Legal Reform

Accomplishments and Ongoing Activities:

• Successfully highlighted the problems, including fraud, associated with the practice of trial lawyers using mass screenings to locate potential plaintiffs in certain types of large-scale litigation such as asbestos and silica cases.
• Developed consensus model legislation and case management orders designed to increase the transparency between the tort system and the various asbestos bankruptcy compensation trusts in order to limit the ability of the trial bar to obtain multiple recoveries for the same injury.

• Established a multi-industry coalition to defend against trial lawyer efforts to limit the availability of pre-dispute mandatory arbitration clauses. Successfully obtained an amendment to the House-passed Farm Bill that limited anti-arbitration language.

• Helped promote the adoption of key legal measures such as joint and several liability reform, limits on the ability of state attorneys general to hire outside contingency fee counsel, asbestos litigation reform, caps on appeal bonds, and limits on punitive damages in key states such as Illinois, West Virginia, and Florida.
• Worked to counteract trial lawyer efforts to roll back prior state-level legal reform victories. 
• Issued the sixth annual Harris Poll ranking of the legal systems in all 50 states.