Lawsuit Abuse Reduction Act of 2004

LAWSUIT ABUSE REDUCTION ACT OF 2004 -- (House of Representatives - September 14, 2004)

Mr. SENSENBRENNER. Mr. Speaker, pursuant to House Resolution 766, I call up the bill (H.R. 4571) to amend Rule 11 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure to improve attorney accountability, and for other purposes, and ask for its immediate consideration.

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Ms. WATERS. Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong opposition both to this bill and to the process which produced it. H.R. 4571 would make fundamental changes to the Rule 11 sanctions process without our even receiving the benefit of input from either the Judicial Conference or the Supreme Court.

Mr. Speaker, it is obvious that the proponents of this legislation do not want to hear from our judges because they know that the vast majority of our judges do not agree with this bill. As a matter of fact, I think that this bill could appropriately be named big business versus the people.

Mr. Speaker, big businesses pay expensive lawyers by the hour to protect their interests. Trial lawyers handling many of these cases that are being termed frivolous are paid only if they win.

I would like to quote John Q. Quinn, a veteran trial lawyer from Houston, who sees this as a make-or-break election issue in an article that appeared in the Los Angeles Times. "Corporate America is in charge these days. They control the White House, the Congress and the Supreme Court. But so far they do not control the right to trial by jury. That is the only place where ordinary citizens can go and have their complaints heard," Quinn said. I further quote him when he said "Ordinary people cannot hire lobbyists in Washington, but in the courtroom they get an equal chance to stand up against a corporation."

Now the Chamber of Commerce and big corporate America, spending millions of dollars in public relations campaigns, would have Members believe that the number of civil cases have risen and thus the number of frivolous lawsuits, but that is simply not the case. I would like to further quote this Los Angeles Times article which said, "The Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics and the National Center for State Courts track civil trials and verdicts in the Nation's 75 largest counties. In April, the bureau reported in the last decade the number of cases have gone down, not
up."

The number of general civil cases disposed of by trial in the Nation's largest counties declined from 22,451 in 1992 to 11,908 in 2001. That is a 47 percent decline. The plaintiffs won about half the time, and the overall median award was $37,000 in 2001, down from $65,000 in 1992.

These cases included automobile accidents, medical malpractice and product liability claims. About one-third of the
cases involved contract claims which typically involve one business against each other. Mr. Speaker, we are talking about ordinary people. We are talking about people who get up every day and go to work, common folk who just earn sometimes entry-level wages. We are talking about people who could be harmed in an automobile accident or on the job working at a company that does not care about their safety, where they can lose a limb, their eyes, they could be killed. They could lose their lives.

Are we going to prevent the ability of these people to be heard and have their day in court? Big business may not want to accept liability, but it must; and we cannot live in a country where we have big business, because they have money, come to the Congress of the United States and produce legislation that would prevent the average, little person from having their day in court and being heard by a jury.