It has been going around for so long now that personal injury lawyers are earning loads in settlements while their clients get nothing but vouchers to use on their succeeding purchases. Now one Florida judge finally has taken up the cudgels for beleaguered consumers. The judge lambasted a New York City law firm for requesting legal fees of $1 million while offering cruise ship passengers travel vouchers for future trips with values ranging from $10 to $60.
It took $2 million for a law firm to settle a class action lawsuit against a cruise line in Fort Lauderdale after the company was accused of increasing port docking charges and passing them onto unknowing passengers. Upon returning to the courtroom the firm asked for $1 million in legal fees. From a 27 page ruling came the order from the judge for four firms from southern Florida to split the request after he sliced the $1 million request to slightly less than $300,000. Also to be paid with vouchers just like the ones received by the 80,000 plaintiffs they managed to corral into the lawsuit is 25 percent of the lawyers’ legal fees as ordered by the judge.
Regular customers of the cruise were the passengers and so the firm’s lead lawyer said that the travel vouchers are beneficial to them. With vouchers not being sufficient to settle bills what was deserved and desired was cash. There are times when personal injury lawyers round up class action plaintiffs without any warning as parties to multimillion dollar lawsuits according to the judge and the clients are usually provided with trivial awards.
Rapacious class action lawyers were going against consumers who ended up being defended by a judge who used common sense and was applauded by tort reform advocates. From a local institute comes the head of a Tallahassee think tank who considers travel awards to be useless because of the little value in such vouchers. A $10 is useless especially for a rather expensive cruise. On the other hand class action lawsuits can be positive. When there are genuine victims of a corporation’s neglect, just compensation is deserved. In modern times the wealthy benefit from class action lawsuits and the victims are left with nothing but their wounds.
A prime example is the class action lawsuit against HMOs now being waged in Miami by a group of multi millionaire personal injury lawyers led by a well known Mississippi lawyer. Without any changes when it comes to patient care, the personal injury lawyers admit to the fact that their actions will cause health care prices too increase nonetheless. There was a lawyer who met with Wall Street financial analysts and he tried to convince them to start a shareholder sell off not to mention downgrade HMO stocks.
His logic was flawless. It is easy for lawyers to get millions in rewards without ever facing trials because as the stock prices plummet the HMOs will more likely agree to settle lawsuits out of court. According to a Yale University law professor, there is no way that these lawsuits cannot do some damage to the country. If they’re successful, the managed care industry basically will be eliminated. That will result, I think indisputably and unquestionably, in an increase in health care costs to all Americans.
For the congressional Republicans and Democrats they should pass a meaningful toil reform act especially when there are numerous lawsuits against HMOs that are driven by greed. There is a lot of average working Americans who have become tired of contributing to the retirement funds of these lawmen and they no longer want to help them travel in their private jets or fish in their luxury yachts.
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