Trial laywers on the offensive, still a little off the mark

Over the past year, the nation's trial lawyers have reorganized themselves, with new leadership drawn from professional PR quarters, and a new focus-grouped moniker--all, one suspects, at great cost. The changes are evident in the group's newly prolific (and occasionally shrill) press releases, which reflect the lawyers' desire to go on the offensive against attacks on the civil justice system. From what I've seen so far, I'm not sure the lawyers are getting their money's worth. Their communications strategy still seems like the product of people who are a little tone deaf.

It's such an odd phenomenon. Trial lawyers, who are unparalleled in their ability to connect with average people who sit in jury boxes, are among the most ham-handed professionals when it comes to PR. (Recall attorney Mark Lanier's comment that he'd "be lucky to get 10 percent" of a $26 million verdict in a Texas Vioxx case.) Even the stuff they've paid PR geniuses to concoct reflects some critical misunderstanding of public perception.

A few years ago, I saw consultant Ed Lazarus unveil a host of talking points and sound bites for the group's "Seventh Amendment" project that were all phrased around preserving the "right to a jury trial." No one in the room seemed to notice that the anti-tort reform slogans sounded like they were describing criminal trials, not civil ones. The trial lawyers' message problems are still evident today. Witness yesterday's press release.

In criticizing the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's newly-issued ranking of state legal climates , AAJ offered up its corollary, a "top 10" list of the worst places to get injured. In theory, this could be a clever and newsworthy item. Instead, AAJ issued a catalog of the limits of legal remedies in various states, with language like this:

Alabama law limits restitution for every injury or death caused by the government to what’s available under workers comp. If a local governmental entity is held responsible, no matter how great the loss, restitution is limited to $100,000 per person for injury or death, or  300,000 if more than one person is injured or killed in the same incident – no matter how many people were affected.

I suspect this kind of thing isn't likely to outrage anyone but trial lawyers. That's because for most Americans, $100,000 is a shit-load of money. The median household income in the U.S. is $46,000. In 2001, half of all American workers under 70 had $2,000 or less in a retirement account. So laws that limit damages to six figures (or seven, in some cases on the list), aren't going to strike many people as especially unfair. Maybe the lawyers need to find a better focus group....

Comments

[John Conry]

Before I became a lawyer I thought about money in terms of how I earned it: on a bi-weekly/monthly basis. Sometimes I thought about money in terms of annual income, like when I thought about what career most interested me. So, I thought a million dollars was a ton of money because I thought of a million dollars now, in my pocket!

The truth about a lawsuit settlement is that it is for life. That means that the Colorado Workman's Compensation limit of $150,000.00 for employees injured alone, or $600,000.00 in large scale accidents sounds . . . well . . . big.

Now think about it from the perspective of a twenty-three year old father of two, twenty years old who worked in a warehouse and got hurt in an accident with ten other employees. His compensation could be limited to $60,000.00. If he can't work again for the rest of his life, he has to like forty-two years on $60,000.00. That means he will get less than $1,500.00/year to support himself and his family while he can't work because of this accident. That is the case that AAJ should have made: instead of regurgitating the legal limits they should be applied to make them understandable. Outside of their context these numbers don't make sense to voters, and voters, in the end, will decide how our courts are run.