Sometimes I understand people who hate lawyers

[pecunium]

I am not, as a rule, opposed to class action suits. I think the hurdles of pressing a claim against an orgainzation/corporation which has lots of money, and lawyers on retainer make it really difficult to get redress.

Add the relative costs (a million dollars, hell half a million, would change my life hugely; ConAgra would be coughing up pocket change) and the ability to impose conditions on settlements (gag-orders) and massive action is sometimes the only thing which can change the behavior of a company (can we say Ford Pinto?... I knew we could).

So the ads for people to sign onto such suits are things I am conflicted about (because I know the lawyers make a whole lot more money for enrolling more people, and the people seem to get less).

Today, however, I saw one which I think is frivolous, was for Steven's Johnson's Symndrome.

Steven's Johnson's is nasty. It's horrible. It's disfuguring, and can be fatal. I have some familiarity with it.

Here's the thing... it an allergic reaction. Yes, it's more common than is often understood, and when it shows up it's often not undertstood, and can be missed until serious damage is done.

However, it's not as if this is something the drug companies (since I don't think a class action suit against individual doctors is going to bring much money) can be blamed for. It's not common. It's not something I expect to have shown up as a real risk in trials.

It's not linked to any specific drug (though some drug's are more prone to causing it... drugs like the sulfa family, in which the usaal allergic reaction is dermal inflammation). There are no obvious predispositions.

So this is probably a bullshit suit, a scam to convince people who are really suffering (imagine large chunks of your skin sloughing off, or becoming blind, losing your sense of smell, etc.) that it was some act of tortuous negligence which deserves compensation.

It's something which a jury will be sympathetic too (children are more strongly affected when afflicted), so the companies might be willing to settle on; even though they aren't, IMO, though IANAL, culpable.

And, I'll wager none of them, if a settlement is reached, will see more than a couple of thousand dollars. It's selling false hope to people who are suffering, and using them to line the lawyers pockets.

Comments

[batwrangler.livejournal.com]

My mother suffered horribly from SJS while undergoing chemotherapy, but if I felt inclined to sue anyone, it would have been her doctors who either failed to recognize what was going on or simply lied to us about it. Certainly the number of lives saved by the drug she reacted to is far greater than the number of people harmed by it, and I think she would agree, if she hadn't succumbed to lymphoma.

[sunfell.livejournal.com]

I read your '03 post- damn! That had to be scary.

I remember seeing a Discovery Health Medical Mysteries segment on the same thing- this girl's skin sloughed off, and she had to be treated as a burn victim until the skin grew back.

Did they ever figure out which drug you were allergic to?

And I agree with your thought that this is just for lawyers- people who could really use the money will be left high and dry.

[slave2tehtink.livejournal.com]

I am cynical enough to think that pretty much all class action suits only benefit the lawyers, in the end. I've been an inadvertent party to one or two, and I'm betting that my returns (less than ~$10 except in the case of the credit card exchange rate thing, and still even then) were FAR FAR lower than what those lawyers saw. They weren't out to correct a social injustice, they were just out to get rich.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

We were certain from the get-go... it just took days to rule out the other possibilities. I am, deathly, allergic to sulfa drugs.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

I disagee. They only provde real money to the lawyers (and I think the billing system is evil, but that's a differet rant.... fees ought to come out of contingent payments. Taking 30 percent of a ten million dollar payout and then tacking on 500,000 in fees is insult to injury. No, the upfront costs aren't something the plaintiff could pay, but the lawyers know in advance about what they are going to be), but the rest of us benefit.

Corporations have no concsience. Law and regulation force them act in sociopathic ways (they are required to get, maximal, not reasonable, profit for investors; that change in regulation puts them in a bind.... the law requires them to be abusive to the public).

The McDonald's Coffee Case (which was a perfectly legitimate, even textbook example of a Good Tort case) came about because the McDonald's in question was knowingly keeping the coffee at a dangerous temperature because it meant they could go a few minutes longer between making new pots of coffee.

The Ford Pinto was manufactured with a known design flaw. Ford decided it would be cheaper to pay the individual claims than to insert an inexpensive washer to prevent gas tank ruptures on collision. Reports have it they did insert such a washer on the Mustang, because they expected them to crash more often.

Class action lawsuits are the difference between a traffic ticket, and jail time.

Somehow we have to find a way to actually hurt companies who are reckless with the public. Right now all we have is massive fines. The only way to get massive fines, is class action suits.

The problem is the low, direct, payout, to those who are personally harmed.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

It wasn't as scary as it ought to have been. I didn't figure out how much risk there actually was. I was at risk of sloughing, and the "burn plane" from Ft. Sam Houston had been alerted I might be on my way.

Now, looking back... well you really don't want to be the subject of a medical monograph.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

That's some scary s**t.

I have the same mixed feelings you do about class-action suits. However, I find that many people who complain about lawyers' fees don't realize (and I'm sure this is not the case with you) that in almost all personal-injury suits, if the plaintiff doesn't win, the lawyer gets nothing. Certainly lawyers don't take cases they don't think they can win, but judges and juries are unpredictable, and sometimes lawyers wind up doing hundreds, thousands, of hours of work and collecting nothing.

[songblaze.livejournal.com]

The thing about SJS is that there are some drugs on which there IS a high rate of SJS and the companies do (or should) know about it. For example, nowadays doctors start you on an extremely low dose of Lamictal and slowly build you up because it's one of the worst risks for SJS. It's also one of the best drugs around for treating bipolar. If it's started at low doses and slowly raised, then the risk of SJS is dramatically reduced - I believe that the new protocol had 10% the number of cases as the original protocol.

That is something that the drug companies ought to be responsible for, IMO.

Also, the thing about class action law suits is that they are a HUGE gamble for a law firm. The costs in putting one together are astronomical, and can bankrupt a firm. No exaggeration. I'm not sure if you've seen Erin Brockovitch - at one point, the lawyer on the case says that he's taken a second mortgage on his house among other things to keep the case going. That really happens. So...I'm kind of torn on the issue of fees. The thing about class action suits is that firms tend to specialize in them, and those firms are among the riskiest for stability - they go under more often than firms in other areas of law. Is it a good system? Maybe not. But a lawyer's gotta eat, too.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Yes, and no.

There are no small number of personal injury lawyers who end up with 90 percent of the judgement, because fees come out of the plaintiff's percentage.

While it's a gamble, on of the things a personal injury lawyer/firm who works on contingincey gets very good at is knowing which cases are winners, which are sure losers and which are in the risky but worth it category.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

I am not against the lawyer eating. I know lots of lawyers, almost went into paralegal work; because I like the field.

But I don't think this is a really good case for class action. Your example shows an awareness, and mitigation, of the risk. I don't wan't sulfasalazine (the specific drug that put me in the hospital as a side effect of trying to keep me out of the hospital). Even with the side effect the three weeks I was on it made a huge difference in my quality of life (and it used the progressive dosing; sulfa drugs as a class are high risk for SJS).

One of the problems with drugs is the scalar nature of things. Longitudinal studies, of great length, are needed to find out about some of these things. If, and I will stipulate that it's not always a good bet, the companies fielding the drug have done studies in good faith, with honest protocols then the liability for the unforseen/unforseeable, side effects ought to be less.

If they cover things up, push for off-label uses without study, etc., nail them to the wall; sell their patents and use the money to pay people who were harmed, and all the other things which can be done to try and make them behave in a manner which doesn't threaten the public (I am a firm believer the law, and lawyers, are a boon to society).

I'm just a little incredulous there is a reasonable assumption that the risks of SJS were so obivious that studies of prevalence needed to be done, and that, in the cases where it is a real risk, mitigational protocols of treatment weren't promulgated.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure what you mean by "fees"--out-of-pocket expenses? The lawyers I know use the word "fees" to mean what the client pays them for services--which in the case of personal injury is the percentage of the award if they win, and nothing if they lose.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

A large number of personal injury lawyers have a contingency structure in which fees are not billed if the client loses.

If the client wins, the fees are charged, and the client pays them, in addition to the amount the att'y/firm collects as its portion of the settlement.

I am not certain if this is the case in class action suits as well.

[songblaze.livejournal.com]

Ah, but if you read my example, you'll see that it says 'nowadays' - the dosing of Lamictal has changed radically from when it was first marketed. Shouldn't the people who were subjected to that 10x risk be able to hold the drug company accountable? I would say so. The more recent cases of SJS from Lamictal? I would agree that perhaps they should be able to go after the doctors who didn't warn them of the potential and/or misdiagnosed/mistreated it - that's why malpractice insurance exists, because doctors do make mistakes - but the drug companies, no.

OTOH, I agree with you that the sulfa drugs are of far more benefit than risk. They are, as I recall, far less likely to cause SJS than Lamictal is. They're also a generic and as antibiotics go relatively inexpensive. (Incidentally, I'm also allergic to them - reading your account of your allergic reaction, I wonder if I was perhaps in the early stages of that. I had that disorienting not-feeling-ok and then the spots on my torso, which very quickly became incredibly tender, lobster red skin from neck to toes, but that was after I think 1 1/2 day's worth of sulfa pills, I think 4.)

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

- the dosing of Lamictal has changed radically from when it was first marketed. Shouldn't the people who were subjected to that 10x risk be able to hold the drug company accountable?

Maybe. If (and this is, of course) all speculation, there is some evidence the companies had warning of the tendencies, and hid them; of course.

I'm just not convinced the information of the risk was there. Puts me in a bind, and I'd have to look at the numbers, so I had some sense of prevalence. There may be merit to the case, but I'll take some persuading. It doesn't help the ad is a blanket, asking anyone who has ever had an SJS reaction to apply.

As to sulfa, yes, it sounds as if you were having a mild reaction. Not all sulfa drugs are generic. The family is less used a general anti-biotic, but the anti-inflammitory properties are really interesting wirh dealing with various arthritis family diseases (which is ironic when the nature of the usual reaction is inflammation of the skin).

[songblaze.livejournal.com]

Hah! I actually was just almost given Celebrex a few days ago. The doc had the box on the desk and was about to hand it to me when he realized he hadn't asked me about allergies. Quite annoying, really, as I have stomach issues that keep me from taking much in the way of NSAIDs and they don't want to add steroids to my cocktail of pills (for the trouble with my ribs that went away with physio but seems to have returned).

I'm not saying it's a perfect case for Lamictal, I'm just saying there's some possibility of it being a viable case in which the drug companies should've been responsible. Part of a class action is just getting to having discovery so you CAN find out just how much the company knew, after all. Doubt we'll find any smoking-gun memos like the ones in big tobacco or the Ford Pinto cases. But yeah, the blanket ads always make me wrinkle my nose, I'll agree with you on that one.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Depends on the blanket ads.

I suspect my real beef is with a system which has become so mis-balanced that the law firms can't afford the suit without the promise of the payout a class action suit can generate, just to get discovery.

So that a person who has a real claim to damage has to subsume themselves into a class, and; functionally, lose the redress they deserve.

So the folks with asbestos induced mesothelioma, get pennies, and the companies loose some moderate amount of a year's profit, and some partners get rich (and the smart one's stay rich, even when the firm folds... not a slam at lawyers; Ken Lay wasn't poor for a day while the peons starved, and Enron was rubble).

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

I asked my husband, a lawyer, about this, and he said he had never heard of a plaintiff-client paying fees in addition to a percentage of the settlement. A losing defendant may be assessed the plaintiff's lawyer's fees. But this is Minnesota; things may be different elsewhere.