THE POWER OF the plaintiffs bar is on the wane in this country, and will be for a long time to come.
You won’t hear many tort reformers admit it. They’ve done too good a job demonizing trial lawyers to let their bogeymen fade away. Twenty years ago, tort reform was an obscure movement with a funny name; today, politicians speak of “ending lawsuit abuse” or “eliminating frivolous lawsuits”-tort reform by more felicitous names-whenever they need a failsafe applause line. The movement’s success has been a public relations masterpiece. Beginning at a time when plaintiffs lawyers, flush from the fat years of asbestos revenues, seemed to have the money, brainpower and political alliances to cripple any defendant of their choosing, tort reformers engineered a billion-dollar anti-trial lawyer campaign: They produced and promulgated scholarly papers on the economic consequences of litigation; they sponsored grassroots groups to lobby state legislatures and campaign for business-backed state judicial candidates; they even hit upon such innovations as the publication of newspapers supported by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to report on litigation in plaintiffs-friendly southern Illinois and West Virginia. Plaintiffs lawyers, accustomed to thinking of themselves as champions of the people, fighting big business on behalf of the little guy, seethed at the vulturous image tort reformers created for them, but didn’t grasp its implications. They were, by their own admission, so slow to respond to what Robert Jenner of Janet, Jenner & Suggs calls “the ridiculous propaganda” of their opponents that they permitted the chamber of commerce and the American Tort Reform Association to co-opt the very language of the debate. “Reform” is one way to describe the business-backed changes in product liability litigation in the past decade. Trial lawyers would choose another, something along the lines of an unconscionable abrogation of plaintiffs’ rights.
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