More Bad News for Defense Firms: Lawsuit Filings Dropping
The Pop Tort Blog has a post about a new report from the National Center for State Courts. Here is a link to the report, which covers 2008 (its most recent reporting year).
According to the Report, tort filings are dropping significantly. Meanwhile, debt collection actions are flooding civil courts.
Here are some of the report's statistics for Mississippi. Again, this is for 2008:
contract cases—43,456 (includes 34,971 debt collection cases (80%).
tort cases—5,545 (11% of filed cases) (includes 1,595 car wreck cases (39% of tort cases).
medical malpractice cases—241 (4.3% of tort cases).
According to my math, this means that medical malpractice cases represented one half of one percent of all filings in 2008. On top of that, defendants win most medical malpractice cases that go to trial.
Yet insurance companies can brainwash doctors into thinking that plaintiff lawyers are a bigger threat to doctors than insurance companies who refuse to pay the bills of patients that should be covered by the patient's insurance. Amazing.
The work is never going to rebound for large defense firms who made a killing during the litigation boom in the 1990's and early 2000's. Mass tort litigation in Mississippi is dead compared to how it was back then. Some of the biggest plaintiff lawyers from that era are in jail. Other plaintiff lawyers have closed their practices or transitioned to criminal law, domestic, bankruptcy or other types of non-tort litigation work.
Making matters worse, out of state lawyers squeeze out Mississippi firms for much of any major litigation that is filed in Mississippi. Some Mississippi defense firms that are surviving in this climate do it by borrowing a page from national counsel's playbook and compete for work outside of Mississippi. That makes sense to me. In my experience the “national counsel” from outside Mississippi are rarely as talented trial lawyers as their Mississippi “local counsel.”
