November 02, 2004

In a crushing defeat for the plaintiff's bar in the Sunshine State, voters are overwhelmingly approving (63 to 37 percent) tight limits on the fees lawyers can charge in malpractice cases. The limits are in fact significantly tighter than those in California's MICRA law. All is not clover for organized medicine, however: with 75 percent of precincts reporting, voters have given approval by an even wider margin to the two "revenge initiatives" hatched by the lawyers, including Amendment Seven, which would require the disclosure of more documents helpful to the lawyers in building cases, and Amendment Eight, which would menace doctors with license revocation if they lose three cases. For more details, see below and adjacent posts.