Funny slogans come and go rather swiftly in popular culture, but it wasn’t that long ago when a familiar sight was somebody wearing a message along the lines of “I did such-and-such and all I got was this lousy T-shirt.”
Thanks to a bunch of class-action liability lawyers, an estimated 1 million people living in four states took Ford Motor Co. to court because their Explorers allegedly tended to roll over, and all they got in return was a lousy $500 coupon toward another Explorer.
The 30 lawyers involved in the multiple cases that were consolidated into one massive class action against Ford? They get $25 million. The most active lead plaintiffs get no more than $10,000 each from the settlement announced three weeks ago in a California court.
Wonder how the plaintiffs and class-action members feel now about Tab Turner, the Arkansas lawyer who filed the first Explorer rollover suit in 2000, and his fellow sharks? Some of these people probably dreamed of a big payday because Ford had sold them an SUV the lawyers said could kill them.
It looked like a slam dunk for a long time. The mainstream media cooperated by repeatedly showing Explorers rolling over, giving prominence to news reports about crashes involving Explorers and dutifully spotlighting demands by politicians and consumer activists for investigations.
When all was said and done, there was an increasingly familiar end — a court-approved settlement with the lawyers getting millions in legal fees and the people they allegedly represented getting $500 coupons good for the purchase of another Explorer, which was likely to cost around $30,000.
Clarence Ditlow, executive director of the Center for Auto Safety, probably spoke for many of them when he said: “My initial reaction to this is that this is a bad deal to the consumer. They should pay the lawyers in coupons.”
I admit to having little sympathy for the folks left holding a bag of coupons. The laws of gravity and motion dictate that you can under-inflate the front tires of any sport utility vehicle like the Explorer, suddenly jerk the steering wheel right or left in an evasive maneuver, and the result will almost always be a crash.
Still, the case illustrates why we may be seeing a turning point in how people see the outrageous legalized extortion rackets run by some of the most famous class-action lawyers in the past two decades.
Cases like the Ford settlement, guilty pleas in the Milberg Weiss and Scruggs bribery cases, and the thousands of falsified diagnoses in the Texas silica suits show that too often such suits have nothing to do with justice and everything to do with fattening the bank accounts of unscrupulous lawyers and their trial buddies.
The latest report of Towers Perrin’s Tillinghast insurance consultancy on the cost to the U.S. economy of out-of-control class-action lawsuits found the first annual decline in years.
The total cost of $247 billion represented a 5.5 percent decline for 2006. The cost was nearly flat in 2005 but had risen sharply in most previous years covered by the study, including a 6.0 percent increase in 2004 and a 5.5 percent increase in 2004.
But Tillinghast cautioned that costs are likely to resume rising big-time because of a likely upswing in class-action litigation stemming from the subprime mortgage crisis, obesity suits and asbestos actions.
We’ll learn more about the prospects for further reductions Tuesday, when the American Tort Reform Association releases its 2007 edition of “Judicial Hellholes,” its annual study of jurisdictions where judges, court rules and laws encourage irresponsible lawyers to file more class-action lawsuits.
While one previously named Hellhole has been dropped from the list, according to ATRA’s advance notice, two new ones have been added. Looks like the battle to stop class-action lawsuit abuses will not be a brief one.
Mark Tapscott is editorial page editor of The Washington Examiner.
