The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is apparently gearing up for a new round of legislative fights over the nation’s civil justice system. The Chamber’s Institute for Legal Reform has unveiled a slick new PR campaign to convince Americans that the little guy, and not, say, the enormous corporations that fund the campaign, is at risk of personal disaster at the hands of a greedy trial lawyer. Not surprisingly, the campaign is headlined by the now-famous Chungs, the owners of a D.C. dry cleaners sued for $54 million for losing a man’s pants.
The Chamber raised more than $70,000 for the Chungs’ legal bills, and has turned them into the poster children that corporate America has been waiting years to find. They are featured prominently in YouTube videos and Internet ads that link to the Chamber-sponsored site I Am Lawsuit Abuse. What happened to the Chungs is tragic and indefensible. It’s also extremely rare, and very little of the Chamber’s legal “reform” agenda would have prevented it, either.
While the medium is new for the Chamber, the new lawsuit abuse videos consist of the same old corporate propaganda bashing the civil justice system, and most of it is highly misleading. One of the segments features a “victim” that was actually a plaintiff in a lawsuit. Particularly egregious is a video of a Georgia professor who specializes in studying “play.” She sweetly contends lawsuits are making children obese because they’ve taken dangerous playground equipment out of the school yard. The junk food companies that fund the Chamber should be especially pleased with that one.
