For the second year in a row Pennsylvania has landed on the top of the American Tort Reform Association’s (ATRA) 2023/24 shameful pile of “Judicial Hellholes,” courtesy of the anti-business fervor of two of its courts.
Philadelphia’s Court of Common Pleas and the Pennsylvania Supreme Court are not only guilty of awarding and sustaining excessive verdicts (nuclear verdicts) but encouraging plaintiffs’ lawyers to file lawsuits in permissive jurisdictions (namely Philadelphia), even if the alleged injury in the case occurred outside the county, and sometimes even outside the state.
“Lawsuit abuse is an absolute plague in Pennsylvania and this latest report is just more proof of that,” said PMA President & CEO David N. Taylor. “By ending the common-sense rule that a medical malpractice lawsuit should be heard in the county where the harm is alleged to have occurred, our activist Supreme Court is reigniting an insurance crisis for our doctors, hospitals, and patients. Pennsylvania already has a state lottery, so let’s just have the courts apply our laws as written.”
This year, Pennsylvania tied at the top of the Judicial Hellhole ranking with Georgia, whose Supreme Court is likewise notorious for its nuclear verdicts.
The excessive tort costs destroy billions in economic activity in Pennsylvania each year, ATRA says citing a recent study.
“Pennsylvania residents pay a ‘tort tax’ of $1,391.33 and 171,091 jobs are lost each year according to a study by The Perryman Group,” the ATRA report said. “If Pennsylvania enacted specific reforms targeting lawsuit abuse, the state would increase its gross product by $18.04 billion.”
The only businesses thriving under this unbalanced court system are the plaintiffs’ lawyers and the TV outlets and billboard companies reaping millions to run their ads.
“In 2022, trial lawyers spent more than $92 million to air approximately 765,000 local legal services television advertisements across Pennsylvania’s media markets,” ATRA notes.
Reacting to the report, Curt Schroder, Executive Director of the Pennsylvania Coalition for Civil Justice Reform (PCCJR), said that in 2023 alone, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court issued multiple decisions that expanded the liability exposure for businesses, health care providers, and others.
“This expansion is set against the backdrop of a recent trend of nuclear verdicts ($10 million+) and thermonuclear verdicts ($100 million+) in Philadelphia courts,” Schroder posted on the PCCJR website. “In the past 12 months, Philadelphia courts awarded damages out of proportion to actual harm in at least eight cases.”
In one case that will almost certainly increase exposure for businesses by further loosening restrictions on venue, the Supreme Court in Hangey v. Husqvarna Professional Products permitted the filing of a lawsuit, “stemming from a lawn mower accident, in Philadelphia even though the plaintiff purchased the equipment in Bucks County and was injured in Wayne County.
“The manufacturer was not registered to do business in Philadelphia,” the ATRA report noted, “had no warehouses or other facilities, no address or telephone numbers, no property, and no employees or officers there. Just 0.005% of the manufacturer’s sales took place in Philadelphia.”
And in August 2022, Pennsylvania Supreme Court wiped out a 20-year-old venue rule that restricted the filing of medical malpractice cases in the counties where the plaintiff claimed the injury occurred.
The elimination of the venue restriction, Schroder noted, has already led to “a sharp increase in cases filed in Philadelphia’s high-verdict jurisdiction. The 501 medical malpractice cases filed in Philadelphia as of the end of November 2023 is almost twice the number filed in 2022.”
“PCCJR has long warned that the scales of justice in Pennsylvania’s civil justice environment are becoming increasingly tilted and trending in a negative and unfair direction for job creators and the health care community,” he added. “PCCJR will continue to work for legislative and judicial balance in our laws and civil justice system.”