Cure worse than the disease wrote:
Mr. Obvious wrote:The only way I can think of to limit suits like this more is to allow defendants to sue for fees and hold not just the plaintiff but the plaintiff's attorney responsible for these fees.
That sounds like a good way of closing the courthouse to anyone but the rich, large corporations, and insurance companies. No lawyer would take a case for a plaintiff where there was any risk of losing because losing a single case would bankrupt the lawyer.
I thought about that, but I decided that lawyers still need to get paid, and rather enjoy it. So they would still take cases. Presumably, not all losses would result in fines to the plaintiff's attorneys, just in cases where a judge or jury determined those attorneys overzealously pushed for a crap lawsuit just out of profiteering. In some cases those judges/juries would make questionable decisions, and law firms would absorb those as a cost of doing business, just as heart surgeons still show up for work and do heart surgeries, even though they sometimes are found liable of malpractice, and sometimes those findings are flawed.
Little "Mom and Pop" law firms might suffer, I'll grant you.
And who knows ... you may be right, and maybe when my neighbor doesn't de-ice their sidewalk like they were supposed to, and I slip and fall, I just hae to deal with it. But I'm not sure that's so bad.