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Practice Tip: One Trick Against Getting Stuck in 'Magic Jurisdictions'
South Florida. Rio Grand Valley and Gulf Coast, TX. West Virginia. Cook County, Madison County, and St. Clair County, IL. Ask most Americans what the connection is between those disparate places and you will probably get quizzical looks. Ask most product liability defense attorneys (or their multinational clients), however, and you may get looks of frustration, anger, possibly even apprehension. According to a 2006 report by the American Tort Reform Foundation, those jurisdictions are so-called 'Judicial Hellholes',' which are 'places where judges systematically apply laws and court procedures in an unfair and unbalanced manner, generally against defendants in civil litigations.' See www.atra.org/reports/hellholes at 1.
The above-mentioned jurisdictions have been labeled 'Judicial Hellholes' for many reasons, including discovery abuse, unfair rulings regarding consolidation and joinder, improper class certification, excessive damages awards, the admission of 'junk science' expert testimony, the uneven application of evidentiary rules, biased jury instructions, the unreasonable expansion of liability under consumer protection statutes, and trial lawyer contributions to locally elected judges. Id. at 2.
One attorney's 'Judicial Hellhole,' however, is another attorney's 'magic jurisdiction' ' a jurisdiction that draws personal injury lawyers to it like a magnet, with expectations of favorable treatment, a plaintiff-oriented jury, and large damage awards even when there is little or no connection between a case and the jurisdiction. Id. at 1. This type of extreme forum shopping is an issue for multinational corporations that are subject to mass product liability litigation ' from vehicle manufacturers to chemical companies to pharmaceutical firms to just about every commercial entity that ever put asbestos into one of its products. See generally Id.
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