Lawsuit Abuse Reduction Act of 2013

Floor Speech

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Mr. SMITH of Texas. Madam Speaker, I want to thank Chairman Goodlatte for yielding me time and for also bringing the bill to the House floor today, and for all of his hard work on this legislation.

The Lawsuit Abuse Reduction Act, known as LARA, is only 1-1/2 pages long, but it would prevent the filing of hundreds of thousands of pages of privileged lawsuits in Federal court.

For example, in recent years, frivolous lawsuits have been filed against The Weather Channel for failing to accurately predict storms, against television shows people claimed were too scary, and against fast-food companies because inactive children gained weight.

Frivolous lawsuits have become too common in our society. Lawyers who bring these cases have everything to gain and nothing to lose under current rules, which permit plaintiffs' lawyers to file frivolous suits, no matter how absurd the claims, with no penalty whatsoever. Meanwhile, defendants are faced with years of litigation and substantial attorneys' fees.

These cases, and many like them, have wrongly cost innocent individuals and business owners their reputations and their hard-earned dollars. According to the research firm Towers Perrin, the annual direct cost of American tort litigation now exceeds $260 billion a year, or over $850 billion per person in America.

Before 1993, it was mandatory for judges to impose sanctions, such as orders to pay for the other side's legal expenses, when lawyers filed frivolous lawsuits. Then the Civil Rules Advisory Committee, an obscure branch of the courts, made penalties optional. This needs to be reversed by Congress.

As Chairman Goodlatte noted, even President Obama has expressed a willingness to limit frivolous lawsuits. If the President is serious about stopping these meritless claims, he will support mandatory sanctions for frivolous lawsuits to avoid making frivolous promises.

LARA requires lawyers who file frivolous lawsuits to pay the attorneys' fees and court costs for innocent defendants. Further, LARA expressly provides that no changes ``shall be construed to bar or impede the assertion or development of new claims, defenses, or remedies under Federal, State, or local laws, including civil rights laws or under the Constitution of the United States.'' So civil rights law would not be affected in any way by LARA.

Opponents often argue that reinstating mandatory sanctions for frivolous lawsuits impedes judicial discretion, but this is not true. Under LARA, judges retain the discretion to determine whether or not a claim is frivolous. If a judge determines at their discretion that a claim is frivolous, they must award sanctions. This ensures that victims of frivolous lawsuits obtain compensation, but the decision to find a claim frivolous remains with the judge.

LARA applies to both plaintiffs and defendants. It applies to cases brought by individuals, as well as by businesses, including business claims filed to harass competitors and illicitly gain market share.

The American people are looking for solutions to obvious problems to lawsuit abuse. LARA restores accountability to our legal system by reinstating mandatory sanctions for attorneys who file frivolous lawsuits. Though it will not stop all lawsuit abuse, LARA encourages attorneys to think twice before filing a frivolous lawsuit.

I thank Chairman Goodlatte again for bringing this much-needed legislation to the House floor, and I ask my colleagues who oppose frivolous lawsuits and who want to protect hardworking Americans from false claims to support the Lawsuit Abuse Reduction Act.

Madam Speaker, I want to make one other point, and this goes to the earlier discussion we just had about judicial surveys.

751 Federal judges responded to the 1990 survey in which they overwhelmingly supported a rule 11 with mandatory sanctions. In the 2005 survey, only 278 judges responded, and over half of the judges who responded to the 2005 survey had no experience whatsoever under the stronger rule 11 because they were appointed to the bench after 1992. So the 2005 survey tells us very little about how judges comparatively view the stronger versus the weaker rule 11.

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