Movie Trailers May Be Hazardous To Your Lawsuit!

Tort reform legislation is the talk of the day. Every time you watch or read the news attempts are being made to portray yet another story of another lawyer who has victimized the community or skirted around the law to his/her own advantage. The challenge, as with anything else is not to allow the pendulum to swing too far one way or the other. When campaigning for changes to the laws, reformers need to be careful. Case in point, the U.S. Chamber Institute for Legal Reform. Recently the organization began a targeted advertising campaign about frivolous lawsuits. But you won’t see their advertisements on the television or internet, nor will you hear them on the radio any longer. Rather, the organization has chosen a more captive audience – movie goers. That’s right - the only place these ads can be seen is in your local movie theatre!

We can’t speak for our audience but certainly state that the last thing we want to see while waiting for the main attraction (and eating our popcorn!) is a movie trailer about frivolous lawsuits, or any other lawsuits for that matter. In the customary Chamber way, these trailers dramatize only the most absurd legal cases. While there are some frivolous lawsuits filed, it is clear and irrefutably documented with empirically objective data that the overwhelming majority of lawsuits are well grounded in legal and factual principle. That is the other side of the story that the tort-reforming business community continues to ignore.

We agree with Ray De Lorenzi, a spokesman for the American Association for Justice which is a national trade group committed to the protection of victim’s rights. De Lorenzi was recently quoted in an article by Sheri Qualters of the National Law Journal (http://www.law.com/) as saying that the U.S. Chamber's movie trailers are "their [the tort reformers] latest desperate attempt to discredit the foundation of the U.S. legal system." These types of incidents only play into the stereotypical lawyer jokes and give credence to the “ambulance chaser” mentality. Nothing is further from the truth.

As victim’s rights advocates, we have looked into the eyes of real victims and listened to the stories that they tell. We have heard about their physical and financial hardships, watched their reputations soiled and felt a tinge of the turmoil that they experience. That’s why we do what we do, and that’s why we’ll keep doing it every day. We will all have critics and they will forever be among us. But we leave you with this thought – have you ever seen a statue erected to a critic?