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A Dark Day for Ambulance Chasers
Trial lawyers whacked in Texas…
[by Roger Aronoff] 8/9/05

The earth shook under one of the largest and most powerful liberal special interest groups, the trial lawyers, but the media have barely noticed. A federal judge in Texas abruptly halted the latest class-action scam, and by doing so, has probably done more to halt these frivolous and scandalous lawsuits than any federal tort reform legislation could ever do. The Wall Street journal has editorialized about the case, but most of the major media have remained silent.

Judge Janis Graham Jack is a U.S. District Court Judge in Corpus Christi, Texas. She is also the wife of a medical doctor, and was herself a nurse. Judge Jack was in charge of approximately 10,000 cases involving claims of silicosis, which according to the Houston Chronicle, is the “oldest known occupational lung disease.” Following 20 months of pre-trial proceedings, Judge Jack, a Clinton appointee, wrote a scathing 249-page opinion, saying there was no basis for continuing federal jurisdiction, and she recommended that the evidence used by the plaintiffs should be thrown out. She didn’t hesitate to use the word “fraud.”

The extent of the apparent fraud is indeed shocking, and should lead to congressional hearings with the same passion and outrage that characterized such hearings as those that looked at the Enron scandal. The problem is that too many in Congress are part of the same special interest group that has perpetrated this fraud, and receive large donations from them.

For example, silicosis has been on the wane for many years, since its damaging effects have been well-known for so long. But the asbestos lawsuits, which have resulted in huge fortunes for many trial lawyers, saw silicosis as another opportunity. So they set up what the judge indicates was a giant scam.

Many of the suits were originally filed in Mississippi, considered a friendly state for this type of plaintiff lawsuits. According to testimony in the case, more than 10,000 cases of silicosis appeared in 2002 in Mississippi alone. The previous year there had been just 76 such cases. For a disease that averages fewer than 200 deaths a year in this country, all of a sudden beginning in 2001 there were more than 20,000 claims in Mississippi alone, which apparently caught the attention of ambulance chasers everywhere.

So what evidence of fraud did Judge Jack discover? For one thing, 99% of the plaintiffs who supplied greater detail of their ailments were diagnosed by the same nine doctors. They had all been retained by law firms or screening companies that, according to the Wall Street Journal, do mass X-rays on behalf of the firms searching for plaintiffs.

In many cases, the doctors never saw the patients, the people who did the X-rays were not radiologists, and one doctor performed more than 1,200 diagnostic evaluations in 72 hours. Another doctor diagnosed more than 3,600 patients with the disease, and admitted in court that he didn’t even know the criteria for diagnosing the disease.

Most shocking of all, perhaps, as the Wall Street Journal pointed out, is that “more than 65% of the silica plaintiffs had previously been plaintiffs in an asbestos suit, even though it is clinically impossible to have both asbestosis and silicosis.” The Journal noted that it was these massive asbestos suits that were “largely blessed by the courts, that first allowed trial lawyers to co-opt doctors to create millions of phony claims and extort billions out of corporate defendants.”

Judge Jack blasted the lawyers, particularly the Houston firm of O’Quinn, Laminack & Pirtle. She required them to pay more than $800,000 of the defendants’ legal bills, and charged that their “clear motivation” was “to inflate the number of plaintiffs and overwhelm the defendants and the judicial system.

There has been very little coverage of this story. The coverage includes a lead editorial in the Wall Street Journal two weeks after the fact, a very good article in the Houston Chronicle, an op-ed in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and stories in several small Texas papers.

But this is a national story. Don’t forget that a prominent trial lawyer, former Senator John Edwards, almost became Vice-President of the United States. What does he think of the verdict in Texas? If the media are interested, Edwards can be reached in his home state of North Carolina, where he has emerged as the director of the Center on Poverty, Work, and Opportunity. Before taking up the cause of eliminating poverty, he made tens of millions of dollars as a trial lawyer. Some of that money was made from legal cases against doctors and hospitals, blaming them for cases of cerebral palsy among children, even though critics said that he relied on “junk science” in some of those suits.

Edwards is convinced that his record as a trial lawyer will not hurt his chances for future political office. He is widely regarded as a possible Democratic Party presidential candidate in 2008. If that happens, the media will do their best to put his record—and the record of other trial lawyers—behind him. tRO

copyright 2005 Accuracy in Media

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