Just a Coincidence?

Over the past six years, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has spent tens of millions of dollars lobbying for tort reform in various states and Congress. Part of its strategy entails focusing on individual states, using a standard formula cooked up by the group’s Institute for Legal Reform. The formula goes something like this:

1. Publish a “ranking” of state legal climates that puts the target state way at the bottom. (Delaware, a place where millions of businesses incorporate but no one actually lives, always ranks #1.)
2. Blitz the state with TV and print ads warning that an epidemic of frivolous lawsuits is driving businesses/doctors/car dealers, etc. out of state.
3. Attack trial lawyers as greedy parasites and source of the above mentioned frivolous lawsuits.

While these PR campaigns are supposed to be nonpartisan “issue advocacy,” they do seem to unfold at key times, like now, in the run up to the November election.

The latest victim of the chamber's work is Illinois, a state with some of the nation’s best consumer protection laws, liberal juries, and formerly a hotbed of asbestos and class action litigation. Coincidentally, Illinois is also home to several judicial elections as well as two bitterly contested congressional races. Democrats are leading in both congressional races, and Republicans have recently stepped up their spending in the state. George W. Bush appeared at a Chicago fundraiser Thursday for the candidates.

Just as the national GOP started dumping money into the two races, the chamber launched a blizzard of TV ads called the “Faces of Lawsuit Abuse,” which claim that “frivolous lawsuits” are wrecking Illinois’ business climate. To be fair, the chamber has been banging away at Illinois for a couple of years now, particularly during judicial elections, but this latest wave of ads seems suspiciously serendipitous. It’s unclear, though, how effective the ads will be in helping the GOP. In the race to fill retiring Rep. Henry Hyde’s seat in the 6th District, the Republican candidate, Peter Roskam, is a personal injury lawyer…

Media Matters

Generally, these well-funded PR campaigns result in a wave of newspaper editorials declaring the need for “common sense” legal reforms and interviews with local business boosters wringing their hands over lawyers wrecking the economy. I’ve never really understood why reporters fall for this gimmick, given that tort reform groups make exactly the same argument in every state, whether it’s Illinois or Mississippi. And they never say exactly where all those disappearing businesses are going. They can’t all relocate to Delaware, can they? And does anyone really believe that it’s the legal system that keeps Mississippi down, and not the fact that a third of the state’s population can’t read?

Anyway, in a nice change of pace, the Edwardsville Intelligencer in southern Illinois last week challenged the chamber’s portrayal of the local area as economically troubled. The story notes that the areas around the famous “judicial hellholes” of Madison and St. Clair counties are booming, with more than a half-billion in current and planned new construction and development in the works....

Whose faces?

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is currently running a version of the “Faces of Lawsuit Abuse” ads in West Virginia, also home to several competitive congressional races. Tort reform and trial lawyer money have featured prominently in the campaigns, largely because of the activism of Donald Blankenship, the CEO of Massey Energy, which has been systematically leveling large parts of the Mountain State through its coal mining operations and is the subject of all sorts of lawsuits. Blankenship is on the board of the U.S. Chamber, and has spent part of his sizeable fortune trying to elect pro-tort reform judges and legislators.

Of course, Blankenship doesn’t appear in the new chamber ad. Instead, the case against frivolous lawsuits is made by “Daniel,” identified as a small construction business owner who appears to be your average judgment-proof hollow-dweller struggling to get by.

West Virginia trial lawyers apparently have publicly questioned whether the people in the ads are, in fact, actors, not local businessmen. In response, Lisa Rickard, a former vice president of Dow Chemical and current president of the Institute for Legal Reform, issued this indignant statement defending the ad and posted the bios of the participants. The trial lawyers appear to be a little off base. Two of the five people are chamber of commerce toadies, but the others, including Daniel, are or were actual West Virginia business people. Whether their claims about lawsuits have any merit is another question….