James Jan-Feb 2024 web - Flipbook - Page 77
TORT REFORM
We have been trial lawyers for
close to 30 years. As we’ve seen
many times over our careers,
Georgia is again at the center of
calls for tort reform to limit and
restrict to the United States Constitution’s Seventh Amendment
right to trial by jury. While many
try to make it a partisan issue, the
Seventh Amendment right to trial
by jury is a nonpartisan issue that
acts to protect all Georgians. It assures all Georgians a right to take
our grievances to a jury of our
peers. Trust me, you want that.
CEOs, small business owners
and thousands of hard-working
people in our communities for
over 100 years. In fact, the law has
been a part of our lives for as long
as we can remember. Our playground as children in 1970s Canton,
Georgia, was the Cherokee County
Courthouse. Constructed in 1927
using marble from nearby Tate,
the three-story courthouse was
straight out of Harper Lee’s “To Kill
a Mockingbird.” And we were fortunate to be able to come back home
to practice law in North Georgia.
As partners, we have tried
over 50 jury trials, and represented thousands of people injured
or who have lost loved ones due
to negligence. Our father, former
Chief Judge Marion Pope, Jr.
began his practice representing
injured Georgians in 1953. Our
family has been consistently active in the Georgia Trial Lawyers
Association with Jon serving as
president in 2021-2022.
As lawyers, we are taught to
argue your case with evidence. Evidence is facts. We want to be sure
when we talk about tort reform
that we talk about the facts. Most
of the information you hear about
tort reform comes from the Washington, D.C. based American Tort
Reform Foundation. ARTF has
accused Georgia of being the nation’s worst “judicial hellhole” in its
2022-2023 report. Given our state’s
booming economy and its selection as the “Top State for Business”
ten years running, one rightfully
should wonder what the ATRF
is talking about. You must start
by considering the source: ATRF
is made up of lobbyists for the
tobacco, insurance, chemical, auto
and pharmaceutical industries.
Many say it strategically pushes out its annual “hellhole” list
to attempt to intimidate judges
and pressure lawmakers to enact
allegedly business friendly laws.
To demonstrate ATRF’s socalled methodology: its members
anonymously submit anecdotes
about cases resulting in a verdict
against a defendant, then ATRF
arbitrarily decides which states
are “hellholes” based on those
one-sided anecdotes. As one
observer noted, ATRF’s list “is not
based on research” because “empirical research tends to debunk
the industry complaints.”
ATRF’s attack focuses on socalled “nuclear” verdicts— another term coming from this group.
ATRF focuses on the fact that a
jury verdict was rendered but it
ignores the facts behind those
verdicts— why did they happen?
For example, ATRF’s discussion
of Carmichael v. CVS ignores the
undisputed fact that before the
plaintiff was shot in the CVS
parking lot, CVS had stopped
providing security guards despite years of violent crime on its
property and repeated requests
by its own employees to make
the property safer. ATRF’s attack
on Holland v. Cypress Insurance
Company, a trucking case involving a death, is similarly one-sided.
There a jury awarded $15 million
for the plaintiff’s life and his pain
and suffering, as well as attorney’s
fees because of the defendant’s
bad faith.
ATRF ignores evidence that
the truck driver “concealed parts
of his medical history” in addition
to his use of opioids, including on
the day of the crash that killed
the plaintiff. Instead, it simply
claims that “[t]he driver suffered a
sudden medical emergency while
behind the wheel and was found
unresponsive in the vehicle.” The
rest of the so-called “nuclear verdicts” described in ATRF’s report
have similarly egregious facts
that ATRF omitted.
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