In the News

For more than a decade, Texas lawyers have filed thousands of lawsuits against insurers every time a severe weather event impacts the state. To calm the surge in storm-related litigation, the Texas Legislature passed House Bill 1774, affording insurance companies a chance to resolve a disputed claim by requiring policyholders to give insurers notice 60 days prior to filing a lawsuit.

Jeff Albright, CEO of Independent Insurance Agents & Brokers of Louisiana, believes auto insurance premiums in Louisiana are among the highest in the country because there are double the amount of claims in Louisiana than any other state. “The reason for our high insurance premiums in Louisiana is very clear,” Albright said. “We claim that we are injured in car accidents twice as often as the national average. If we make twice as many claims we will pay more for insurance.”

A proposed opioid “negotiation class” that would include more than 24,000 U.S. cities and counties is a waste of judicial resources unlikely to achieve its stated goal of hammering out a global settlement, say critics, including a former Connecticut official who was directly involved in negotiations with the opioid industry.

Non lawyers, namely doctors and finance companies, are steering the litigation for accident claims. In the past, plaintiff attorneys were the only ones behind the wheel and put aside money in a “war chest” to fund the risk of their contingency cases, says Ben Dyches, an attorney in Utah who specializes in defending doctors from malpractice suits.

You’ve probably heard about the proposal by plaintiffs’ lawyers representing more than 1,800 city and county governments suing pharmaceutical companies, drug wholesalers and drugstore chains for sparking an epidemic of drug abuse. Defendants have balked. For one thing, they deny that they illegally marketed or sold opioid products, which are tightly regulated by the federal government, and contend that illegal heroin and fentanyl, and not their prescription pharmaceuticals, are to blame for the rash of drug overdoses. For another, defendants are worried about the practical obstacles to global peace. Any settlement with plaintiffs in the consolidated litigation would just attract more claims.

Oklahoma’s more than 670 cities and counties, which have absorbed most of the emergency and health-care costs of the opioid epidemic, received just $12.5 million to divvy up. The agreement gave about $60 million to private lawyers hired to work on the case. Two months later, Hunter announced an $85 million settlement with a second defendant, Teva Pharmaceutical. Oklahoma’s governor, lawmakers and mayors were not about to make the same mistake twice.

A nearly decade-long legal battle over the harm inflicted on tens of thousands of women by surgically implanted pelvic mesh is moving away from manufacturers and toward the lawyers who helped the women bring their cases. In recent weeks, women who received some of roughly $8 billion in settlements have sued their lawyers, accusing them of improperly enriching themselves with excessive fees or stretching themselves too thin to properly handle the pelvic mesh cases.

Monsanto is facing a growing number of lawsuits from people who claim that ingredients in its weed killer, Roundup gave them cancer. Several Roundup cases have already been heard, including one resulting in a verdict of more than $2 billion in damages. Many more are expected. With money like that on the table, personal injury lawyers are filling the airwaves with ads.

On June 10, Gov. Greg Abbott signed off on House Bill 2826, which could curtail the rising trend of Texas attorneys soliciting county, school district and city officials in hopes of pursuing litigation. From opioid litigation to construction defect lawsuits, trial lawyers have engaged in an all-out scramble to sign up local governments.

Voters are spurning alarmist climate agendas at the ballot box, so U.S. progressives have turned to state attorneys general to litigate against fossil fuels. But the plan is backfiring as an ethically dubious program involving private-interest funding of state AG staff is being confronted in court.