I got a letter the other day from a couple of lawyers in a little town outside of St. Louis.
The letter said they had filed a lawsuit against Ameritech for me. They said the phone company had been secretly charging to keep up the phone lines inside my house, and this was wrong.
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That seemed kind of odd, because I knew all about the charge. It was about three bucks a month, I saw it on my phone bill, and it didn’t bother me. But I didn’t know about the lawsuit until it was settled.
As a result of the lawsuit, I will get to make a few free phone calls.
The lawyers in the little town outside St. Louis will get $14 million.
I suppose this deal could have turned out a little better for me and the other Ameritech customers who will get to make a few free phone calls. But it could have been worse too.
It could have been something like the lawsuit a few years ago that was filed for people who had mortgages with the Bank of Boston. The lawsuit claimed the bank was holding too much of its customers’ money for too long in escrow accounts.
As a result, the lawyers who brought the suit got $8.5 million.
The customers got, at most, $10 each. They also got about $100 deducted from their escrow accounts to pay the lawyers. That’s right, the customers lost $90.
All this is a strange way to pursue justice. It came to mind when a jury awarded Rachel Barton $29.6 million for the injuries she suffered in an accident on a Metra commuter train.
They are different kinds of lawsuits. The Ameritech and Bank of Boston cases were class-action lawsuits filed on behalf of thousands of unknowing people who supposedly were wronged. Barton’s was a personal-injury suit, filed with her knowledge, to win compensation for her injuries and the pain she suffers.
What they have in common is they were supposed to seek justice and right some wrongs and punish the people whose misdeeds were at fault.
But, really, can anybody find justice in these cases? They all come down to the same thing, playing a lottery game in the courts.
Most of the time the legal lottery doesn’t get much attention. Thousands of class-action and personal-injury lawsuits are filed every year. Some lose, and some strike it rich.
They get attention when you have one like the Barton case, which started out with a terrible tragedy and wound up looking like a pure money grab. What other conclusion could you draw when Barton’s attorneys told the jury that it ought to award her $600 million?
The jury gave her $29.6 million which, if her attorneys take the customary one-third, means she will get about $20 million and the attorneys will get about $10 million.
If I had been on the jury, I probably would have gone along with the verdict. After listening to days of testimony about the terrible accident and her pain and trouble, I would have given her tens of millions of dollars. I would have given her tens of millions of dollars because I would have been too embarrassed to look her in the eye if I had given her nothing except the cost of her medical bills.
Juries are full of easy marks like me. That’s the problem.
The Barton case lost its nobility when her attorneys told the jury that $600 million might be a proper outcome. It was no longer a case to right wrongs–Metra had long since changed its safety procedures to prevent another accident like this. The case was about shooting for the moon.
Civil lawsuits have a place. Sometimes they do fix wrongs. When someone has been injured on the job and won’t be able to work again, he or she deserves to be compensated.
But the civil justice courts need some sense of proportion. There is no shortage of ideas on how to do that. Legal fees could be fixed to the actual time and cost of preparing a case, not based on a percentage of some outlandish jury verdict. In a class-action case, lawyers could be required to keep their thousands of “clients” aware of what’s happening and could be blocked from forum shopping. The Bank of Boston case was filed in Mobile, Ala., of all places, for one reason: Alabama juries have a reputation for handing away lots of money.
Illinois had a very reasonable law to bring some rhyme and order to personal-injury cases. It set a $500,000 cap on damages that could be awarded for pain and suffering and limited punitive damages. If that law had applied to Rachel Barton, she still could have collected $8.8 million. But that law was struck down by the Illinois Supreme Court in 1997. The court said the legislature had infringed on the rights of juries and the courts. But it seems like it was the other way around: The Supreme Court decided lawmakers had no business making laws.
There is a public cost to these lawsuits, although you don’t hear much about that.
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Maybe what’s needed is a separate line on the property tax bill. A line spelling out the tax assessment for lawsuits, right over the line for elementary schools and right under the line for mosquito abatement.