John Edwards Fortune: Junk Science and Exorcising the Voice of Children

Dire?

 

not to mention all the prescription drugs that have hit the market. there is a fix for everything, whats the drug for your legs going dumb. I thought when that happened all you had to do was shake them.

 

I find that taking the same position as the insurance industry rarely puts you on firm ground. The whole idea that malpractice judgements, which btw are when 12 citizens decide a doctor has seriously injured or killed someone, are the main cause for exploding healthcare costs is a joke. Add in the lack of a link/the link provided from an obviously biased group, and the normative editorializing in the article and there is definitely some 'junk' here.

If we want a change let's put a cap on fees AND a cap on insurance companies expenditures for defense. They can refund that money saved to their policy holders - yeah right!

 

Nowhere in the original article or the rest of the thread is there any specific evidence that Edwards did anything wrong whatsoever. All I see is a lot of vague accusations and anti-lawyer rhetoric.

This is not to say that Edwards is a saint. He very well may have exploited jurors' ignorance and doctors' fears to make a buck. However, I will remain skeptical of this obvious hit piece until someone provides some substance to these claims.

 

This sounds like a real case of junk science and frivilous lawsuits:

The defining case in Edwards' legal career wrapped up that same year. In 1993, a five-year-old girl named Valerie Lakey had been playing in a Wake County, N.C., wading pool when she became caught in an uncovered drain so forcefully that the suction pulled out most of her intestines. She survived but for the rest of her life will need to be hooked up to feeding tubes for 12 hours each night. Edwards filed suit on the Lakeys' behalf against Sta-Rite Industries, the Wisconsin corporation that manufactured the drain. Attorneys describe his handling of the case as a virtuoso example of a trial layer bringing a negligent corporation to heel. Sta-Rite offered the Lakeys $100,000 to settle the case. Edwards passed. Before trial, he discovered that 12 other children had suffered similar injuries from Sta-Rite drains. The company raised its offer to $1.25 million. Two weeks into the trial, they upped the figure to $8.5 million. Edwards declined the offer and asked for their insurance policy limit of $22.5 million. The day before the trial resumed from Christmas break, Sta-Rite countered with $17.5 million. Again, Edwards said no. On January 10, 1997, lawyers from across the state packed the courtroom to hear Edwards' closing argument, "the most impressive legal performance I have ever seen," recalls Dayton. Three days later, the jury found Sta-Rite guilty and liable for $25 million in economic damages (by state law, punitive damages could have tripled that amount). The company immediately settled for $25 million, the largest verdict in state history. For their part, Edwards and Kirby earned the Association of Trial Lawyers of America's national award for public service.

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2001/0110.green.html

On trial lawyers in general:

Years of conservative agitation about trial lawyers have led the public to believe that the courts are clogged with "frivolous lawsuits." But that belief is unlikely to withstand a national debate, because the truth is fundamentally different from what tort reformers pretend. There has indeed been a rise in frivolous claims. But they haven't been brought by personal injury lawyers; those claims have actually decreased over the last decade. The single factor most clogging the judicial system is frivolous litigation brought by corporations against corporations, which don't involve independent trial lawyers at all. For example, John Deere went after a competitor for using the same shade of green that Deere paints its tractors. Gillette sued Norelco, claiming its ads for a new electric razor were "false and deceptive" because they depicted non-electric razors as "ferocious creatures." Nabisco sued Keebler over the latter's claim that its chocolate-chip cookies contained 25 percent more chips than Nabisco's. Each of these cases is more representative of the true problem of frivolous litigation. But because they involve a Republican constituency---business---rather than a Democrat constituency like trial lawyers, tort reform advocates don't mention them.

To persuade the public that frivolous personal injury suits have brought on a crisis, advocates of change religiously invoke cases like the elderly woman who spilled coffee on herself and won a $2.9 million jury verdict against McDonald's. Such stories tap into a genuine sense of frustration many Americans have with the modern tendency to blame others for problems of their own making. But on closer examination---the kind likely to happen if the GOP declares open war on trial lawyers---such anecdotes will be exposed as the urban myths most of them are. As Roger Williams University torts professor Carl Bogus explains in his book, Why Lawsuits Are Good for America, the woman who spilled her McDonald's coffee had to undergo a skin graft, spend weeks in the hospital, and offered to settle for $10,000 (McDonald's refused). She only sued as a last resort---the epitome of conscientious use of the legal system. Her original award of $2.9 million was later reduced by a judge, as most such judgements are, to $480,000, and she wound up settling for even less. To prevent other suits, McDonald's, which had previously ignored more than 700 similar complaints, stopped serving near-boiling coffee, as did its competitors.