In the News

Will self-driving cars end up making our roads more dangerous? More importantly, who will be held responsible when the inevitable happens?

Once a regular on the list, Texas managed to avoid landing a “Judicial Hellhole’ ranking this year, but did secure a “Dishonorable Mention” for dishing out massive damage awards, including the largest in the nation for 2018.

America is getting crushed by courts that have opened the door to lawsuits by adopting fake law, “junk science,” and even litigation “tourism,” with payments reaching $429 billion, or 2.3 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product, according to a remarkable new report.

Wall Street hedge funds are cashing in on New York’s legal feeding frenzy by financing “mass tort litigation” over prescription drugs and medical devices in exchange for a piece of the action when the cases settle, the “Judicial Hellholes” report reveals.

Forbes’ 13th annual ranking measures six categories for businesses: costs, labor supply, regulatory environment, current economic climate, growth prospects and quality of life. This year, Texas has earned itself the number one spot in the ‘growth prospects’ category, which measures job, income and gross state product growth forecasts over the next five years.

A special master reviewing fee requests from hundreds of law firms in the $1.51 billion settlement with Syngenta has recommended that lead counsel get half the estimated $500 million in legal fees but rejected the idea that attorney Mikal Watts, who represents 60,000 farmers in the deal, should get $150 million.

A Charleston man has filed a lawsuit seeking $700 million over allegations he was told the incorrect cutoff time to play the Powerball lottery in 2017 at a Texas convenience store.

Anyone who has sat within several feet of a television set between the hours of 9 a.m. and 3 p.m. is bound to have heard the line, soundtracked sometimes by foreboding music, prefaced always with an ominous “Attention.” “If you or a loved one has been diagnosed with mesothelioma …”

“We have seen a number of other lawsuits brought by lawyers, public adjusters, estimators, and others fighting with one another over referral fees, commissions, and estimate charges in these matters,” says Steven Badger, a Zelle LLP attorney who represents the insurance industry in hail- and-wind related litigation. “[T]he underlying lawsuits giving rise to these disputes are about lining the pockets of those who have found a way to inject themselves into the insurance claims process.”

“Then boilerplate lawsuits are drafted by non-lawyer staff and filed,” he continues. “No investigation of the underlying merit of the dispute is ever conducted by a real lawyer. Not surprisingly, a significant number of these lawsuits are entirely without merit and are either dismissed or settled for nuisance value.”

Across the country, the jobs of manufacturing workers are being threatened by trial attorneys and politicians targeting manufacturers with baseless lawsuits based on the legal theory of “public nuisance,” attempting to hold manufacturers responsible for harms that are often far outside of their control. While trial lawyers have pursued such lawsuits for years, there has been a dramatic increase over the past year, as lawyers team up with states, cities and counties to sue manufacturers over climate change.