IT'S THE PARALEGALS, NOT THE LAWYERS...

Today the President was touting tort reform in Illinois. While we all hear about ridiculous awards, often those awards are overturned on appeal. More importantly, many, many cases are filed because people are genuinely injured by someone else's behavior, and the injured party deserves to be compensated. The fact of the matter is, tort reform simply means that when regular people are injured, they can rest assured knowing that the company that injured them was able to calculate the cost of injuring them into its margins before the injury took place.

That being said, this story, about a paralegal in Cleveland is a wet dream for the tort reformers. The guy is suing NBC because he claims to have been injured when "Fear Factor" showed people eating rats. Of course, if you watch Fear Factor, you ought to know that the show is gross and degrading, so there is some assumption of risk. Second, the guy really hurt his credibility when he told Reuters, "I am not at liberty to discuss the complaint unless it is a paid-interview situation."

What a buffoon.