Trial lawyers getting you down? Disgusted at the huge settlements they win, supposedly on behalf of the little guy, really for the sake of lining their bulging pockets with a third of whatever the insurance companies are made to fork over?
No, I don’t have a solution, other than to say if wishes were horses there would be an immediate cap on settlements and lawyers would have to make due with a much smaller contingency fee. But I do have, courtesy of a public-spirited friend, a simple, painless way to cause at least some law firms a modicum of inconvenience and expense.
You know those ads on Google? You search for “Peach Pie,” say, and running down the right side of the screen are a bunch of ads for recipes, peaches, and what not. All of those ads are paid notices. Every time someone clicks on them, Google gets a sum — quite a substantial sum, I understand, in the case of the ones near the top.
So here’s what you do. Search for something like “asbestos” or “mesothelioma” (an icky lung disease caused by exposure to asbestos) and up will pop a zillion articles about it and , along the right side, a bunch of ads for law firms angling for your business. Have a spare moment? Click on the top several. Do it more than once. Every time you click, they pay. No, it won’t make them go away, but it will register your irritation and, besides, anything that causes the trial lawyers inconvenience should be regarded as a public-spirited act. So go ahead: occupy an idle moment charging the trial lawyers. You’ll be glad you did. And encourage your friends to do likewise.
By the way, readers wanting to educate themselves about the costs and absurdities of our overly litigious society should be sure to check out the excellent web site overlawyered.com which, as its tagline puts it, chronicles “the high cost of our legal system.” After you peruse some of the articles there, you’ll probably come back to “mesothelioma” on Google and click a bunch more ads.
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17 Comments
1. SodaJerk:POSTAGE PAID BY ADDRESSEE IF MAILED IN THE UNITED STATES
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A variant of the “Google” ads pastime mentioned above has been a hobby of mine for several years.
You know all those annoying postcards or return envelopes “embedded” within magazines (one particular national mag often has 6 of them included…some loose, some cutouts)?
You’re probably also familiar with these same items included with junk mail.
Well, the vast majority of these items feature free return postage.(Heh, heh).
In your spare time, just collect the postcards, seal the envelopes and return them all to the sender. Don’t include anything, don’t write your address on it or anything.(Nothing says you have to). Just mail them in blank. Destination address is already included. Post office will do the rest. A typcial household, I project, could easily send out 2 dozen of these items a month.
If your having a particularly bad day, you can actually fill the envelopes to bursting with their own blank forms thus incurring a higher postage charge for the addressee. That national “Sweepstakes” company is particularly good for this since the junk it mails must weigh a pound easily.
The beneficiary of these actions is the US Postal “Service” since they collect for each item delivered.
Since I’m on the subject: here’s another variant of the above.
I’m in the habit of answering all emails, particularly those from Nigerian princes and Heads of State and similar communications assuring me of vast riches if only I…….
What I do is “lead them on”. When it gets time for me to send them my bank account number and so on, I readily comply…..except all the numbers and addresses etc I send them are totally fictitious.
It must be terribly frustrating for these jailbirds to finally come to the realization that they’ve been duped and they’ve wasted a lot of time for nothing.
Oct 4, 2009 - 9:42 am 2. Marc:I do something similar. There are some org’s that I detest. AARP is a leading one. I either send their envelopes back empty or like last week I sent them back a beg letter from WWF. Beg letters from other unwanted groups go in also.
Oct 4, 2009 - 5:57 pm 3. biblio44:“Click on the top several. Do it more than once. Every time you click, they pay.”
Mad at Obama? Call a pizza parlor and have them deliver a pie to the White House. Have a bunch of pies delivered! Mad about drug prices? Call your pharmacy and ask if they have Prince Albert in a can! What fun!
Thanks for the ideas, Rog. Now the Tea Baggers have something to do between rallies.
Oct 4, 2009 - 6:22 pm 4. Pajamas Media » Your Own Private Tort Reform:[...] Read the entire piece here. [...]
Oct 5, 2009 - 2:20 am 5. Gary S.:“Every time someone clicks on them, Google gets a sum”
Then all you’re doing is transferring money from one creepy left-wing organization to another.
Yahoo has a search engine with sponsored links. As far as I know, their management is not guilty of endorsing or contributing to liberal political causes. And it’s not your grandpa’s Yahoo–it really is a good search engine in my opinion nowadays.
If Yahoo is also married to the left, please say so.
Oct 5, 2009 - 3:28 am 6. Che:The end does not justify the means. Wrong is wrong, no matter how easy it is to do. Sorry guys and gals, but this is just plain wrong.
Oct 5, 2009 - 4:48 am 7. BackwardsBoy:While this can be good, clean fun, (I’ll try it a few times) few Americans are aware of the true costs that trial lawyers add to everyday items. We’re just now hearing how “defensive medicine” is practiced in preparation for a lawsuit that may or may not be real and how much that adds to the price of health care. An additional estimated twenty percent added to the cost of healthcare is essentially a “lawyer tax”. What do you get in return for that extra cost?
Oct 5, 2009 - 5:12 am 8. Michael Kirsch, M.D:While everyone of us is suffering from metastatic litigation, no one feels the pain more acutely than the medical profession. (See http://www.MDWhistleblower.blogspot.com under Legal Quality category.) The only stakeholder who wants to preserve it is the one who is enriched by it. Would physicians stifle a new medical breakthrough which would prevent illness because it would be ‘bad for business’?
Oct 5, 2009 - 5:37 am 9. myth buster:I’ve seen ads suggesting Google pays people to run this scam, and it is a scam, albeit a legal one, because the people clicking on the ads have a 0% chance of buying anything. Caveat emptor, yes, but I still don’t like the idea of hiring people to do that sort of thing.
As for Google as an enterprise, despite the underhanded tactics and questionable ethics, it is a publicly traded corporation, which makes it much more vulnerable to popular opinion than these privately held law firms.
Oct 5, 2009 - 7:49 am 10. Michael:biblio, please at least try to add something to the conversation besides your well known hatred of everyone on this site. Che, there is no social contract between mass mailers and the irritated consumer. I don’t see any wrong there.
Unfortuantly the lawyers are a necessary evil in society but they have gone out of control to the point they don’t even try to justify the damage they do to this country. Control of the out of control lawyers would reduce the cost of living in the US by at least 10%. (That is probably an underestimation.)
Oct 5, 2009 - 8:01 am 11. Harris Tweed:Maybe President Obama and the progressive Democrats could do something to reduce our “lawyer footprint,” to reverse “litigation warming,” and to limit “global suing”?
Oct 5, 2009 - 8:55 am 12. John:If you are going to do this, you should be aware that clicking several links at the same time, or clicking one link several times, will trigger a google alarm and they will determine that they were phony clicks and the advertiser won’t be charged anything. More than 2 or 3 clicks is enough to trigger the google guardians.
Oct 5, 2009 - 9:05 am 13. jWarrior:Sodajerk is right. The postage paid envelopes cost the recipient close to a dollar apiece. If you are feeling real mean, you can put a bit of fine sand or dust in them which will mess up the machines that open the envelopes. You can also mark “Refused – return to sender” on mail and get it sent back at the sender’s expense. Of course, if you put yourself on the Do Not Junk Mail list, you won’t get so much.
Oct 5, 2009 - 9:39 am 14. Poor Citizen:Great Article and it does work. And, I hope they include Tort reform in the health care bill. Thanks!
Oct 5, 2009 - 11:28 am 15. ZombiBoy:My favorite mail pastime was to return credit card solicitation disclosure pages with “F*#k You” written over the interest rate and fees. Stuff like APR 19-32%, “we can change your interest rate at any time for any reason”, “we will apply a default rate of a bubbazillion percent if you enter a late payment on this or ANY account”.
Oct 5, 2009 - 3:23 pm 16. lefroy:Man, that stuff still makes me laugh.
Most nations find it hard to accept that when something is done differently elsewhere, it might also, just occasionally, be done better, but in the US it is the national vice. That americans cannot see and correct the destructive idiocy of their tort law system is wondrous to behold. It is the reason no sensible compromise can be found in the health care debate (why are the people of New York taxed at welfare state levels, but get nothing like the welfare state in return?). Worse, absurd jury verdicts inflated by statutory sanction of punitive damages awards have brought whole industries undone – the light aircraft industry is one, but there are many other more significant examples. And when industry tries to draw attention to this idiocy, the reaction is olympic standard navel gazing.
Oct 5, 2009 - 8:15 pm 17. NC Mountain Girl:Call the 800 numbers, too.
A very effective drug I was using to treat a chronic condition was taken off the market because the tort bar began to file suits about alleged side effects and the maker panicked. My MD, a nationally known expert on the condition, told me most of the problems were both exaggerated in number and easily prevented had the patients gone in for the recommended screening tests the first year on the medication.
Everytime I saw an ad asking “If you used xxx, you may be entitled to…” I called the 800 number, said I had used xxx and asked if they were going to compensate me because they may have shortened my life by forcing it off the market.
Oct 8, 2009 - 12:42 pm