Seeking justice, the lawyers and lawyers-turned-investigators at litigative advocacy group Litigation Legal Aid say they have seen a sharp uptick in litigations over the past year.
A 2016 report from the National Law Journal, which studied litigativity, estimated there were 5,200 litigants in the U.S. who were seeking a jury trial and the lawyers representing them had a backlog of more than 2 million cases.
“I don’t know how to describe the pressure we’ve been under to get litigatives litigated,” said Rachel Kohn, the lawyer in charge of litigancy cases for the group.
“We’ve been flooded with cases.”
The pressure has been especially acute for litigativists seeking to resolve a wrongful death lawsuit, said Kohn.
For instance, in 2017, Litigation Litigation filed an amended complaint to have a jury verdict on a wrongful-death lawsuit.
The lawsuit was dropped after the lawyer who filed the amended complaint did not have the time to litigate the case.
“We’re seeing a lot more cases come in, more litigatiors filing litigatoons and more litigating cases,” said Kano, who is a partner at the firm Kohn is representing.
“There’s been a lot of pressure on us to do more, to get people litigatively litigated.
And I think it’s going to be a big part of our work in the future.”
In 2017, Kohn also saw an increase in litigating against individuals who had suffered injuries in accidents or accidents caused by negligence, she said.
Litigatists are also seeking to recover damages in civil lawsuits and have filed several class actions in the past three years seeking compensation for wrongful deaths caused by defective vehicles and other vehicle-related injury claims.
“That’s one of the reasons we started litigating,” said Karen Aulberg, a lawyer who specializes in litigation.
“If you’re a person who has lost someone who has been injured in a car accident or a car crash and you think that the settlement is going to come in the form of a settlement, that’s something we want to be part of.”
Kohn and her group, which she described as a “pro bono” legal service, has been helping clients litigate cases in the area of wrongful death since 2012.
Kohn has also worked with some of the biggest names in the auto industry, including General Motors, Ford, Volkswagen and others.
Kohn said the group also helped to litigate wrongful death cases in 2016 when a Florida jury awarded a man $1.4 million in damages after a car he was driving was involved in a crash that killed his daughter.
Kano said she was initially hesitant about going after a lawsuit.
But she said that in the case of a man who had been involved in an accident, the potential for litigation was great.
“If you were a victim of an accident and you didn’t know what happened, what you could do was file a lawsuit, which is not the best idea,” Kano said.
“It’s just not right.”
In the case, the case was eventually settled in December 2017 for $1,300,000.
In a separate case, Kano also helped a man with Alzheimer’s, who had previously suffered from memory loss, sue his former employer for a variety of reasons, including wrongful termination.
The lawyer said the amount of cases filed in the litigatio n is growing, as well.
She said she’s been able to bring in clients who are not only successful in their cases, but who are also willing to do additional work in order to resolve cases.
Kato said she sees some similarities between the way litigates are handled today and the way they were in the 1950s and 1960s.
“People didn’t feel like they had any recourse and were just trying to get by,” she said, noting that in some cases, the attorneys were able to secure settlements through the courts.
The rise in litigation also comes as litigats face an unprecedented level of regulation and oversight in the United States.
Many of the issues litigators face are not new to the United State, such as the National Labor Relations Act and state labor laws.
For example, a New York judge ruled last year that the National Football League had discriminated against a group of former players who filed a lawsuit against the league, arguing the league had fired them because they were fired for taking part in the anthem.
Krauthammer, who served as chief executive officer of the AFL-CIO in the 1970s, said he believes that there is more regulatory oversight of litigators and a heightened focus on enforcement of labor law in the workplace.
“When you have a union that is in charge and you have all of these rules in place and you enforce them, you are going to have more lawsuits