If He Jumps Up and Kicks His Heels, Will He Fall Down and Break His Neck?

Over at Overlawyered, Walter Olson is breaking out the champagne on behalf of big-business interests everywhere in a post titled "Madison County: let the joyous news be spread..."  He's speaking of Judge Maag's defeat by Judge Karmeier for a seat on the Illinois Supreme Court.  As Olson puts it more than just a little melodramatically, "Tuesday's judicial election results in the notorious Illinois county amounted to a 'cataclysmic' defeat for the county's powerful personal-injury lawyers."

It's clear the doctors-leaving-town argument was the decisive issue, and that the electorate was hoodwinked into believing that electing a Republican to the Supreme Court would somehow lead to lower insurance premiums for doctors.  That's what the electorate was told in the TV commercials and the press coverage, anyway.  But soon the Republicans will be backing away from that stance, as they're forced to admit that insurance companies won't automatically lower their med-mal rates as the result of who's sitting on the Illinois Supreme Court.  (In fact, insurance rates were already trending down long before the election, as I pointed out here.)

There's no doubt that the Republicans ran an effective, though nasty, campaign.  It was expensive, too: contributions by big-business interests to Judge Karmeier's campaign amounted to $4.3 million.  Along the way, Judge Maag, who was in the wrong place at the wrong time, unfortunately had his good name and reputation unfairly tarnished.  And the citizens of Illinois can't be criticized if both candidates' negative campaigns led them to entirely lose their faith in the system.

Will things change in Madison County, as Olson contends?  If so, it will be as a result of potential jurors being brainwashed into thinking that anyone with a legitimate claim is bringing a frivolous lawsuit.  On the Illinois Supreme Court, the majority of the justices are still Democrat.  And Judge Karmeier, though a Republican, is by all accounts a smart, fair-minded judge.  Meanwhile, at the trial court level, the judges will continue to issue rulings consistent with Illinois law or subject to review by the Illinois appellate courts, as has been the case for the fourteen years I've been practicing in Madison County, both as a defense lawyer and a plaintiffs' lawyer.

If things do change in Madison County, the real losers will be anyone who has the misfortune of being harmed at the hands of big business.  That, my friends, is why Walter Olson is doing a jig. And though I really don't want him to break his neck, I'm probably not the right guy to represent him if he ever does.

Comments

[Marie]

Wow! I can't believe no one has made any comments on this, yet. Hoodwinked is right. Both of these fellas ran their TV ads in Springfield. Ugly and dirty are the words that come to mind. I never did find out why Springfield. I mean, it's not like we could vote in the Fifth or anything.

Anyway, this election aside, the tort reform machine and medical doctors' professional liability insurance machine and the chambers of commerce machines (and probably more I can't think of right now), have so permeated the atmosphere and people's thinking here with their rhetoric, that the citizenry can't help but believe that trial lawyers equal bad and every lawsuit must be frivilous (even the winners) and that Southern Illinois would be the most wonderful place on earth to live except for the fact that if you bump your head you might have to go all the way to somewhere like Pah-doo-kah to see a neurologist because we never hear anything else about Southern Illinois - so it must be great. Right?

These messages are coming at us almost every day now. TV, radio, print. I even heard the local liberal radio talk show host (yeah, we got one of those here) intimate the same machine line the other day with nary a wink that there is another side to the story. I mean, really!

And that jig? That's what it's all about, you know - that gloating, self-righteous, intolerant jig they do because it puts them a little bit closer to the day that when someone is truly suffering at the hand of their trusted physician, but there's no relief to be found because lawyers are too scared of the machine to take the case.........

Sorry. But, it riles me that the voice of one side has so drowned out the other. That's all. Maybe someone with more eloquence will come along and say it better.

[Ted]

No one took the bait?

When people run for Senate in New Jersey, they buy television time in NY and Philadelphia -- not because they hope to persuade New Yorkers and Pennsylvanians that they'd be good senators, but because those are television stations that reach the electorate. I suspect something similar happened with Springfield, which isn't that far from Madison County, and is undoubtably cheaper than St. Louis television time.

[Evan]

The Maag and Karmeier ads ran around the clock in the St. Louis TV market too. As Ted says, however, it wasn't to influence St. Louisans, since they didn't vote in the Illinois election--it was because the St. Louis TV market includes the Illinois counties of Madison and St. Clair, which are just across the river.