Drowning in a Sea of Torts

The mute button on my TV remote has suffered serious damage, and I’m considering a lawsuit. Never mind a replacement device. That’s cheaply available in the geek aisle at my local Walmart. What I want is a metric potful of money for damages to my left index finger suffered by mashing that mute button in order to avoid a constant barrage of ads from various firms that want me as their next plaintiff in one massive lawsuit or another. It might get a little complicated. I’d be asking the selected ambulance chaser to sue for damages incurred in attempting to silence TV ads his Big Law brethren are using to involve practically every living human being in what the legal profession refers to as mass torts.

But never mind. I’ll find someone to take my case. How can I fail to find a willing advocate for my cheapjack claim when we live in a country that makes up only five percent of the world’s population yet features 65 percent of the world’s lawyers? If my mute finger case gets tossed, I can always join the steadily growing ranks of mass tort victims. No mute button in existence can stifle the 800,000 mass tort solicitations that ran on American television last year seeking clients for personal-injury and product-liability cases.

Big Law insists I must be a victim of something even if the physical evidence hasn’t manifested in any obvious way. I was stationed at Camp Lejeune during my active-duty time which included washing, showering, and otherwise lapping up base water. Barracks I lived in and ships I sailed on were stuffed with asbestos to ward off fires. I used talcum powder regularly to ward off boot blisters and various weeds on my lawns were assaulted with Roundup to keep them at bay.

Ergo and quod erat demonstrandum, say the lawyers who like to use plenty of obscure Latin terms, I’m a wretched victim just waiting to develop some fatal disorder or disease. Frankly, even if I could suppress my gag reflex and join the victim’s parade, I probably wouldn’t wind up with much money to compensate for any pain or suffering, American law firms didn’t spend $160 million in mass tort TV ads last year expecting peanuts in return. In the end it will be a relative pittance paid to genuine victims and families. The big bucks will wind up with the big law firms. That’s sad because some plaintiffs who are or might be seriously damaged by product faults or environmental hazards in these cases wind up drawing the short straw.

That’s down to greed and avarice that permeate much of the legal profession and that makes the whole deal even more sordid. To hear some of the greed-heads working in the legal arena today, we are all simply potential litigants in one lawsuit or another. Americans for the most part are up to their beady eyeballs in laws that can be twisted, misapplied, or distorted. It’s hard to find any aspect of life in this country that isn’t somehow dominated or invaded by lawyers gasping to sue us or keep us from being sued. Of course, there’s a role for lawyers in our society, but that role can’t be vast and unchecked power over the way we live our lives.

My knee-jerk reaction to contemplating all this was to recall lyrics of “Get Over It,” an old Eagles tune that says “Old Willie was right. We got to kill all the lawyers, kill ’em tonight.” That’s entertaining but a bit harsh. I checked The Bard’s Henry VI, Par II. Shakespeare has one of his characters—a churlish thug contemplating regicide—say these words: “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” But Old Willie was singing a different tune in his play. He saw lawyers as a fundamental defense against the trepidations of power-hungry monarchs. He got that right. That’s what lawyers should be doing for all of us rather than cobbling together mass tort or frivolous class-action suits.

No question we live in a litigious society. That’s necessary to some degree in a society like ours which is based on the rule of law, but it’s blown way out of proportion. It’s become overarching and invasive, and it too often flies in the face of American freedoms guaranteed by our Constitution. We are drowning in a Sea of Torts. Don’t believe that? Watch a little TV.

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