Four years ago Madison County in the Metro East (the Illinois side of the St. Louis Metropolitan Area) was the national epicenter of lawsuit abuse. It was the home of what famously came to be called ‘Jackpot Justice’. It was a hard issue for much of the public to understand. They could not easily see the products that never came to market, the jobs that were lost, and the huge extra costs added to products and insurance to fund outrageous lottery-like verdicts.
But the trial lawyers had finally gone too far. Doctors were leaving the state, particularly in southern and northwestern Illinois, en masse because they could not afford the malpractice premiums – and the ruin that often ensued from even baseless suits. Some specialties almost vanished entirely. For a time, there was only one neurosurgeon in Illinois south of Springfield. Many insurance companies refused to offer malpractice insurance at any price to southern Illinois doctors. The region came within a month of having certain practices abolished entirely, such as kidney and renal specialists because NO insurance companies would cover them. Pregnant women in the Metro East struggled to get routine care: Illinois doctors were not taking new patients and Missouri doctors refused to accept Illinois patients because of the elevated risk of liability.
It was a terrible time to live in Belleville and develop a life-threatening neurological problem. But that’s exactly what happened to me. On Good Friday of 2003 I was stricken. The collapse of a disc in my neck deprived my spinal cord of fluid because of a congenital spinal deformity. I could barely walk. I could not stand for more than a few minutes without getting disoriented. I could not drive. Even riding in a car with someone else, going around the gentlest curve would send me into sickening waves of nausea. The pain on my right side was enormous. I needed surgery and I needed it quick. But it was not to be. First, there were dozens of defensive tests that had to be done. Even so, the situation was so dicey that my neurosurgeon was loathe to operate. I had to beg and sign dozens of papers acknowledging the risks – and do a few more tests. The day before my surgery was finally scheduled – two months after I had been stricken – my neurosurgeon’s partner pulled up stakes and moved his practice to Missouri, cutting his malpractice insurance to less than a third what it had been in Illinois.
Each day that surgery was delayed my condition got worse. By the time I finally was scheduled, my doctor’s best-case scenario was that I would be at least partially paralyzed as the damage to the nerves was too extensive and irreparable. Miraculously, I was not paralyzed. But my right leg always feels like it is on fire. Sometimes just a slow burn, sometimes an enormous, agonizing flare that knocks me off my feet. If, before Good Friday of 2003, I had felt on my worst day as much pain as I do on my best day since then, I would immediately have gone to the emergency room. Had the litigation atmosphere not postponed my surgery for so long, it is very likely I would not have suffered such lasting consequences. Even so, I was one of the lucky ones. I did not die waiting for surgery or for lack of a doctor. Quite a few people in Illinois, including in the Chicago area, have because of the lack of the right specialist within near proximity during an emergency event.
People whose eyes had glazed over when politicians spoke of tort reform snapped to attention when pregnant wives and daughters couldn’t get prenatal care, when sick relatives could not find the specialist they needed within two hundred miles, when entire hospitals were about to be closed because they could not get insurance any more. So there was revolt. Doctors, normally relatively non-political creatures, began carrying on mass protests on the courthouse steps in Madison and St. Clair Counties – bringing hundreds of their patients with them. Lawyers tried to shift blame to the insurance companies, but it was a hard case to make when the same insurance companies were gladly covering the same specialties for a small fraction of the cost just over the border in Missouri, Iowa and Wisconsin – places that did not have routine headlines about the multi-million-dollar verdicts lawyers were winning in their suits.
Enter the Chicago-based Illinois Civil Justice League (ICJL), which had for many years championed lawsuit reform. It had been a lonely voice patiently explaining the real costs of lawsuit abuse, mostly to yawns. People were not yawning now, though. In 2004, the ICJL put its money where its mouth was. It took the lead in raising both money and awareness about the campaign of Republican Lloyd Karmeier for the Fifth District seat on the Illinois Supreme Court. That district had not elected a Republican judge in several generations: it was viewed by many as the seat on the Supreme Court owned by the Illinois Trial Lawyers Assn. It was important not just for the seat itself, but because the elected member of the Supreme Court controls the appointments to vacancies in the Appellate and Circuit Courts in his district. A determined reform judge could break the back of ‘Jackpot Justice’ at Ground Zero of the problem. In the most expensive – and perhaps most bitterly fought – race in Supreme Court history, Karmeier prevailed. In a perfect coda, Karmeier’s vanquished opponent, Gordon Maag, the champion of the trial lawyers filed suit over his loss – too oblivious to understand his suit underscored the very point why he was ousted in the first place.
The trial lawyers had been rebuked and the crisis receded. It didn’t go away, but it sunk below public consciousness once more. Illinois remains one of the worst states in the country for job creation because of the double whammy of jackpot justice and punitively high taxes and fees. But people don’t notice the jobs that never come in the first place. Illinois remains one of the most inhospitable climates in the nation for doctors and medical professionals. But if the trial lawyers continue to make it perhaps the worst spot in the nation for a doctor to set up shop, they at least are not actively trying to drive the ones already here out.
In the first vacancy to the Appellate Court, Karmeier appointed a reform-minded Republican Judge in Steve McGlynn of Belleville. In an important early ruling, McGlynn wrote the majority opinion for the court denying a tortured effort by attorneys for a plaintiff in a Missouri case who were trying to get venue set in the Metro East, thus sending a signal to trial lawyers throughout the region that the jackpot was not going to be quite so easy to get to anymore.
Then came the election cycle of 2006, a bloodbath for Republicans. McGlynn was narrowly defeated by Democrat Bruce Stewart. The ever-vigilant ICJL found itself enmeshed in a lawsuit filed by convicted felon Amiel Cueto, brother of St. Clair Circuit Judge Lloyd Cueto, who the ICJL had opposed. Another vacancy had opened on the Appellate Court. In an obvious effort to extend an olive branch, Justice Karmeier appointed conservative Democrat James Wexxsten to the vacancy. The ICJL, hoping to demonstrate that their commitment was to judicial reform rather than the type of rank partisanship that has traditionally ruled in the Metro East, supported the appointment.
But the trial lawyers don’t want no stinkin’ olive branch. Apparently believing that the ICJL has been enfeebled by the Cueto lawsuit and interpreting Karmeier’s olive branch as a sign he can be rolled, rumors abound that the immediate past president of the Illinois Trial Lawyer’s Assn., Judy L. Cates of Swansea, is contemplating running against Wexton in the Democratic Primary. Despite the fact that Judge Wexxsten has tried to assure fellow Democrats he is not a reformer, if she does, almost all the trial lawyer money will go to her. They want their jackpot back. If they get it, things will not be as bad as they were four years ago; they will be worse. Doctors and manufacturers will flee this state, credibly convinced that even crisis conditions cannot lead this state to adopt moderate, lasting reforms.
Apparently, like liberty itself, the price of judicial reform is eternal vigilance.

Charlie Johnston is a member of the Chicago Daily Observer Editorial Board