posts to identify the hundreds that criticize corporate plaintiffs--especially when his original claim was that Overlawyered "never" does so, so all I had to do was find one to refute his original argument, so I quickly googled for one of the several we wrote about Mattel's overprotectiveness of Barbie, which was the closest analogy I could think of off the top of my head to the Levi's case.

If Cyrus had clicked through the links of the Maine Board of Tourism post, for example, he'd see that it linked to Overlawyered's lengthy post written before this blog even existed, as well as to a blog that thanked Overlawyered for publicizing the suit when it first happened last year. That latter post was after January 29, so I couldn't post on it before then.

If Cyrus had searched Overlawyered for "trademark", he'd see dozens of posts before January 29 about lawsuits similar to Levi's, which is why the dog-bites-man story only merited a line in a roundup post. Criticized: Cisco; Apple; Entrepreneur magazine, Marvel Comics; the record industry; Sew Fast, Sew Easy; Hooters; Virgin; Tulsa World; Universal Communication Systems; Mattel; Lindt; Fox; etc., etc., etc., and that's just in the category of trademark.

A less solipsistic individual might think that the reason I'm posting about Overstock's securities lawsuit on February 3 is because they filed a $3.5 billion complaint on February 2 that got a lot of press coverage. But, no, Cyrus thinks the universe revolves around him, and that I did so in response to a cut-and-paste he did about a trademark suit several days earlier.

"To find out, I invite the tort “reform” supporters who read this site to weigh in on these corporate lawsuits."

We did weigh in on them. We've been weighing in on them before this blog existed. You just are either too lazy or too dishonest to acknowledge this fact.

Quick and incomplete list of posts criticizing business plaintiffs in the month before Cyrus's post:
http://www.overlawyered.com/2007/01/january_29_roundup.html
http://www.overlawyered.com/2007/01/january_19_roundup.html
http://www.overlawyered.com/2007/01/yanking_riaas_chain.html
http://www.overlawyered.com/2007/01/cisco_sues_apple_over_use_of_i.html
http://www.overlawyered.com/2007/01/patent_troll_meet_rule_11.html

There may be others, I just skimmed.

Cyrus: The judge has the ability to dismiss any suit for wasting the time of the court. That this pro-lawyer biased lawyer on the bench fails to do so in most of these inter-corporate frivolous lawsuits just proves judge, pro-lawyer, rent seeking bias.

They complain of low pay, high case load. They have the ability to eliminate all time wasting cases. If a lawyer refiles, the judge should be charging all costs times 2. To deter.

As a civilian, I see little difference between you and Ted. You need Ted as a rare example of a lawyer with some primitive understanding of the problems your profession causes the nation.

If proposals to arrest and remove the hierarchy of the criminal cult enterprise gets traction, he may be a lone savior. Take it easy on him.

You’ve sometimes got to hand it to him, Ted is a master of spin and re-direction.

He took a post which said
“And yet, you never really hear them advocate against the rights of corporations to sue each other and recover damages over even the most technical and banal of issues.
Then again, maybe I’m wrong, and they oppose this particular series of corporate lawsuits by Levi Corporation.”
and framed it into a discussion about how many posts on a particular blog discuss corporation-to-corporation lawsuits instead of a larger discussion about the focus on the tort “reform” movement on limiting the rights of people, as opposed to corporations.
So that it is not lost in this back and fourth I want to highlight this point before the going back to Ted’s specific point.
The large thrust of the post is that the tort “reform” movement focuses on limiting the ability of people to hold corporations accountable. There are few efforts to affirmatively reel in the ability of corporations to sue each other over contractual violations. They do not focus their energies on advocating for caps, heightened burdens of proof, shorter statues of limitations or outright immunity from suit when discussing the lawsuits between corporations which makeup the great majority of litigation in the nation’s civil courts. If we wanted to “unclog” the courts, the best way would be to reel back the ”litigiousness” of corporations holding each other to account.
That’s the thrust of the argument, and the truth or untruth of this discussion is what would be really helpful to our readers.
In the post I even said “maybe I’m wrong,” so I’m happy to be wrong. So if as Frank argues I am wrong, let’s focus on discuss the dynamics of corporation-to-corporation lawsuits. How should we limit them? What is the best way to affirmatively deal with the problem of abusive corporate lawsuits against corporations? Frank is a seasoned tort “reform” advocate, and is likely a great source for some ideas on reigning in corporate lawsuit abuse. Let’s hear the proposals.
Turning to Ted’s points above…
First of all, taking a step back, when I said tort “reformers” I didn’t mean the overlawyered blog. Frank,Olson, and the others are prominent in that field, but are not its entirety.
Moreover, even if we for am moment assume that overlawyered somehow represents the entirety of the tort “reform” movement, just like Ted, I don’t have time to go through the thousands of overlawyered posts to ascertain the exact percentage that discuss corporations suing each other. Whether the correct descriptive phrase is that corporations “never” “almost never” or let’s even say “rarely” depends on what degree of deviation from the assertion we will allow. Does mentioning corporate lawsuits against corporations 5% of the time constitute “almost never”? That’s one out of every twenty references. Is that “rarely”?
Slicing through a debate about a percentage of posts on overlawyered (note the fact that there is no tab category for corporate lawsuit abuse), is the fact that since suits involving corporations suing each other makeup the majority of civil litigation, the majority of discussion should be about “lawsuit abuse” of corporations.
Just because “reformers” sometimes or “almost never” discuss corporate lawsuit abuse doesn’t mean they are not skewing the focus and distorting the dbeate. Indeed, they should be discussing corporate lawsuits abuse most of the time since that’s the major form of “abuse” that is out there because those lawsuits are the majority of civil lawsuits
Moreover, even in the posts on a specific blog by a few tort “reformers” few concrete/comprehensive measures restricting corporate access to the courts are advocated to restrict access to the courts when these corporate lawsuits are mentioned, at least as compared to when lawsuits by human beings are mentioned?
Maybe there are a few, but definitely not as often or in as great depth as when discussing lawsuits by human beings, and definitely not in equal proportion to this type of corporate lawsuits’ share of all civil suits.

Cyrus writes: "The large thrust of the post is that the tort “reform” movement focuses on limiting the ability of people to hold corporations accountable. There are few efforts to affirmatively reel in the ability of corporations to sue each other over contractual violations. They do not focus their energies on advocating for caps, heightened burdens of proof, shorter statues of limitations or outright immunity from suit when discussing the lawsuits between corporations which makeup the great majority of litigation in the nation’s civil courts. If we wanted to “unclog” the courts, the best way would be to reel back the ”litigiousness” of corporations holding each other to account. "

But we don't want to "unclog" the courts. Except for judges' spouses who want their family members available for long vacations, we don't care whether judges work hard. We want *frivolous* suits out of the courts, leaving them free for meritorious suits.

As I explained to Justinian when he brought up this red herring several months ago, contracts are very different than torts, and do not present the same problems. The ability of anyone -- no matter how many times you say "corporations," tort reformers do not believe the rules should be different for individuals and corporations -- to sue each other over contractual violations is ALREADY reeled in. There already ARE caps in contract cases.

We don't have the problem of arbitrary jury awards for non-economic and punitive damages in contract cases the way we do in tort. If you breach a contract, you know what you'll be sued for. We don't have a $2 million, or $200,000, or $20,000 contractual lawsuit over failure to provide a 50 cent cup of coffee -- but we do have $2 million tort lawsuits over a 50 cent cup of coffee.

We don't have the problem of third parties who never had any dealings with either of the parties being dragged in as defendants in contract cases the way we do in tort. If someone breaches a contract, we don't see trial lawyers trying to sue the owners of the building where the breach of contract took place, the municipality where the breach of contract took place, the company who designed the pen which one of the parties used to sign the contract, or the restaurant that served the parties drinks while the negotiations were going on.

We don't have the problem of suits springing up decades later in contract cases because someone claims they were injured by something you did decades ago. If you complete the contract and the two sides are happy at the time, you know it's over.

In short, the contractual side of litigation works. Not perfectly; nothing is perfect. But it isn't broken the way the tort system is, so there's no need for the same sort of "efforts" to reform it.

Why is Cyrus raising the question of contract suits at all? Is he unaware that the Levi's litigations are tort suits filed under the Lanham Act?

We've already written on this stuff. Why doesn't Cyrus address what we've actually written (or, perhaps, come up with some original ideas himself) rather than always posing complex interrogatories and then changing the subject when they get answered in a way that he can't respond?

David,

If the outcomes in contract law are so definitively obvious/ such foregone conclusions, why do corporations ever bother to litigate claims?

Either they are needlessly litigating claims the outcome of which are obvious and “clogging the courts”, or contracts cases and contract law are not fairly categorized as you describe above.

David,

Ted states that the Levi's suit is not a contractual dispute but a tort action (although I think it's fair to say the majority of corporation-to-corporation lawsuits are). Aside from my point above, your reasoning above argues in favor of attacking and limiting this Levi's suit since (as Ted states) it is not a contract. How do you propose we do so?