By John Freund
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Institute for Legal Reform (ILR) has ranked #2 on The New York Law School’s Center for Justice & Democracy’s 2018 ranking of the top-30 tort reform hypocrites. The report aims to reveal which tort reform advocates are the most litigious, and thereby hypocritical in their efforts to scale back the litigiousness of other entities. The ILR, which consistently advocates for numerous tort reform measures including mandatory disclosure of third party funding agreements and placing interest rate caps on Consumer Legal Funding transactions, placed second on the list behind only President Trump.
According to the report, the ILR was established in 1998 to pursue the Chamber’s tort reform agenda. Since its inception, however, the ILR “has spent millions on federal lobbying to in an effort to keep victims from having their cases heard before a civil judge or jury.”
The U.S. Chamber is the top lobbying spender in the country, having spent a whopping $109MM in 2017 alone ($22MM of which was spent by the ILR). Yet despite spending all of that money on efforts to scale back the ability of others to litigate, the Chamber itself is one of the nation’s top litigators. Over the last decade, “the Chamber has been involved in over 1100 lawsuits, either as a plaintiff or as an amicus curiae,” according to the report.
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