Hmm why would you trust five elected officials? My guess is that "who you know" would determine whether you get to sue. If you are someone locals are not going to like-out of towner, wrong political party, gun owner in NYC and you are beat up by the son of owner of a large local business/a well liked sheriff's deputy you think the "local officials" (read that spear carriers and suck ups of whichever political party is in power) are going to let you sue?

Also I am curious, what facts do you think jurors don't get in a personal injury lawsuit that they should be getting?

Interestingly in NY there is a requirement before filing a medical malpractice suit that you have to get an affidavit from another doctor that there was malpractice before you can file the lawsuit (there are some exceptions, but that's basically how it works).

Our country is also a little unusual in that the winner in a lawsuit is usually out his attorney's fees even if he wins. My understanding is that in most countries, if you are sued and win you get your attorney's fees back from the other side. I don't really think that would make much of a difference, as americans prolivcilivity for suing is more cultural than anything to do with attorney's fees.

This is as true as saying all people who own assault rifles are drooling paranoid psychopaths. (although I do like the Yassar Arafat joke, I hadn't heard that one before).

Ironically, as I'm reading this, I'm on hold listening to the "L.A.Law" theme music.

I think there's a [i]little[/i] too much generalization going on here.  We're not all bad, not even those of us who occasionally work on a personal injury case.  

Heh, heh, didn't make enough this week to cover the house payment, but I got hopes for tomorrow. I have defended lawsuits for large  companies and insurance companies and I have also represented plaintiffs in personal injuries claims.

I personally don't see a lot of frivolous lawsuits, but maybe in other states and cities it is different. I do think that insurance companies and lobbies that work for big companies spend money advertising and lobbying to try and convince people that lawyers are scummy ambulance chasers so that laws will be passed to restrict people's right to sue so they are less at risk not just from frivolous lawsuits, but also when they get caught dumping chemicals out the back door of a plant and screwing up a village's water supply.

I agree in Zoom's case he should have been able to immediatly (well at least quickly, not much happens immdediatly in court) get a court date for a motion or hearing to force the plaintiff to show proof that he was the guy they claimed and if they couldn't & refused to drop if after being shown they had the wrong guy, they should have gotten whacked for his attorney's fees and fined for commencing a frivolous action.

At least in my case, there is a big incentive to not commence a frivolous lawsuit, or even a kind of crappy one. Why? Because I won't GET PAID! As everyone probably knows, most personal injury work is done on a contingency, I keep a 1/3 (varies) of whatever the recovery is and get paid nothing if there is no money paid from the defendants to the plaintiff. Most insurance companies, large businesses and other "deep pockets" don't just roll over and write out a check when I sue them. If a case sucks they fight me (and when it doesn't suck they still fight, darn them). Then either 1. I get no money because I lost at trial or 2. they pay me a small amount of "go away" money that is less than I could have made doing work where I am paid by the hour. So I have a big economic incentive to not go around suing stupid cases.

I do not do work on class action suits (like the one in FMJunkie's article) & haven't in many years; but I think that, although they are a good idea in theory, in practice the members of the "class" get screwed because they get a free pair of shoelaces, while the lawyers walk away with too high a percentage of the actual cash money. I guess that they are so expensive to defend that there is greater motivation to pay them off. I believe the judge has to review the proposed claim before the class action is started to see whether there is enough of a claim to let the suit go forward-maybe they need to be more aggressive in weeding out bad class action suits or allow the proposed defendant to try and prevent the suit from going forward at that point.