Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Posts Tagged ‘Nancy Pelosi’

Buried on page 1431: Potemkin tort reform

Commentary’s Jennifer Rubin notices:

A friend points out a little nugget of absurdity and political mendacity in the Pelosi health-care bill. Remember Obama’s effort to try a “test” for tort reform? (We don’t actually need a test, since it has worked to lower medical malpractice coverage and help increase access to doctors in states that have tried it.) Well, Pelosi’s bill has an anti-tort-reform measure. On pages 1431-1433 of the 1990-page spellbinder, there is a financial incentive for states to try “alternative medical liability laws.” But look — you don’t get the incentive if you have a law that would “limit attorneys’ fees or impose caps on damages.”

In other words, Congress is providing a financial incentive to uncap damages. Marvelous.

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$1.6 billion tax break for plaintiff’s lawyers

According to the U.S. Chamber-backed Legal NewsLine, the litigation lobby is quietly preparing to push through a $1.6 billion (with a “b”) tax break that would let contingent-fee lawyers deduct expenses as made, rather than in the year of settling a suit. American Association for Justice lobbyist Linda Lipsen says Sens. Harry Reid and Max Baucus and Reps. Nancy Pelosi and Charles Rangel are among those on board, as well as “some Republicans”, but “the problem is there is not a tax vehicle yet,” — “You cannot have a stand alone bill to help lawyers … so we have to tuck it into something.” [cross-posted, and slightly adapted, from Point of Law; updates and additional links there]

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“The AAJ’s misguided media ban”

Robert Ambrogi at Legal Blog Watch criticizes the trial lawyers’ association for excluding the press from its annual convention, but the tactic seems to have worked pretty well in lowering the group’s lobbying profile and deflecting serious coverage of the parade of politicians, from Nancy Pelosi to Henry Waxman to DNC chair and Virginia governor Tim Kaine, who have made the pilgrimage as speakers to pay their respects. More: AAJ’s response.

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Nancy Pelosi to address trial lawyers convention

She’ll be opening the AAJ annual convention tonight in San Francisco. Charles Krauthammer thinks the coziness between Big Law and certain parts of the political establishment may explain a lot about the faltering status of health care reform.

More: “Media Barred from Speaker Pelosi’s Speech to Trial Lawyers“. And John Steele Gordon at Commentary “Contentions” offers some ideas for health care reform that were probably not included in Pelosi’s speech.

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“Pelosi betrays her own House for a slew of trial lawyers”

We’ve previously covered the Senate’s boon to trial lawyers at the expense of consumers and shareholders, the Consumer Product Safety Commission Act, S. 2663: Feb. 20; Feb. 25; Mar. 5. (The bill was amended somewhat since we complained but Democrats, on a party line vote, tabled critical amendments to prohibit the use of contingent-fee attorneys and permit prevailing parties to recover attorneys’ fees.) The House passed a somewhat more sensible version of the bill unanimously, but Pelosi, for some reason, is trying to bypass her chamber’s proponents in constructing the “conference committee” that will work out the differences between the bills in favor of those of trial lawyers. Today’s Washington Examiner has the unholy details.

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