John Conyers: “Mr. Chairman, one of the complaints that has been lodged against this bill is the unreasonable haste with which it has…”

“Mr. Chairman, one of the complaints that has been lodged against this bill is the unreasonable haste with which it has been brought out of the Committee on the Judiciary, which has five or six of the items of the contract of America which are now being given precedence in the House. And unfortunately the original bill provided that the losers to any claim pay the attorney's fee of the winner. It applied to all of the fees in the case, at least as to that claim and was not tied to any offer whatsoever. Then we had the modest improvement by the gentleman from Virginia, the famous Goodlatte amendment, which made the bill less worse. It adopted a rule 68 type settlement offer. The loser pays the winners' fees after the date of an offer, and the losing means not doing better than the offer. The award is limited as in the original bill to the plaintiff's own attorney fees, and we are in a real roll of the dice in terms of whether a person can make an offer based upon their outcome. All of which presumes that plaintiffs' lawyers and defendants' lawyers know how these cases are going to come out, which in many instances, particularly if the case is not an open and shut one, is the last thing that any of the parties knows. It is an improvement over the original bill.”