By: Lucy Nashed, TLR Communications Director For watchdogs of the Texas legal system, the American Tort Reform Association’s annual Judicial Hellholes report provides some good news and some bad news. The good news is that Texas has successfully avoided being named the worst of the worst for the second year in a row, since storm-chasing lawyers propelled us to a Hellhole designation in 2016. The bad news is that two massive 2018 verdicts from Texas trial courts landed us on this year’s Dishonorable Mention list. And as they say, where there’s smoke, there’s fire. The first verdict came in August 2018, when a Dallas trial court awarded $241 million to a couple whose children were seriously injured in a car accident. The jury found that the car’s seats were defective and unreasonably dangerous. The jury assigned 95 percent of the responsibility for the plaintiffs’ injuries to Toyota and assigned only five percent of the responsibility to the distracted driver who caused the crash. According to the ATRA report, the jury found liability and awarded damages even though “the product exceeded federal safety standards, there was no evidence of a safer alternative design, and the court had refused to allow Toyota

By: Lucy Nashed, TLR Communications Director With 2018 winding down, Texas managed to squeeze in one more big national economic ranking before the ball drops. This time, it’s Forbes’ annual ranking of best states for business, which puts the Lone Star State at #3 overall (down one spot from second in 2017). Much like CNBC’s ranking from earlier this year, Forbes 13th annual list takes several categories into consideration, including business costs, labor supply, regulatory environment, economic climate, growth prospects and quality of life. Texas finished in the top 10 in four out of the five categories, ranking first for growth prospects and third for business costs and economic climate. Digging into those categories, there’s a lot to be proud of when it comes to how Texas creates opportunities for families and job creators. Like the CNBC study, however, there was one area where the Lone Star didn’t shine quite as brightly. Texas ranked a lackluster 25th for its regulatory environment, which includes an analysis of the state’s legal system. If you’ll remember, CNBC’s ranking also dinged Texas for its “sometimes difficult legal climate.” Those dynamics are complicated further with the ouster of all but one of Texas’ incumbent appeals

By: Lucy Nashed, TLR Communications Director For those of us who only play lawyers on TV, the legal world and its jargon can be perplexing. Being deposed in the legal world doesn’t (usually) involve any sort of Game of Thrones-like coup. You might want to keep your Latin dictionary handy if you’re doing any light legal reading, and what’s with all this talk about barratry, anyway? Fortunately, we at TLR are here to help shed some light on the lesser known areas of the legal system that still deserve our close attention. One such area is third-party litigation finance. A quick Google search will pull hundreds of articles touting its merits and decrying its pitfalls. But what exactly is it? According the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Institute for Legal Reform (ILR), third-party litigation financing is “the practice of providing money to a party to pursue a potential or filed lawsuit in return for a share of any damages award or settlement.” The money can be used to cover legal fees and court costs, but it can also be used for living expenses as a lawsuit is ongoing. ILR (dis)credits Australia as the birthplace of third-party litigation financing, where it continues

By: Lucy Nashed, TLR Communications Director $3,535. What would you buy with $3,535? You could pay for a couple of months’ rent in a nice apartment in Austin, Dallas or Houston. $3,535 gets you more than halfway through a semester of tuition at The University of Texas at Austin. It could also buy you more than 1,100 gallons of milk, more than 1,300 gallons of gas and nearly 600 gallons of Blue Bell ice cream. But you’re already spending that $3,535 every year, likely without even realizing it. That’s because $3,535 is what litigation cost each and every household in the Lone Star State in 2016—slightly more than the national average of $3,329—according to a new study on the cost of the U.S. tort system conducted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Institute for Legal Reform. Nationwide, the costs and compensation of the tort system reached $429 billion, or 2.3 percent of U.S. GDP, according to the study. That accounts not only for judgments, settlements and the legal costs of lawsuits or enforcement actions, but for the cost of insuring businesses against the risk of a lawsuit. Rather than risk being bankrupted by legal fees and lawsuit judgements, many of

September 1 marks the one-year anniversary of the enactment of House Bill 1774, the Texas Legislature’s solution to stop storm-chasing lawyers from taking advantage of property owners after natural disasters. After the explosion of unnecessary lawsuits against insurance companies following hail and wind events, property insurers in parts of the state were raising premiums and deductibles, or had stopped offering coverage in some areas all together. The Legislature acted decisively in 2017 to shut down this obvious lawsuit abuse and stop storm-chasing lawyers from hijacking our property insurance premiums. Our data shows that during the four-and-a-half-year period from Jan. 1, 2014, through June 30, 2018, more than 34,600 weather-related lawsuits were filed throughout Texas, an average of 640 new lawsuits per month. Compare that to the six years before 2012, when fewer than 4,500 of these lawsuits were filed in Texas, an average of only 62 new lawsuits per month. This explosion of lawsuits was driven by lawyer conduct—including the unlawful and unethical recruitment of clients through door-to-door solicitation by case generators. TLR’s recent data shows that weather-related lawsuit filing spiked in August 2017, the month before HB 1774 took effect, as storm-chasing lawyers dumped their inventory of heavily-solicited lawsuits

Picture this: You are the defendant in a lawsuit. You spend thousands of dollars and months preparing to defend your case in a court of law. You hire an attorney to help navigate the web of legal issues created by this litigation. Then the day arrives. You show up to court, and sitting on the other side of the courtroom is the plaintiff… A monkey. While it seems ridiculous, a monkey is only one of the animals that recently filed a lawsuit. In that case, a British man who photographed macaques on a trip to Indonesia got one of the animals to snap a selfie—that is, the monkey triggered the camera shutter while looking into the lens. After the picture gained popularity online (and made the photographer some money), People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) filed a lawsuit on behalf of the macaque, “claiming that the animal was the rightful owner of the copyright.” The trial court judge ruled that animals weren’t subject to the Copyright Act and PETA appealed to the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. That’s right. A federal appeals court. Luckily, the Ninth Circuit saw the lawsuit for what it was, and threw it

The New York Times recently looked into “defensive medicine,” or the practice of doctors ordering excessive medical tests in an attempt to stave off medical liability lawsuits. Testing out of an abundance of caution, many doctors believe, can potentially shield a physician from being sued in the event of an issue with a patient down the road. But as it turns out, this understandable “CYA” by health providers is costing all of us big bucks. The Times article points to a recent study completed by MIT and Duke that looked at medical costs in an area where medical liability suits are not allowed—veterans’ healthcare. As the Times notes, “Under longstanding law, such patients get access to a government health care system but are barred from suing government doctors and hospitals for malpractice.” The study found that when base closures forced veterans to use civilian healthcare providers, “healthcare spending increased, particularly on extra diagnostic tests.” Overall, the study found that while healthcare spending increased by five percent in places where lawsuits were possible, it didn’t always lead to improved outcomes for the patients. Of course, the impact of abusive lawsuits on the medical community is not news to Texans. Back in

A recent newspaper article spurred us to look into The Great Tuna Settlement of 2015. What we found, of course, was more evidence of client recruitment by enterprising plaintiff lawyers. In Spring 2015, a California law firm announced it had settled a nationwide class action lawsuit against Starkist for $12 million. The basis of the lawsuit was that Starkist’s five-ounce cans of tuna did not actually contain five ounces of meat. The cans were, it was alleged, slightly underfilled. Under the proposed settlement, consumers were to receive a cash award of $25 or tuna vouchers worth $50, but the fine print contained a caveat: the settlement was subject to “pro rata dilution if the total amount of claims exceeds the available settlement funds.” In other words, the more people who joined the class, the lower each class member’s award would be. The federal judge in California overseeing the case found that the $12 million settlement was adequate because the plaintiff’s case was “relatively weak.” It turns out it was going to be difficult to establish that a substantial number of underweight cans were sold to the public. Based on rates of $300 to $850 per hour, the plaintiff’s lawyers claimed