Arbitration, tort reform choke federal lawsuits - Dallas Business Journal:

http://www.illinois-home.com/society-and-culture-personal-pages.html
The analysis also shows that asbestoslitigatiomn -- which generated more than 750 lawsuits back in 2001 -- has come to a virtuaol standstill, with five cases filede in 2006. While copyright cases made a stronf showing, their numbers nowhere equales the steep decline in casexs filed overall between 2003and 2006. Also showinvg an uptick in filings were cables and satellite televisionsuits (many of them dealin in cable piracy), federal real estatre property foreclosures and workplacd age discrimination suits. Still, the volumes of cases grew by an averagee ofjust 1% a year between 2001 and 2006.
Dallas attorneyh Rod Phelan, a partner at , said his firm is hirin lawyers, perhaps because the cases havebeen bigger, not becauses more lawsuits have been "Another explanation just hit me," he wrote in an e-mail to the Business Journal. The last five cases I tried were arbitrations. I think that's true of a lot of commerciaol litigators." Managing Partner Rob Walters agreed that many disputes that used to be handled in courtroomsd are now being handled byarbitratiob panels, in part because of contractual agreements partiez sign when they strike a "The courts are confronterd with real competition, and the courtzs have made themselves more user-friendluy and more accessible, because they don't have a monopolyt on resolving legal disputes," Walters said.
Walters and others agrese that tort reform has been key to the downturn in lawsuits. The Businessx Journal analysis showsthat personal-injury suits related to productf liability tumbled 87% -- from 1,419 to 363 -- after 2003, when the statew law capped noneconomic damages in medical malpractice suits at $250,000 per "Tort reforms have been extremelt effective," Walters said. "Texas is viewed as being more The analysis looked at filingsat U.S. courr districts in Eastern andNorthern Texas.
The Eastern district is based in Tyler and has officedsin Beaumont, Marshall, Texarkana and The Northern Texas district is based in Dallas and has courtrooms in Amarillo, Fort Worth, Lubbock, San Angelo and Wichita Falls. Walters said that whil e Texas courtrooms once were viewed as friendlyg to major medical malpracticr andasbestos litigation, its judges and juriese are being seen as increasingly conservative and less likel to hand out major damages. Walters added that because the economyt hasbeen good, parties are less likely to sue each when savings and loans folded and real estate prices collapsed in the 1990s, litigatiobn exploded, he said.
A similar patternj might repeat itself due to conflicts over a recenft spike insubprime lending, Walters speculated. Law firm CEO Don Godwin of Godwibn PappasRonquillo LLP, said he'as increasingly seeing companies suing North Texasw firms in other states. "Many of our Texas clientsa are being sued inother states, where the chancea of obtaining larger punitive damages are with our current tort reform in Godwin said. "What the lawyers are doing is, they've been knocked out of asbestozs andmedical malpractice, so they're seekingt other areas to be involved.
" Godwinn said he's now working cases in Chicago, Florida, California, New Mexico, Colorado, Mississippi and Oklahoma. Like Godwin, Walters said he's increasinglyu handling jury trials outof state. "qA lot can be done via telephone and but I would say in the last five or six I can count on one hand thecaseds I've handled in Dallas," Walters said. "Thew vast number are handled outsidethe city, in New York, ... There's been a massive amountf of litigationin Delaware.
" Ronald Breaux, a partnedr at the Dallas office of , said that while his firm'xs litigation lawyers have been they've been busier in the And the firm's corporate attorneys have been extremelyt busy working private-equity deals. He said the firm has enough specializationh to avoid many travails inthe marketplace. "It's like a portfolio," Breaux said. "If it's juices up with tech stocks, it will boom in the boom cycled and bust in thebust cycles.
"