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ended up spending 20 years as an insurance underwriter, so I have my own perspective on the whole thing.
TB's Law of Unintended Consequences says that you can't limit frivolous lawsuits without limiting the rights of those actually harmed.
TB's First Corrolary says when you can't limit frivolity, it will naturally exist, and its effects have to be dealt in other ways. Fortunately, it tends to be self-limiting. Lawyers will rarely waste their time on bullshit suits, and courts can, and often do, throw them out.
My experience is primarily in maritime law, to the extent I had to understand it, and I can come up with a week's worth of stories about the abuses of Jones Act claims and amazing definitions of unseaworthiness. However, even as we saw the law take some very strange turns, no one ever claimed shipowners liabilities were sending them down the tubes. Their financial problems, when they had them, were almost always from other sources, and while they always complained about insurance premiums, that was one of their smaller costs.
From an insurance viewpoint, we were rarely interested in the huge claims. They were few and far between, and covered by reinsurance. Before 9/11, reinsurers weren't all that worried about the big ones, either. (Much has changed in the past couple of years.)
What we did care about was the probability of future claims, and were constantly polishing our crystal balls. The thing that scared us the most was the possibility of unanticipated changes in the law or hazards that would drastically change the usual flow of anticipated claims.
Because of some structural changes in the insurance industry, there are a lot of small businesses and individuals who are seeing their premiums skyrocket. They tend to dismiss the fact that often their premiums tumbled for years, and are just getting back to "normal." Large companies are rarely affected by his, and are often the cause of it, since they have retained their premiums by forming captive insurance companies, starving the real insurance companies of income.
Probably the most important thing to note is that most people who talk about this have no real data. Insurance company claims data is proprietary, and you can't get the true numbers, You can get public records of suits filed and judgments rendered, but you can't see how the individual companies receive and pay the bulk of their claims.
The huge numbers of lawsuits filed is a strawman. Most of them don't go to trial and are settled. However, it is simply the nature of the beast to file a suit when the claim is made. It doesn't cost much, and is a natural part of the negotiation with the company. The number of tort claims filed seems to pale next to the number of contract disputes anyway. Curiously, no one has seen fit to whine lately about lawyers in contract disputes and what they are doing to the cost of doing business.
Most of the claims do have some legitimacy, but the companies don't have the resources to properly investigate each one, so there will always be a certain amount of fraud or waste.
Bottom line-- talk about sleazy personal injury lawyers is bullshit. I've come across some shyster thieves and ambulance chasers over the years, but most of them are just doing the job the system set them up to do, and are doing it very well.
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