Like the in-laws visiting for the holidays, I don’t want to overstay my welcome at Overlawyered, so Wednesday will be my last day, at least for this stint. Before I go, I wanted to leave you with a few lessons I have learned about avoiding lawsuits in a customer contact business. Please note, I am not an attorney, and this is not legal advice, it’s just what we do. Your mileage may vary.
1. Pay your attorney before a problem arises. My attorneys have been real allies in helping me review our procedures, create releases, craft an employee manual, etc.
2. Treat your employees well. Unhappy employees create internal problems, and are more likely to mistreat customers.
3. We always make an employee’s first 60-90 days a probationary period, as indicated and accepted by them in their job offer letter. We have found it easier to treat the employee truly as at-will in that period. Some argue that using the probationary period makes it harder to fire someone after the period, but since we are a seasonal business and most folks only work for us for 4-6 months, this is not an issue for us. Ask your attorney about it in your situation.
4. Employees who show poor judgement in how they interact with customers will do it again in the future 99% of the time. We are very aggressive about weeding out these employees, terminating them when possible in their 60-90 day probationary period. In a seasonal business, we just don’t have time to train new behaviors.
5. When employees or customers are hurt, we train our employees to provide medical care quickly. There is absolutely no return to being cheap with first aid, no matter what or who the cause. All of our employees know how to get injured people to the emergency room fast, and key phone numbers are posted in many locations.
6. I insist that every “incident”, from injuries to confrontations with customers, be documented immediately by our employees on a company incident report. Even waiting a day will mean that critical details can be forgotten. This information is invaluable when dealing with possible claims later.
7. I always investigate personally any complaint that a customer or employee brings to me. I will document my findings for the file, and always provide a written response to the customer. If I think they are considering a claim, I always write the letter assuming that it will be read by an attorney considering taking on their case on a contingency basis. Remember that attorneys have to decide if a client is worth their time — this is a chance to convince them it is not.
8. Get a good business insurance agent. If your agent says “no, I can’t get your coverage for that” then you probably have the wrong agent. I never knew how mediocre my previous agents were until I had a great one. Also, insurance companies have a lot of good free resources to do safety and risk inspections.
9. Invest the time in a good manual for your supervisors. Don’t think of it as a policy manual, think of it as a giant FAQ. Every time one of our managers faces an odd new situation, we assume it can happen again and publish guidance for them in the manual.
10. Don’t operate in California or Florida. Well, since we are a recreation business, we almost have to be in these states. So we just plan in advance that insurance and other costs will be higher.
I don’t usually link to registration-required sites, but this article is worth it (and the registration is not too intrusive). Charles Burck writes about the reaction to the Netflix class-action settlement, and makes this observation which I would love to be true but strikes me as overly optimistic:
Could this be the Boston Tea Party of the class-action game—a relatively small-potatoes event that leads to epochal change? An Internet-driven consumer uprising against a pending class-action settlement by Netflix, the online movie-rental outfit, may torpedo this particular deal. But even if it doesn’t, the uproar reveals a growing universe of people who are as mad as hell about suits where lawyers pocket millions while each injured party gets a coupon worth $6, maybe.
(Charles Burck, “Bloggers Challenge a Class-Action Settlement”, Corporate Board Member Magazine, March/April 2006). One might hope. The opponents of the settlement cite two problems with the settlement: 1) Only the lawyers got cash, and 2) the coupons Netflix is sending to customers are really a low-cost marketing program for them, like locking you into a magazine subscription with a free first month, and doesn’t really punish Netflix or compensate customers at all. So, either there was no harm, and the suit was a big frivolous mess, or there was harm to customers, in which case the settlement utterly failed to redress it.
Anyway, just in case you are deterred by the registration requirement, I will share this not-to-be-missed quote:
A surprising number of bloggers on both sides of the customer-satisfaction aisle were upset by the whole idea of the settlement. “I too am quite tired of getting the countless class-action lawsuits that seem to infiltrate my mailbox, where someone felt as though their hamburger wasn’t quite two ounces, their car was 1 hp less than advertised, or they (in this case) can only see 10 movies a month,” said Dave Guo of Pittsburgh on MSNBC’s Red Tape Chronicles, a blog. “The pathetic joke to it all is, the only one that gains is the attorney in every case.”
Also weighing in on this point was “Will,” who posted on Geektronica.com. “I really don’t care whether the lawsuit was justified,” he said. “I don’t care if it’s about false advertising or a petulant subscriber. I don’t care if this guy should have been subscribing at a higher level. I don’t care if anyone here personally saw the effects of throttling or not. What I care about is a $2.5 million payout to a bunch of lawyers. If Netflix did wrong by its customers, why is it that the lawyers are getting the biggest payoff?” Even some attorneys agreed with the point. “We lawyers get a lot of undeserved abuse about a lot of things,” said Tom Moss, posting on Red Tape Chronicles. (Perhaps wisely, he didn’t give a hometown.) “But when it comes to class-action lawsuits and coupon settlements, lawyers deserve every rotten thing that can be said about them.”
Apparently, there is a website to protest the settlement which announces a hearing set for tomorrow (Feb 22). Ted and Walter have been all over this on Nov 3, Jan 11, Jan 21
Tagged as:
class actions,
Pittsburgh
No, I don’t mean to start a discussion over the existence of a deity or whether that entity intervenes in the material world. I am sure Walter would permanently disown me for starting such a food fight on his blog. No, what I mean is, does the legal term “act of god” have any meaning nowadays vis a vis liability, or are all damages now necessarily someone’s fault?
The other day I listed some of the litigation and threats of litigation we get in our public contact business (Feb 20). Another common claim we get is from damages our customers suffer to their property due to what I would call natural events or from meeting up with inevitable natural hazards (e.g. hitting a rock while off-roading). Let me give a specific example that is not real but is typical of these claims.
A customer drives into a National Forest campground we operate. During their stay, on a particularly windy day, several trees fall over including a large tree that crushes the roof of their camper. Is this an act of god? Or am I, as I can assure you every such customer and insurance lawyer out there seems to believe, liable for the damage to their car?
Well certainly, one criteria would be whether I exercised due care in maintaining the health of the trees in public areas. And in fact we have a hazard tree process where experts from the US Forest Service, whom a reasonable person would consider the best in their field, assess the health of trees in public areas and mark trees that might pose a danger of falling for us to remove. Lets posit that we had just completed this process, and the tree that fell looked healthy to all the experts. I guess the question is, in today’s legal environment, is there any such thing as being able to prove “all due care”, or in effect does the accident itself serve as prima facia evidence that due care was not exercised, even if no one can think of what else could be done? Comments are open.
Tagged as:
personal responsibility
As my guestblogging stint winds down here at Overlawyered, I wanted to reflect a moment on lawsuits I see around me every day. My company runs an outdoor recreation business, mainly running campgrounds on public lands. As a public contact business, we get people trying to make all kinds of strange claims against us.
For example, we have had at least two different people who needed an operation that they couldn’t afford come into our facility and fake an injury to try to get us to pay for the operation. Fortunately, in both cases, the individual involved lived locally and had tried the same stunt at several other local businesses, and we were able to get them to move their efforts on to some other business (we used to have the same philosophy about fire ants in Texas — you can’t get rid of them, you can only chase them onto your neighbor’s yard). We have also had several people try the same thing, but as employees, turning down office work and begging us to give them lots of physical labor, only to be hit with a workers comp claim within weeks.
Every year, we have hundreds more job applications than we have positions to fill, so we have to turn down a lot of qualified people for employment. It is often the case that when one of these people we turn down for employment considers themselves in a “protected” group, they call me threatening to sue. Several folks who were over 65 have threatened to sue me for age discrimination, which always makes me laugh, since the vast majority of the 500 people I employ are over 65 — many are over 80 and a few are even over 90! We have also had at least one person who interviewed in a wheelchair threaten to sue for discrimination against the handicapped, right up until we saw him playing football at the beach in our campground (and despite the fact that over 10% of my work force is disabled in some way).
We always have issues with employees who honestly believe that the courts are supposed to act as a grievance and appeals board for job terminations. I can’t even describe the large percentage of employees we terminate for cause who call me and tell me they are going to sue. Even when they don’t sue (and few do, since lawyers working on contingency need to see some hope of winning) they still cost me a ton of time, because I feel the need to personally investigate every one to make sure my managers are treating people the way they should. In many cases, we probably wouldn’t have hired the person involved in the first place because they have a history of poor performance and quick terminations, but it’s hard to find this out anymore since lawsuits have dissuaded many companies from responding honestly to reference checks.
Despite all of these, my favorite suit actually was against the company from who we bought most of our assets. One day, a male visitor was near the campground in bare feet, and claims to have stepped on a nail. The nail caused a small puncture wound on the bottom of his foot. Employees offered to get the man to the emergency room to treat the puncture and to get at tetanus shot, but the customer turned down care. Months passed, and the case was mostly forgotten. Until one day the company was given notice that the man was filing suit for sexual dysfunction. Apparently based on some medical logic I never understood, perhaps some strange acupuncture effect, the man claimed he was unable to perform sexually based on stepping on that nail. In a sane world, this would have been dismissed out of hand. However, years later, the suit lumbers on, continuing to generate legal bills and settlement pressure.
Tagged as:
medical
By extending civil liability to acts of terrorism overseas, the Patriot Act has unleashed a new weapon of mass destruction at Al Qaida: The Plaintiff’s Bar. Last Friday, they achieved their first victory:
A Utah soldier blinded in one eye during a firefight in Afghanistan that killed his comrade has won a default judgment against a father accused of training his young son to be a terrorist.
Sgt. Layne Morris, of West Jordan, and the family of Army medic Christopher Speer, killed in the 2002 gunbattle, have been awarded triple damages of $102.6 million.
On Friday, U.S. District Judge Paul Cassell said in his ruling that the lawsuit may be the first filed by an American soldier under the anti-terrorism law known as the USA Patriot Act. While GIs serving abroad likely cannot identify their attackers, causing problems in future terrorist cases, that stumbling block “poses no barrier” in this case, said Cassell.
Morris, who served with the 19th Special Forces, cited news reports – including interviews with his attacker’s immediate family – indicating that Omar Khadr, then 15, had wounded him and killed Speer. Similar evidence also showed that the boy’s father, Ahmad Sa’id Khadr, was bagman to the terrorist organization al-Qaida and trained his son to attack American targets.
(Dawn House, “GI injured in Afghan war wins lawsuit”, Salt Lake Tribune, Feb 18)
Tagged as:
crime and punishment,
Utah
Merck won the first test of Vioxx in a federal court, though the short-term nature of the plaintiff’s use probably made it one of the weaker cases facing the company.
Merck & Co.’s painkiller Vioxx wasn’t to blame for a Florida man’s fatal heart attack in 2001, a federal jury ruled today, the company’s second victory in lawsuits filed over the drug.
Jurors in New Orleans deliberated for three hours and 40 minutes before clearing Merck in the death of Richard “Dicky” Irvin, who had taken Vioxx for 23 days. The first trial in the case ended in a mistrial in Houston in December.
(”Merck wins retrial of first federal vioxx lawsuit”, Bloomberg, Feb 17). Ted Frank has more at Point of Law.
Tagged as:
Houston,
product liability
Apparently Amazon is facing yet another suit over patent infringement involving its website technologies. “The complaint accuses Amazon of using technology on its own Web site and for third parties such as Target.com that infringes on two Registrar Systems patents, Amazon said.” (”Amazon named in patent infringement suit”, Puget Sound Business Journal, Feb 17).
Though I am generally sympathetic to companies sued over software patents, particularly since the US Patent Office seems to have completely lost its mind in granting many of these patents, I have little sympathy for Amazon. After all, they were the ones to patent and then sue their rivals over “one-click” ordering.
My college roommate, who was a trade lawyer for quite a while, told me a story of a company trying to get their disposable cigarette lighter to pass the US child safety tests (I promise we will get back on topic in a second). I can’t remember the exact test, but it involved giving a bunch of children the lighter and observing how many in a certain amount of time could figure out how to defeat the childproofing. Apparently a key to success was to (literally) go out and find the slowest and dullest group of kids you could. Which brings me back to the one-click patent, where surely Amazon must have gone through a similar process to find a patent examiner who would declare one-click ordering “non-obvious” and patentable.
Tagged as:
Seattle,
technology
In another giant leap for the equality of women, Broadway producer Dede Harris has demonstrated that its not just men who can get sued for sexual harassment:
The casting couch of the sexually predatory producer is a dirty secret that has been part of Hollywood and Broadway since the first actors trod the boards. But, like any great headlining play, the newest sex scandal to hit America’s acting profession has a fresh twist: the top producer accused of sexually harassing the cast of a Broadway play is a woman.
Her alleged victims are also far from being wide-eyed starlets. Instead they are some of the top names on Broadway, including Irish actor Gabriel Byrne.
Dede Harris, one of the most famous producers in New York, has been landed with a multi-million-dollar lawsuit after half the cast of her latest play walked out.
Paul Harris, “Turning the Tables on the Casting Couch” The Observer, Feb 19
Tagged as:
harassment law
Taser International has experienced tremendous growth over the last few years, but now is facing a growing number of lawsuits. Some of these suits narrowly focus on police departments for their use of the Taser, while others name Taser itself in defective product suits. A quick scan of the news over just the last few days reveals suits in Georgia, Ohio, Tennessee, Canada, Florida, and Minnesota.
Taser claims that many of these suits have been dismissed. Taser faces some of the same problems faced by vaccine makers and even airbag makers – their product clearly saves lives vs. the alternative (i.e. getting shot with a real gun), but this “safer product” value proposition gets confused with “completely safe,” which leads to careless use and mistaken expectations.
Tagged as:
guns,
Minnesota,
Ohio,
Tennessee,
vaccines
Over at Coyote Blog today, I observe that while most of us have shifted our attention away from Katrina, gas price “gouging” lawsuits against gasoline retailers still continue. Sunoco became the latest retailer to settle, paying New Jersey over $300,000 to be left alone. Many other states have also gotten into the act, including Aspiring Governor Eliot Spitzer, who would never miss an opportunity to score some populist points.
So, having spent months trying to explain markets and supply & demand and refute the silliness of the “price-gouging” concept, what are gasoline retailers doing today? Why, they are hauling credit card companies in front of Congress to accuse them of … price gouging (Coyote Blog, Feb 17). Also see Sept 2, Sept 1.
Tagged as:
Eliot Spitzer,
governors,
Katrina,
New Jersey
This is a bit off topic from civil litigation, but Tom Kirkendall, a Houston attorney following the Enron trial, makes the case that the Enron prosecution team or “task force” has been pushing the envelope of prosecution tactics, with disturbing results.
In an unprecedented move, the Task Force has named over 100 co-conspirators in the case. So, the potential definitely exists for substantial testimony about out-of-court statements going to the jury without the defense ever having an opportunity to cross-examine the persons who made the alleged statements. Moreover, fingering unindicted co-conspirators is an equally effective technique for the Task Force to prevent testimony that is favorable to the defense because persons named as unindicted co-conspirators are likely to the assert their Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination and thus, not be defense witnesses during the trial. Thus, the Task Force’s liberal use of the co-conspirator tag has a double-whammy effect — not only does it allow the Task Force to use out-of-court statements against defendants without having the declarant of the statements subjected to cross-examination, it has also effectively prevented previous Enron-related defendants from obtaining crucial exculpatory testimony from alleged co-conspirators who have elected to take the Fifth and declined to testify.
Kirkendall argues that despite these tactics, the task force botched the broadband prosecution, and already seem to be making mistakes in the Lay/Skilling trial. He has a lot of fun, in particular, with the task force’s indictment against Lay and Skilling, which was apparently so poorly written that the prosecution itself has petitioned the court not to let the indictment be referred to in cross examination. (Tom Kirkendall, Houston’s Clear Thinkers, Jan 27)
Almost makes you nostalgic for Marcia Clark. But probably not Janet Reno. Over at CoyoteBlog, I wonder whether NJ prosecutors are more interested in upholding the law or getting front page pub in the NHL betting case.
Tagged as:
crime and punishment,
Houston,
Janet Reno
The basic complaints in the suit are so common as to not really be newsworthy. Mary Sidney, COO of San Jose State University’s foundation, filed suit recently that she is underpaid vs. her white male peers who hold similar jobs. Here is the line, though, that caught me attention:
The foundation’s board of directors failed to ensure that Sidney was properly compensated, according to Sidney’s complaint.
Wow! Throw away all those “you get what you negotiate books”, there is already someone else out there that has the legal responsibility to make sure you are paid enough. Think of all the hardship I put my family through, moving them to new cities so I could take new jobs with better pay — it was all wasted effort. I should have been able to stay in one place and let my bosses take responsibility for making sure I was paid enough. (Becky Bartindale, “Suit claims salary bias” San Jose Mercury News, 2/16)
Tagged as:
personal responsibility
Bernie Marcus, who founded the Home Depot chain as a “regular guy” starting from one store, says that he couldn’t have done it in today’s legal environment.
We went public after opening our fourth store because we needed the capital to open more stores. Going public and entrepreneurship were the keys to our success. If you’re a public company today, you have to be surrounded with lawyers and you can’t make a decision without a lawyer on one side of you and an accountant on the other side. Today, you just can’t use your business judgment to take the risks that must be taken for a new company to succeed. And, one share valuekiller lawsuit can kill a startup company. Back in 1978, those lawsuits were rare. Today, all you have to do is pick up a newspaper and read about one after another.
(IBD staff, “The Home Depot’s Bernie Marcus On Why He Couldn’t Do It Today”, Investors Business Daily, Jan 30 pdf). Mr. Marcus dedicates a lot of his philanthropy to tort-reform. When asked why, he said “I’m concerned for the next generation of entrepreneurs whose creativity, risk-taking and innovation are stifled by the current legal and regulatory climate. Will they be able to create the next Home Depot?” As one of those entrepreneurs, thanks! (see also Jan 15).
Tagged as:
class actions
My company is in the business of managing recreation sites, many of which are located in the National Forest. I deal with local Forest Service rangers all the time, and I’ll tell you they have an almost impossible job. They all joined the Forest Service because they wanted to be close to trees, but many of them find that the closest they get to trees every day is via the reams of paper they must generate in environmental impact studies and motions in lawsuits. Everything they try to do in the forest tends to be blocked legally by somebody, the most common opposition coming from environmental groups.
One federal judge may be raising the costs of filing such suits against everything.
In November, U.S. District Judge Donald Molloy ordered a halt to logging on the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest, outside of Butte, after three environmental groups appealed the judge’s earlier decision to allow the 2,600-acre timber harvest. Then, on Dec. 20, Molloy ordered the groups to post a $100,000 bond. Should the groups lose their appeal before the 9th Circuit Court, the money would help compensate the Forest Service and a private contractor for losses due to the delay, such as decaying timber. The agency had requested a $400,000 bond.
“We have asked for this kind of accountability for years,” says Ellen Engstedt, executive vice president of the Montana Wood Products Association. “Ninety-eight percent of these cases are not legitimate. These groups have nothing to lose.”
While this is not really a true loser-pay system, and appeal bonds are fairly normal, they seldom cover the true costs of the delay and extra litigation. Apparently this bond is getting attention for being 10x larger than is typical. (Brett Wilkison, “Judge orders litigating enviros to pony up”, High Country News, Feb 6).
Tagged as:
environment,
loser pays,
Montana
In 2003, a terrible fire in a Providence night club killed a hundred people and injured many more. The fire apparently started when Great White’s (the live band) pyrotechnics ignited soundproofing foam around the stage. The victims initially filed suit against “four dozen defendants, include club owners Jeffrey and Michael Derderian and former Great White tour manager Daniel Biechele.” Biechele recently plead guilty to a hundred counts of involuntary manslaughter for igniting the pyrotechnics, and the club owners are fighting the same charges.
Now, as the statutory deadline (3 years apparently in Rhode Island) for new suits approaches, and perhaps given the disappointing depth of the current defendants’ pockets, the victims and their families have filed suit against “dozens” of others in the fire. The suit now names individual members of the band, the company that distributed the acoustic foam, and even Home Depot, for not “warning of the potential hazards” of the insulation they sold the club, despite the fact that the insulation Home Depot sold “is different from the foam ignited by the pyrotechnics”. (Eric Tucker, “New complaint filed in nightclub fire case”, Houston Chronicle, Feb 15)
Tagged as:
deep pocket,
fires,
Rhode Island,
Rhode Island Station nightclub fire,
shotgun defendant selection
Apparently, 2005 was a record year for class-action securities settlements, (Patti Bond, “Class-Action Securities Settlements Set Record, Indianapolis Star, Feb 13)
Companies shelled out $9.7 billion in shareholder settlements in 2005, according to Cornerstone Research, a national financial and economic consulting firm. Included in that figure is WorldCom’s whopper $6.2 billion payout. But even excluding WorldCom, the value of cases settled was still the highest ever tracked by the firm — rising more than 17 percent from total settlements in 2004.
Researchers said they were struck by increases across the board for 2005, in both the number and size of the settlements.
If it has not become abundantly clear already, I am not a lawyer, so I can’t comment on the legal ins and outs. But from a philosophical standpoint, shareholder suits have never made much sense to me. While I can understand the shareholders of the company suing a minority shareholder who might be enriching themselves disproportionately (e.g. Rigas family at Adelphia), suits by shareholders against the company they own seem… crazy.
Any successful verdict for shareholders against the company would effectively come out of the pockets of the company’s owners who are.. the shareholders. So in effect, shareholders are suing themselves, and, win or lose, they as a group end up with less than if the suit had never been started, since a good chunk of the payout goes to the lawyers. The only way these suits make financial sense (except to the lawyers, like Bill Lerach) is if only a small subset of the shareholders participate, and then these are just vehicles for transferring money from half the shareholders to the other half, or in other words from one wronged party that does not engage in litigation to another wronged party who is aggressively litigious. Is there really justice here?
OK, you could argue that many of these shareholders are not suing themselves, because they are past shareholders that dumped their stock at a loss. But given these facts, these suits are even less fair. If these suits are made by past shareholders who held stock (ie, were the owners) at the time certain wrongs were committed, they are in fact paid by current and future shareholders who may well have not even owned the company at the time of the abuses, and who may in fact be participating in cleaning the company up. So these litigants are in effect making the argument that because the company was run unethically when they owned it, they are going to sue the people who bought it from them and cleaned it up? Shouldn’t the payment be the other way around, with past owners paying current owners for the mess they left?
Tagged as:
Bill Lerach,
class actions,
Indiana
This is a bit off-topic from litigation, but one of the issues I touch on from time to time in my own blog is just how hard the government makes it to conduct business. While Ted and Walter seem to enjoy what they do, not all of us want to shuffle documents through the legal system every day.
As brief background, my small business runs recreation facilities on public lands under concession contracts. This week we won our first contract with the National Park Service, to run a restaurant and a couple of marinas in Colorado. Since this is our first foray into that state, there are a lot of legal hoops we must jump through to get all the permissions we need to conduct business in Colorado. In fact, as I describe on my blog, my work list is up to 20 fairly time-consuming approvals we need to obtain. And I am sure this list will grow. Even after years in a state, we still can have some random inspector coming by looking for our (fill-in-the-blank) licence, which we had never heard of to that point. My favorite so far is probably Kentucky’s requirement that I get a licence to sell eggs.
About six months ago, a business school professor asked if I would just write down what I was working on that day, as a part of a lesson in entrepreneurship for his students. Later, I posted the list on my blog. I ended the post by saying, “An alien from another planet in reading this post might question whether I am really working for myself or this ‘government’ entity”
Tagged as:
Colorado,
Kentucky
The Senate has apparently defeated the bill that would create a $140 billion trust fund to pay asbestos claims (Charles Hunt, “The Senate Defeats Asbestos Trust-fund Legislation” The Washington Times, Feb 15).
Liberals and conservatives in the Senate joined together last night to stop legislation that would have created a massive trust fund for victims of exposure to asbestos.
Years in the drafting, the bill is disliked by conservatives who fear that the costs will be passed on to taxpayers and by liberals who worry that victims will lose their rights to sue companies that, however unwittingly, exposed workers to a substance now known to cause cancer.
Whether this represents a final defeat of the measure is unclear, since there seem to be a number of procedural questions surrounding the bill. The Wall Street Journal ($) had an interesting editorial yesterday (2/14), which described the bill basically as deeply-flawed legislation to try to correct a deeply-flawed litigation situation.
The trust fund concept would take most of these cases out of the courts by guaranteeing a payment from the fund. This would prevent dozens of already, or soon-to-be, bankrupt companies from becoming wholly owned subsidiaries of the tort bar under the current bankruptcy code. As long as the money holds out, the trust fund would also offer companies some certainty about payouts, avoiding jackpot judgments.
And yet what Congress would create here is a gigantic new federal entity, with all of the moral hazard that such things always involve. Since no Congress can bind a future Congress, the medical criteria that pass this year can change faster than you can say “Chairman Pat Leahy” if the Senate changes hands this November. The companies that support the trust fund would receive an immediate benefit, while taxpayers would be assuming a lifetime of political risk.
You can see the vote count here, but, in a fairly unique outcome in these hyper-partisan times, both Democrats and Republicans were split on this one.
Update: Made a few changes to the links to try to better match Ted and Walter’s style
Ted has more on the bills prospects at Point of Law, as well as a whole archive of following the asbestos mess.
Tagged as:
asbestos,
bankruptcy,
product liability
