Thursday, October 8, 2009

AND YET MORE REPUBLICAN HYPOCRISY (I'M SHOCKED! SHOCKED!) AND DEMOCRATIC HONESTY (FROM AL FRANKEN, ANOTHER DEM I'M DIGGIN')

This tells it best.

3 comments:

JIm said...

It is not surprising that the obnoxious Franken who scraped through the election with 49000 registrations supplied by ACORN, would appeal to liberals, who have defended ACORN’s methods for years. Franken displayed all the class that one would expect from someone who benefited from the efforts of a confrontational and criminal organization. And speaking of “Diggin”, it looks like the DA will be digging into a possible criminal investigation in Minnesota to ascertain whether ACORN acted criminally in the last election.

Franken attacked the Executive Director of The Council for Employment Law Equity for defending arbitration over litigation. There is no shock in the fact that Franken got his facts and statistics wrong.

“ Arbitration costs less than court litigation. Surveys conducted by organizations as diverse as Ernst and Young, Harris Interactive and the American Bar Association Section of Litigation demonstrate that arbitration participants, trial lawyers and in-house attorneys all believe that arbitration is significantly less expensive than court litigation.”

“Arbitrations are resolved more quickly than lawsuits. Bureau of Justice Statistics data on contract lawsuits show an average case duration of 25 months for jury trials and 18 months for bench trials. To compare, California consumer arbitration outcome data show an average duration of 4.35 months for claims filed by individuals against businesses and 5.60 months for claims filed by businesses against individuals.”

“Arbitrators are neutral and unbiased in deciding cases. Tanick speculates that arbitrators tend to favor business parties who arbitrate more often. Not so. The truth is that arbitrators provide the same outcomes -- in terms of "win rates" for different types of parties -- as do judges who decide similar cases in court.”
“This result holds true for consumer and employment cases, where individuals fare as well or better in arbitration as they do in court. “
http://www.startribune.com/business/11763816.html

tom said...

This is from a response in the year
2007 by Roger S. Haydock managing director for the National Arbitration Forum in Minneapolis

Perhaps not an entirely unbiased opinion. He was responding to a litagator - Marshall Tanick who clained that arbitrators were biased toward institutional partys.

Seems like it is just a pissing contest between guys on opposite side - both who make money from what method is chosen.

JIm said...

Tom,
I agree that the article involved folks who were in a pissing contest. However I also believe the economy and America would benefit from a system that encouraged, not required, arbitration over litigation. One of the goals of government take over of health care is to lower cost. Litigation raises the costs and leads to defensive medicine. If arbitration were encouraged along with caps on awards, it would go a long way in lowering costs for the economy as a whole and health care specifically.