Greedy Trial Lawyer
Frivolous Lawsuits Versus Frivolous Defenses
Category: In Your Face
Someone has posted an extremely fair and balanced article about Frivolous Lawsuits and Defenses on Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. I appreciate the even-handed discription of two concepts. My personal estimate would be that for every legitimate lawsuit there is at least one or two Frivolous Defenses filed. Yet, this national blight on our system of justice goes largely unreported.
"Frivolous lawsuits" is a phrase that refers to actions at law or "lawsuits" that lack legal or factual merit or have only marginal legal or factual merit. The phrase is somewhat amorphous and prone to interpretation (e.g. what one person considers to be frivilous another may consider to have merit).Any discussion of frivolous lawsuits warrants equal time discussing "frivolous defenses." "Frivolous defenses" refers to any position taken by a defendant in a legal action or lawsuit that lacks factual or legal merit or has only marginal factual or legal merit. It is often associated with positions taken by the criminally accused, where innovative or so called "twinkie" defenses are raised by a defendant in a desperate attempt to avoid responsibility for a criminal act. Frivilous defenses are also commonly motivated by the insurance and medical industry as an attempt to statistically reduce or prevent payment on bodily injury claims and lawsuits.
Frivolous lawsuits and frivolous defenses are equally harmful to the legal system and society. Frivolous defenses in particular perpetuate a systematic avoidance of basic accountability when our society's laws of responsibility have been breached. Frivolous defenses increase the cost of litigation and clog the court system, and often wastefully enrich defense law firms and defense oriented expert witnesses (particularly in bodily injury and medical malpractice litigation where expert witness testimony is nearly always required to address the issues), and often force the loss or abandonment of an otherwise legitimate lawsuit or claim. Frivolous defenses also systematically erode at basic civic lessons taught early in life (e.g. to accept responsibility for one's actions rather than deny or deflect responsibility) and encourage irresponsible conduct in adults, professionals, and corporate leadership.
In recent years the insurance and medical industry has capitalized on the phrase "frivolous lawsuits" and has incorporated it into modern political and social lexicon as a form of propoganda. Still in more recent years, the phrase "frivolous defenses" has also gained recognition as identifying a widespread and common problem of responsibility avoidance in our justice system and society at large.
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