No win, no fee

One of the things I noticed back in England was that all of a sudden there seem to be commercials for ambulance chasers. You know, the lawyers who flock around accident victims looking for someone to sue. One of the things Brits love to mock the Americans over is their propensity for litigation, not living in a litigious society gives Brits a sense of moral superiority. However the real reason Britain has never been a litgious society is that it was actually illegal for lawyers to work for a client on a no win no fee basis. This meant, for all intents and purposes, that only the wealthiest people could afford to sue anyone, even for really obvious things. But now it seems that changes to the law allow this and hence the commercials for ambulance chasers on TV and a marked increase in Brits looking for someone to sue.

As a Brit one of the consequences of living in the USA for ten years now is I find myself increasingly adopting a litigious attitude. I suppose its better than wanting to settle things "outside" as it were, after all the law is supposed to be there to protect those unable or unwilling to fight physically for protection. This increasing desire to find people to sue is somewhat bothersome to me, however I believe I have found a great example where a class action suit seems to just the ticket and all it is waiting for is an enterprising firm of lawyers ready to bite the bullet.

I think that there should be a class action suit for regular car owners against car companies for promoting safety of SUV class vehicles at the expense and personal risk of regular car drivers. As I've pointed out before, in a side impact of car vs SUV the car driver is six times more likely to die than in a car to car collision. The net consequence of this is that car drivers end up paying higher insurance rates than SUV owners because their cars are now statistically less safe (oh, and they die more often of course). There's some very contorted and misleading logic going on here that allows auto companies to market and promote SUVs as safer while not being required to mention the net effect on regular car drivers. Just like with the tabacco industry, I think its the kind of thing that only the fear of grave financial injury can persuade the auto companies to change their ways.

Of course while I'm on the subject it goes without saying I should mention that Detroit and Texas love SUVs because a) being essentially low tech beasts, they have much higher profit margins than regular cars, and b) they guzzle more gas than they should if some of that profit margin was pumped into building more fuel efficient SUVs. But neither of these things are ones that would probably fuel a successful class action suit - when it comes down to litigation it is only money and consumers in body bags that count.