And your assertion that your link was pertinent is good enough for me. I was only asking.

And I am officially dragged in.

In general, I think you should be a bit skeptical of statistics compiled by insurance companies on this matter [Skeptical about statistics compiled by trial lawyers, too. Which I would neither seek out, nor bother to link you to.]

I certainly agree with at least one part of the spiel:
"Tort lawsuits are a necessary evil in a market economy. There has to be a mechanism for making polluters and incompetent doctors and penny-stock scamsters pay. But when the payments lose any tether to the harm caused or the culpability of the defendant, they create economic havoc."

Whether or not payments have indeed "lost any tether" has not been established to my satisfaction.

The charts page that you displayed for me seems to be offered in evidence of this.

In the upper left chart, where did they get the '05 number from? The one that shows such a nice jump. And anyway, there should be a huge jump in litigation since last year, owing to the apparently gross misdeeds of some of our major corporations and their auditors.

Middle chart: Though $130 billion [again: who is doing the expecting in the phrase: "expected to hit"?] sounds like a very large number, I don't have any way of knowing if it's a fair amount or not. How many people died of asbestos-caused cancer? How many people were put at risk by companies continuing to sell the product after the dangers were known? I need a bit more scholarship here to be convinced that this is out of line.

Last chart on top: doesn't seem to show a startling trend at all, between '91 and '02, if you don't count the spike in '01. What caused that spike?

Middle row, first statistic: what's the source? Is it true? Were the 3 awards really medical malpractice awards? If the 3 awards are actually tobacco verdicts, then I really think the tobacco industry dug it's own grave. Tell people that your product is safe when you know it is not. Then kill large numbers of your customers. Expect to be clobbered. If they were not tobacco suits, then I would have to know more about the cases to judge if they were fair. Possibly those humongous 3 suits explain the entire jump in the average.

Middle: don't know enough about asbestos affects to judge if this is fair.

Right: point being?

Third row, left: What is the "price of litigation"? How was it calculated?

Middle: point being?

Right: not unexpected. The US holds first place in a lot of comparisons between nations.

Bottom row, left: Yep [back to something I know about and care to talk about!]. Mold is really clobbering homeowner insurance. My company has completely dropped its line of HO, as a result of mold and earthquake claims. This does not mean that *any* of these claims were frivolous. Claims are not law suits, by the way. They are just something else that insurance companies like to whine about.

Middle: I've been staring at this one for a bit and there is some strange stuff in it. Defense costs are counted in winnings? What [and whose?] administrative costs do the "winnings" also cover? Where are the punitive damages? If "noneconon loss" means punitive damages, then I would expect it to be much larger. This calls into question the rest of the statistics on this page.

Right: do the shocking top ten securities settlements [what is the definition of a securities settlement?] have merit, or not?