Question of the Day - 12 September 2021

Actually, Nevada is one of the states that has enacted a law that makes it more difficult to sue.

In the early 2000s, local doctors precipitated a crisis; claiming that malpractice suits were too many and costly, they threatened to leave the state en masse. Melodramatic TV ads showed a line of practitioners marching down the highway, headed for California or Utah maybe. The legislature fell for it and passed a law capping malpractice awards.

Still, is Nevada one of what the American Tort Reform Foundation (ATRF) calls “Judicial Hellholes”? (Litigation in the U.S. represents 2.3% of the gross domestic product.)

Well, according to ACC Docket, Philadelphia is “the worst place to get sued in the United States.” Next is California, “a breeding ground for class actions and anti-arbitration measures that routinely lands the state at the very top of the Judicial Hellholes list.” The Golden State is followed by New York state, Louisiana, the city of St. Louis, Georgia, Illinois (“a magnet for biometric privacy class-actions”), Oklahoma, Minneapolis/St. Paul, and New Jersey. No sign of Nevada or Las Vegas.

The U.S. Chamber Institute for Legal Reform conducts annual “lawsuit climate surveys” and generally agrees with ATRF, but also cites Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, and West Virginia as lawsuit-happy. Still no sign of Sin City.

New York doles out the largest medical-malpractice awards, according to one study by the National Practitioner Data Bank, closely followed by Pennsylvania. North Dakota had the smallest. Nevada ranks close to the bottom, with an average of $207.3 million per year. So if you’re venue-shopping for a malpractice suit, the Silver State is not where you want to go. It has only 18.7 malpractice actions per 100,000 residents.

The answer to your question is complicated by the fact that even if you’re a Nevadan, you don’t have to bring your lawsuit. Let’s say you’re suing a company whose registered agent is in Delaware. You can bring your case in that state (or wherever the registered agent happens to be). Even federal-case statistics are an imperfect measurement; according to one legal source, “Most lawsuits, including most personal-injury lawsuits, are in state court. Unless you’re suing under a federal law, you can’t get into federal court unless the lawsuit involves a plaintiff and a defendant from different states and the amount at issue is over $75,000.”

So while there’s no pat answer to your query, nothing that we found in our research would qualify Nevada as a “Judicial Hellhole.”

As to why so many lawyers are advertising in Sin City, that's a bit of an enigma. Perhaps competition is particularly fierce here. One attorney of our acquaintance tells us that the general perception that Las Vegas is a land of easy money does extend to members of the bar.

Another commented that Las Vegas is hardly alone in law firms advertising on billboards and network television. Again according to ATRA, between July and September 2018, Los Angeles had 37,000 TV ads for legal services, costing a total of nearly $10 million. New York City had 23,000 at $6.8 million, followed by Tampa/St. Petersburg, Miami/Ft. Lauderdale, San Francisco/Oakland/San Jose, St. Louis, and Kansas City. 

We agree that there seems to be an abundance of billboards and TV ads for trial lawyers in Las Vegas. But by comparison with other places, Las Vegas and Nevada aren't anywhere near the top of any list for litigiousness.