They Should Fire Their Lawyers

PLA has an interesting post up about tort reform and defensive medicine. It brought to mind a debate on the Lehrer news hour the other night about “traaaal lawyers” and their monstrous greed and avarice.

The defender of liberty and all that is good and clean — the corporate apologist — kept complaining about how these evil toe-art lawyers were conning innocent unknowing Americans into filing suits against their will and then taking all the ill gotten gains when they rape the Godfearing American job creating corporations. One of the “reforms” he was lobbying for was to eliminate contingency fees.

Satan’s handpuppet pointed out that it would hardly make sense for him to pour a bunch of his own money into these cases, which he does in these contingency arrangements, if he knew they were frivolous because he could not hope to recoup it if he didn’t win.

The sainted corporate defender didn’t respond, but it made me realize that these bastards are actually trying to persuade average Americans that corporations are at a disadvantage in a courtroom. They want people to believe that plaintiffs lawyers are able to take completely bogus cases, pour huge sums of their own money into them, convince a judge that the case is for real, use all their wiles on the jury of complete idiots…er… average voters (oops) who are mesmerized by their devilish powers to convince them to bankrupt the guileless corporations for no good reason at all.

If this is the case then the huge stables of highly paid lawyers representing these corporations in court really suck at their jobs, don’t they? Perhaps rather than outlawing the practice of contingency fees altogether it would make more sense to hire those corporate lawyers on a contingency basis too. It seems to have a very salutory effect on performance.