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Florida Needs Terminator Lawyers Against BP

By Joe Consumer

Honestly, we don?t mean to repeat ourselves.  But there?s another weird converging of topics going on, which like yesterday?s BP/Law Clinic post, also involves BP.  I guess when corporate wrongdoing becomes this huge, it spills over into all kinds of areas. 

Question.  What happens when a legislature caps a plaintiff's (i.e. an injured victim, like you perhaps) lawyers? fees?  

Answer.  A defendant (corporate bad guy) can hire the best lawyers around to fight you.  You, on the other hand, can?t.  Which, of course, is the point of all misguided and one-sided legislation to cap plaintiff's ?contingency fees?

Under a contingency fee arrangement, a lawyer can take a case without expecting any money up front.  In return, the lawyer is entitled to a percentage of money collected if the case is successful ? usually one-third.  If they are not successful, the attorney receives no fee at all.  Without such a system, injured people could never find attorneys to fight insurance companies. Most injured people lack funds to pay next week's rent, let alone hourly attorney's fee.

Some states limit contingency fees by capping them way below one-third, or sometimes drastically as judgments increase.  Obviously with caps in place, it is far less likely attorneys can afford to risk bringing the more costly and complex cases, providing practical immunity for many wrongdoers, especially large corporations and institutions like unsafe hospitals, or the drug or tobacco industries.  

Fee caps also handcuff state Attorneys General, many of whom are underfunded and understaffed and/or can't hope to take on big industries without hiring outside counsel under a contingency arrangement.  As we noted in the context of financial reform, remember that these lawyers are hired at no cost to the taxpayer ? fees are paid by the wrongdoer if the state is successful - and their work often results in states recovering billions of dollars from corporate wrongdoers.

In the BP case, states need ?terminator litigators,? as one Florida columnist put it.  But Florida won?t get one now.  That?s because, ?[s]ix days before the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded and the wellhead a mile beneath it began gushing oil, [Florida Governor] Crist signed into law [Attorney General] McCollum's chief legislative priority. The law that goes into effect July 1 caps contingency fees at $50 million on contract work for the Office of the Attorney General.?

This is almost as shortsighted as the $75 million liability cap for economic damage caused by oil spills that Congress put in place in 1990. 

Business groups have set up entire organizations dedicated to undermining AG's consumer protection role, and often, their main tactic is to make it financially impossible for states to bring on the best attorneys, who must front millions of dollars to bring a case ? money that states don?t have. 

But BP sure does. 

Full post as published by ThePopTort on May 21, 2010 (boomark / email).