Another View: ‘Judicial hellholes’ are bigger in Texas, too

Texas is known for its 10-gallon hats, wide open spaces and ardent football fans. This is a state of enormous economic opportunity that attracts wannabe Texans the world over.

Unfortunately, some parts of Texas also attract less than savory “tourists” — oppor-tunistic personal injury lawyers who flock to areas of the state known as “judicial hellholes” to bank on biased courtrooms and pad their pockets with Texas-sized verdicts.

For the sixth year running, the Rio Grande Valley and Texas Gulf Coast were dubbed judicial hellholes in the annual Judicial Hellhole report released by the American Tort Reform Association. Also known for its rich culture and beachfront properties, the Valley and the Coast persist as destinations for what’s been described as “litigation tourism.”

Courts in these regions of the state are notorious for favoring personal injury lawyers and are perceived by the trial bar as ideal legal venues. As a result, according to the “Judicial Hellholes 2007” report, “plaintiffs’ attorneys become the ‘travel agents’ for the ‘litigation tourist’ industry, filing claims in jurisdictions with little or no connection to their clients’ claims.”

It’s no wonder that enterprising personal injury lawyers flock to judicial hellholes, where judges systematically apply laws and court procedures in favor of plaintiffs and against defendants in civil lawsuits. In fact, the Rio Grande Valley and the Texas Gulf Coast are known collectively “as one of the toughest jurisdictions for corporate defendants in the country,” according to published reports.

In an attempt to end Cameron County’s long reign as a judicial hellhole, the local newspaper in the Rio Grande Valley published its plea to newly elected judges, lamenting that the county is a “place where judges … give preferential treatment to tort cases in general or to cases files by attorneys who are personal or political friends.”

The courthouse bias in Starr County was clearly evident this year when a district judge single-handedly stifled a defendant’s request for a new trial, even after all parties discovered that a juror in the first trial actually knew the plaintiff, had accepted interest-free loans from her and had contacted her several times after receiving his jury summons.

The case was filed by a widow who blamed her husband’s fatal heart attack on the fact that he’d taken Vioxx for no more than 17 days. It fetched a $32 million verdict despite the fact that the husband had a 28-year history of heart disease, had undergone quadruple bypass surgery, smoked and had high blood pressure long before taking Vioxx. Instead of ruling on the defendant’s request for a new trial with a fair jury, the judge sat on the request, allowing the 75-day time limit for a new trial to expire. So much for blind justice.

On the other side of the courtroom aisle, personal injury lawyers boast about their successes in these “magic jurisdictions.” According to one prolific personal injury lawyer’s description of Starr County, “That venue probably adds about 75% to the value of the case. ... (W)hen you’re in Starr County, traditionally you need to just show that the guy was working, and he was hurt. And that’s the hurdle …”

Pervasive attitudes like this — and the realities of the courtrooms that reinforce these attitudes — make a mockery of our judicial system. Baseless lawsuits, with near-guaranteed windfall verdicts, are the bread and butter for more than a handful of personal injury lawyers who know how to strike it rich in judicial hellholes.

In fact, a personal injury lawyer said, “These cases are not won in the courtroom. They’re won on the back roads long before the case goes to trial. Any lawyer fresh out of law school can walk in there and win the case, so it doesn’t matter what the evidence or law is.”

The threat to civil justice reforms in Texas doesn’t stop in the courthouses of judicial hellholes. A statewide movement to roll back progress is afoot in Texas and beyond. Through the courts, in the Texas Legislature and in the halls of Congress, innovative, aggressive trial lawyers — and their army of lobbyists — are searching for and finding new ways to sue and, in many ways, playing the litigation lottery to their own financial benefit.

Clearly, it takes more than statutes passed in Austin to stop abusive legal practices. The public must declare zero tolerance on lawsuit abuse and hold our officials accountable.

Judges should be applying the law fairly and consistently in all cases and lawyers found abusing the system should be penalized.

When our communities become breeding grounds for greed, we all pay the price as justice is eroded and the cost of goods and services skyrockets. It may be true that everything is bigger in Texas, but that shouldn’t include the judicial jackpots so feverishly pursued by personal injury lawyers. Greed-fueled notoriety has no place in the proud landscape of the Lone Star State.

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Summers is founder of Citizens Against Lawsuit Abuse (www.citizensagainstlawsuitabuse.com) and current president of its original chapter in the Rio Grande Valley.

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