Legal Blog Watch has a new post from Robert J. Ambrogi up today summarizing the latest edition of the American Tort Reform Association‘s annual “Judicial Hellholes” rankings for 2008-09 (see the link on the executive summary page for the full report). Class action lawyers won’t be too surprised by the “honorees” on this year’s list. One item of note was that Madison County, Illinois, once the standardbearer for “judicial hellholes” has stayed off the list for the second year in a row, although it’s still on the organization’s “watch list.”
I found the comments to Ambrogi’s post interesting. One commenter questioned whether it was appropriate for Law.com to be endorsing the views of such a “radical corporate propaganda machine” as the ATRA (Legal Blog Watch is part of the Law.com Legal Blog Network). This prompted a response from another reader that the article was appropriate in the spirit of fostering healthy debate and that the American Association for Justice (formerly ATLA) is viewed by some as being just as radical as the ATRA. I’m not going to weigh in on that dispute, but I will be checking back to see whether Legal Blog Watch ever publishes an AAJ “generous dispensers of recompense” list.
[…] to compete with the ATRA’s list of “judicial hellholes,” as I very seriously suggested yesterday. But the AAJ did send an email response to Robert J. Ambrogi of Legal Blog Watch in response to […]
[…] actions with some practical tips for defense lawyers. Standard Fire, he argued, is proof that judicial hellholes still exist. He pointed to Amgen as an example of the dangers of accepting conventional wisdom, […]