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Full-Text Articles in Law
What Do We Talk About When We Talk About Mass Torts?, Anthony J. Sebok
What Do We Talk About When We Talk About Mass Torts?, Anthony J. Sebok
Michigan Law Review
Twenty years ago, Deborah Hensler and a team of scholars at the RAND Corporation's Institute for Civil Justice issued a report entitled Trends in Tort Litigation: The Story Behind the Statistics. Pressure had been mounting both in the business community and the Republican Party to "reform" tort law throughout the 1980s. There was concern that Americans "egged on by avaricious lawyers, sue[d] too readily, and irresponsible juries and activist judges wayla[id] blameless businesses at enormous cost to social and economic well-being." The RAND report argued that the real risk of a torts "explosion" came from the world of mass …
Why Should Businesses Hire Settlement Counsel, Kathy A. Bryan
Why Should Businesses Hire Settlement Counsel, Kathy A. Bryan
Journal of Dispute Resolution
As a former in-house litigation manager, I hired separate settlement counsel in only a few cases and with varying results. With responsibilities for hiring and managing a large portfolio of outside firms, I was loath to increase case-staffing ranks for many reasons-and cost was only one factor. Internal resources must oversee litigation, and having another set of outside lawyer relationships on the same case generally seemed duplicative. Worse, it demanded more of my scarce time to manage both the relationship and the primary litigation firm