The junk science on display in the American Tort Reform Association's annual "judicial hellhole" study -- remember, Adam Liptak documented how the rankings are meaningless because the underlying survey has no actual validity, which ATRA cheerfully admitted -- now propagates itself on Forbes.com. The business magazine's Web site reports today on the "worst places to get sued in America," listed by type of lawsuit. Writer William Pentland explains how he did the reporting:
Forbes.com asked the American Tort Reform Association (ATRA), which surveys hundreds of defense attorneys and corporate executives every year for its report on litigation abuse on "Judicial Hellholes," to list the places identified by the largest number of survey respondents as the worst possible places to be a defendant in particular types of lawsuits.
Alrighty then. Garbage in, garbage out. Which is too bad, because the idea behind the Forbes story is interesting and valid: to get beyond broad-brush statements about plaintiff-friendly jurisdictions and examine which are the worst, for example, in medical malpractice or products liability. A sidebar gives answers to those questions (sticking with our two examples): Miami and Chicago, respectively, and supposedly, but not really, because the ATRA survey list is a self-selecting anecdote generator whose results are meaningless. (Via Overlawyered.com, which puts a decidedly more positive spin on the report.)
