Political Quotes

“Reclaiming my time, that is bad. But what he just said may be even worse if he is in fact correct, because the attorney would just reject a settlement offer, therefore putting into effect a contingency fee. I want to make a couple of other quick points. Mr. Chairman, the point is this, the contingency fees are being portrayed as the villain of the legal system. That is emphatically not true. The contingency fees are a mechanism by which the average America, the person that the Republicans love to cite, gets access to the judicial system. Without contingency fees the fact is a lot of cases would not be brought. I want to tell my colleagues something else. Without contingency fees, we do not have a control on frivolous lawsuits, because contingency fees are in fact the initial screening mechanism, and as an attorney I can tell you that if a case comes in that is frivolous, I am not going to take it on a contingency basis because in all probability I will lose. So a lot of cases that would otherwise be brought are in fact not brought because the initial attorney says this case is a bad case. Let me point out in the second instance this bill does not stop contingency fees.”