Rise In Certain Types Of Claims Benefits Citizens, According To Law Offices Of Burg & Brock

LOS ANGELES, Oct. 4, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- At the Law Offices of Burg & Brock, Inc. your personal injury case is treated with respect, and their legal team will fight long and hard to make the courts work for you.

For the past few years, depending on which survey you read, statistics have pointed to either a very slight, or sometimes a noticeable rise in certain kinds of claims in The United States. The modest shift might point to a larger trend in personal injury law.

Cameron Brock, leading personal injury attorney in Los Angeles, provides a history lesson that puts this in context. He says in the 1990s, media pundits popularized the term "frivolous lawsuit" to describe almost any lawsuit by an injured plaintiff against a large, possibly wealthy defendant. An example, in which a woman reportedly sued a popular fast food chain for spilling coffee on her lap, was particularly egregious. While the reality of the case (as medical records and other purely factual accounts bear out) is that the woman was severely injured and hospitalized after the drive-thru spill incident.

According to Brock, perhaps the most reputable personal injury lawyer in Los Angeles, the six o'clock news version of events, seemed to portray a greedy woman who, after being coaxed by her personal injury lawyer, was suing for a fortune after the coffee caused a moment's discomfort.

This case and others like it popularized a component of many political platforms known as "tort reform" in the 1990s. Many politicians of the age pointed to the ways in which lawsuits halted economic progress by forcing corporations to pay out in response to so-called "frivolous" claims.

And so it came to pass in the popular consciousness that suing a large corporation over a personal injury was regarded as an act of desperation and greed. According to Brock, it's something else entirely: "a private citizen exercising their constitutional right to fight back against the negligence of the monolithic insurance companies and other corporations that, while economically essential in this country, require the occasional course correction that can sometimes only be brought about by litigation."

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