By: Lucy Nashed, TLR Communications Director For those of us who only play lawyers on TV, the legal world and its jargon can be perplexing. Being deposed in the legal world doesn’t (usually) involve any sort of Game of Thrones-like coup. You might want to keep your Latin dictionary handy if you’re doing any light legal reading, and what’s with all this talk about barratry, anyway? Fortunately, we at TLR are here to help shed some light on the lesser known areas of the legal system that still deserve our close attention. One such area is third-party litigation finance. A quick Google search will pull hundreds of articles touting its merits and decrying its pitfalls. But what exactly is it? According the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Institute for Legal Reform (ILR), third-party litigation financing is “the practice of providing money to a party to pursue a potential or filed lawsuit in return for a share of any damages award or settlement.” The money can be used to cover legal fees and court costs, but it can also be used for living expenses as a lawsuit is ongoing. ILR (dis)credits Australia as the birthplace of third-party litigation financing, where it continues

By: Lucy Nashed, TLR Communications Director $3,535. What would you buy with $3,535? You could pay for a couple of months’ rent in a nice apartment in Austin, Dallas or Houston. $3,535 gets you more than halfway through a semester of tuition at The University of Texas at Austin. It could also buy you more than 1,100 gallons of milk, more than 1,300 gallons of gas and nearly 600 gallons of Blue Bell ice cream. But you’re already spending that $3,535 every year, likely without even realizing it. That’s because $3,535 is what litigation cost each and every household in the Lone Star State in 2016—slightly more than the national average of $3,329—according to a new study on the cost of the U.S. tort system conducted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Institute for Legal Reform. Nationwide, the costs and compensation of the tort system reached $429 billion, or 2.3 percent of U.S. GDP, according to the study. That accounts not only for judgments, settlements and the legal costs of lawsuits or enforcement actions, but for the cost of insuring businesses against the risk of a lawsuit. Rather than risk being bankrupted by legal fees and lawsuit judgements, many of

September 1 marks the one-year anniversary of the enactment of House Bill 1774, the Texas Legislature’s solution to stop storm-chasing lawyers from taking advantage of property owners after natural disasters. After the explosion of unnecessary lawsuits against insurance companies following hail and wind events, property insurers in parts of the state were raising premiums and deductibles, or had stopped offering coverage in some areas all together. The Legislature acted decisively in 2017 to shut down this obvious lawsuit abuse and stop storm-chasing lawyers from hijacking our property insurance premiums. Our data shows that during the four-and-a-half-year period from Jan. 1, 2014, through June 30, 2018, more than 34,600 weather-related lawsuits were filed throughout Texas, an average of 640 new lawsuits per month. Compare that to the six years before 2012, when fewer than 4,500 of these lawsuits were filed in Texas, an average of only 62 new lawsuits per month. This explosion of lawsuits was driven by lawyer conduct—including the unlawful and unethical recruitment of clients through door-to-door solicitation by case generators. TLR’s recent data shows that weather-related lawsuit filing spiked in August 2017, the month before HB 1774 took effect, as storm-chasing lawyers dumped their inventory of heavily-solicited lawsuits

Picture this: You are the defendant in a lawsuit. You spend thousands of dollars and months preparing to defend your case in a court of law. You hire an attorney to help navigate the web of legal issues created by this litigation. Then the day arrives. You show up to court, and sitting on the other side of the courtroom is the plaintiff… A monkey. While it seems ridiculous, a monkey is only one of the animals that recently filed a lawsuit. In that case, a British man who photographed macaques on a trip to Indonesia got one of the animals to snap a selfie—that is, the monkey triggered the camera shutter while looking into the lens. After the picture gained popularity online (and made the photographer some money), People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) filed a lawsuit on behalf of the macaque, “claiming that the animal was the rightful owner of the copyright.” The trial court judge ruled that animals weren’t subject to the Copyright Act and PETA appealed to the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. That’s right. A federal appeals court. Luckily, the Ninth Circuit saw the lawsuit for what it was, and threw it

The New York Times recently looked into “defensive medicine,” or the practice of doctors ordering excessive medical tests in an attempt to stave off medical liability lawsuits. Testing out of an abundance of caution, many doctors believe, can potentially shield a physician from being sued in the event of an issue with a patient down the road. But as it turns out, this understandable “CYA” by health providers is costing all of us big bucks. The Times article points to a recent study completed by MIT and Duke that looked at medical costs in an area where medical liability suits are not allowed—veterans’ healthcare. As the Times notes, “Under longstanding law, such patients get access to a government health care system but are barred from suing government doctors and hospitals for malpractice.” The study found that when base closures forced veterans to use civilian healthcare providers, “healthcare spending increased, particularly on extra diagnostic tests.” Overall, the study found that while healthcare spending increased by five percent in places where lawsuits were possible, it didn’t always lead to improved outcomes for the patients. Of course, the impact of abusive lawsuits on the medical community is not news to Texans. Back in

A recent newspaper article spurred us to look into The Great Tuna Settlement of 2015. What we found, of course, was more evidence of client recruitment by enterprising plaintiff lawyers. In Spring 2015, a California law firm announced it had settled a nationwide class action lawsuit against Starkist for $12 million. The basis of the lawsuit was that Starkist’s five-ounce cans of tuna did not actually contain five ounces of meat. The cans were, it was alleged, slightly underfilled. Under the proposed settlement, consumers were to receive a cash award of $25 or tuna vouchers worth $50, but the fine print contained a caveat: the settlement was subject to “pro rata dilution if the total amount of claims exceeds the available settlement funds.” In other words, the more people who joined the class, the lower each class member’s award would be. The federal judge in California overseeing the case found that the $12 million settlement was adequate because the plaintiff’s case was “relatively weak.” It turns out it was going to be difficult to establish that a substantial number of underweight cans were sold to the public. Based on rates of $300 to $850 per hour, the plaintiff’s lawyers claimed

 Texas is turning heads, yet again. The latest national recognition comes from CNBC, which recently named Texas the Best State for Business in 2018. This makes the Lone Star State the first to snag the top spot four times in the study’s 12-year history. According to CNBC, “Texas has added more than 350,000 jobs in the past year… Put another way, one in seven jobs created in the United States in the past year was created in Texas.” CNBC uses a variety of criteria to rank the states, from quality of workforce and life to infrastructure, technology and cost of living. But one part of the study jumped out at us the most. “Since we introduced our rankings in 2007, Texas has never finished outside the top five overall, always following the same basic formula… The state prides itself on business-friendly regulations, smart spending and low taxes… The state does not always meet those priorities. This year, for example, it finishes… No. 21 for Business Friendliness because of a sometimes difficult legal climate.” That’s right. Texas—the national example of successful, common-sense tort reform—ranked near the middle of the pack in business friendliness because of our legal environment. An excellent

TLR spent the 2015 and 2017 legislative sessions working to fix the problems storm-chasing lawyers were creating for Texas property owners. Fortunately, the Texas Legislature passed a common-sense solution in 2017 to make it harder for these lawyers to file unnecessary lawsuits, while maintaining the strongest insurance consumer protections laws in the United States for Texas property owners. We had heard credible stories since late 2013 of lawyers trolling for clients following hail and wind storms. In many places, lawyers were ignoring criminal laws and ethical rules by paying roofing contractors and public insurance adjusters to go door-to-door to solicit clients. The solicitors were promising homeowners they could get a lot more money from their insurance companies if they would just “sign here.” In many cases, they never disclosed that they were working on behalf of an attorney. Then the lawyers would step in—sometimes filing 20 or more lawsuits at a time—claiming all kinds of nefarious actions by the insurance companies. In many instances, the insurance companies had paid the homeowners’ claims months before, and having heard nothing more from the homeowner, closed the file. Even worse, we repeatedly heard that many homeowners were completely surprised to learn they had