From the Bloomington Pantagraph and Decatur Herald & Review
The state of Illinois either has one of the nation’s worst judicial climates, or is a state where the ordinary plaintiff has a fair chance to win against corporate giants.
It just depends on who you ask. More importantly, it depends on where the money is located.
That’s the result of the news last week that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce was proclaiming the Illinois lawsuit climate was one of the worst in the nation.
According to a survey conducted for the Chamber’s Institute for Legal Reform by Harris Poll, the chamber said only Louisiana and West Virginia have worse lawsuit climates.
The results are based on questionnaires asked of senior company attorneys about how a state’s lawsuit environment is likely to affect important business decisions. So, at best, the results of the survey were pretty predictable.
However, Gov. Bruce Rauner lent his support to the issue, saying the lawsuit environment in the state is hampering economic growth.
“You come here, you open yourself up to attack and excessive judgment against your company,” the governor said.
Rauner has proposed legislation that he says will put the system more into balance. Those reforms include medical awards based on charges rather than actual payments, changing overly inclusive liability standards and limiting venue shopping by plaintiffs.
The Illinois Trial Lawyers Trial Association disagrees with the survey and with Rauner. Perry J. Browder, president the association said in a written statement that the Institute for Legal Reform is a “a front group for the nation’s wealthiest special interests.”
“The only lawsuit crisis in Illinois is the one conjured up by the imaginations of phony front groups funded by big businesses trying to saddle the state’s taxpayers with the costs of caring for those who are injured or the survivors of those killed due to corporate negligence or malfeasance,” Browder wrote.
Browder also didn’t put much stock in the survey either, calling it “math washing — using numbers to give the veneer of science and precision to a biased study that found just what it wanted to find.”
Of course, if you limit the outcomes of lawsuits, you limit the income of trial lawyers.
Balancing the rights of plaintiffs and defendants is a tricky business. And, as a nation, we head to court way too often.
Illinois does need some sort of legal reform since it appears to be out of sync with the rest of the nation and surrounding states.
But that process will require careful negotiations among all sides. It won’t be accomplished with questionable “studies’’ and two sides trading the same arguments that have been around for decades.