Supporting Business Through the Courts.
New York continues to be one of the most powerful economic engines in the world. However, that position is under threat. New York’s courts, aided by the legislature, and often funded by plaintiffs lawyers, have created a hostile business environment.
There is an opportunity to improve New York’s business environment, our economy, and our quality of life through the courts.
That is the mission of the Center for Jurisprudence, to improve New York’s economy by ensuring that business has a voice in the courts.
Current Issues
Nuclear Verdicts
Big verdicts often garner big headlines, but those dollar figures often come down on appeal. Except when they don’t. Abetted by the practice of improper anchoring by plaintiffs attorneys, $1m+ ‘nuclear verdicts’ have become the norm. This leads to verdict inflation, straining our economy and the perception that the law can be a lottery.
Lawsuit Lending
Also known as litigation financing, lawsuit lending is the practice of lending money with a future judgment or verdict as collateral. Since the lenders do not get paid if the case loses, they are allowed to skirt lending law, including necessary consumer protections from usurious interest rates.
Construction Law
Labor Law 240, also known as the “scaffold law” is the most frequent source of litigation in New York. The law imposes absolute liability, but it arguably was never supposed to be that way. The courts interpreted the law that way and launched decades of the most hostile legal environment for construction in the history of the United States.
Expert Evidence
New York has some of the flimsiest, most disjointed rules for expert evidence in the nation. The courts frequently allow “trial by ambush,” junk science, and, in the case of medical lawsuits, do not even allow defendants to know who is testifying against them.
Fraud
New York is confronting two closely related forms of insurance fraud: staged auto accidents and staged construction-site accidents. Both schemes can involve deliberately manufactured incidents followed by claims for injuries, medical treatment, lost wages, or other damages. Common schemes include staged car crashes or construction accidents and falls, which then lead to inflated injuries, unnecessary or nonexistent medical treatment, runners who recruit accident participants, and fraudulent repair or wage-loss claims.
Asbestos
The arrest of disgraced former Speaker of the Assembly Sheldon Silver exposed the corruption in New York’s asbestos courts. Preferential treatment, priority access to juries, and more. Consistently cited as a “Judicial Hellhole” the New York’s asbestos courts continue to hamstring defendants, many of whom never manufactured asbestos at all.
Cybersecurity Liability
Cybersecurity issues are at the cutting edge of liability. Businesses, big and small, will face a growing number of cybersecurity-related lawsuits. The Center for Jurisprudence is committed to ensuring that consumer protections actually protect consumers.