Today, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce released a report complaining about lawsuit abuse, and the American Association for Justice released a report complaining about corporate misconduct. Look at the links below and see if you can figure out why trial lawyers aren’t “winning hearts and minds.”
Click here (PDF) for the Chamber's report, "Selling Lawsuits, Buying Trouble," by Skadden partners John Beisner and Jessica Miller and counsel Gary Rubin. Click here (PDF) for the report from the American Association for Justice, titled "They Knew and Failed To."
The Chamber put together a slick, professional report that oozes class. The AAJ put together a coloring book. I don’t mean to be harsh, but look at the difference in quality between the two products.
The Chamber put theirs together in Quark Xpress 6.5. They’re a couple versions behind, but Quark Xpress is top-notch desktop publishing software.
The AAJ put theirs together in Microsoft Word, probably Word 2003. Word is undoubtedly the best word processor out there, but it’s crap for desktop publishing. You simply can’t make a document in Word look as good as one done in Quark.
How do I know what software they used? It’s in the metadata. I laughed when I saw that the Chamber cleared their metadata such as the name of the author; they probably learned the importance of doing that after their members produced documents with damning metadata in them. The AAJ, on the other hand, did not clear their metadata. The metadata they left behind tells me that this document is little more than a repackaging of a previous AAJ article, “Cases that Made a Difference.”
My biggest complaint with the AAJ piece isn’t the coloring-book cover, or the mediocre publishing format. It’s the title. “They knew and failed to…” Failed to what? Failed to stop selling the product? Failed to fix the defect? Failed to be decent human beings? I have no idea because they don’t tell me. Even a clichéd title like “Making a killing” would have been an improvement.
The content of the AAJ piece is pretty good – other than the stuff from the 1970’s and 1980’s that no one cares about anymore. Dalkon Shield? Horrible, terrible, and evil. And entirely irrelevant to anyone under 40. Try asking a 30 year old what an IUD is and you’re going to hear something like “one of those bombs they use on the road in Iraq.” Similarly, the Copper-7 thing doesn’t resonate, either. (And neither does the document that was quoted under the Copper-7 paragraph. *I* had to read it two times to see what was so bad about it.)
The bit about Renu would have been greatly improved by one picture of a guy with one eye, or a picture of an infected eye. Even better if it were followed up with some of the nasty internal Renu docs, or even an excerpt from one of the FDA reports. The article totally dropped the ball on Trasylol. It left out the most important part of the Trasylol story – that the competing drug was completely safe, and cost 1 tenth of the price as Trasylol. The Avandia part lacked punch, too.
The entire document just doesn’t look like it was put together by a multimillion-dollar lobbying organization. The stakes are too high not to hire typographers and desktop publishing experts to put these things together.
So many of the things that trial lawyers (and not just the AAJ) are amateurish or lack polish. The Chamber and other tort “reform” whores, on the other hand, spend the money to put out stuff that looks impressive. I mean, the Chamber’s latest doc is screaming to be printed on 110lb glossy paper.
As always, I’m willing to volunteer my time and resources for free to the AAJ or any other group who wants my help. And as always, my inbox will remain empty.
