What clients are provided with are vouchers to use on their next purchase while the personal injury lawyers are receiving lots of money in settlements. Now one Florida judge finally has taken up the cudgels for beleaguered consumers. A judge criticized a New York City law firm that requested for $1 million in legal fees when it only offered vouchers ranging from $10 to $60 to cruise ship passengers.

The amount that a law firm needed to settle a class action lawsuit against a cruise line in Fort Lauderdale was $2 million when the company inadvertently raised port docking charges for unwary passengers. When they arrived in the courtroom the firm asked for $1 million in legal fees. From a 27 page ruling came the order from the judge for four firms from southern Florida to split the request after he sliced the $1 million request to slightly less than $300,000. Another order from the judge involved 25 percent of the lawyers’ legal fees to be paid in the same vouchers given to the 80,000 plaintiffs they managed to corral into the lawsuit.

For the firm’s lead lawyer the passengers were all regular customers of the cruise so the travel vouchers would be advantageous. What was desired was cash because bills cannot be dealt with by using vouchers. Without their knowledge, class action plaintiffs are usually rounded up by personal injury lawyers as parties to multimillion dollar lawsuits according to the judge and their clients end up with awards that are simply useless.

After using his common sense a judge was applauded by tort reform advocates because he was able to defend consumers from rapacious class action lawyers. From a local institute comes the head of a Tallahassee think tank who considers travel awards to be useless because of the little value in such vouchers. Nothing is appealing about $10 off of a cruise worth hundreds of dollars. Several class action lawsuits end up doing something good. Some form of compensation should be awarded to genuine victims of a corporation’s neglect. When it comes to class action lawsuits there are minimal gains for the victims nowadays and a lot for the already wealthy.

Miami HMOs are facing a class action lawsuit waged against them by a well known Mississippi lawyer who is leading a group of multi millionaire personal injury lawyers. The personal injury lawyers concede that their lawsuit will force health care costs into the stratosphere, while doing little, if anything, to improve patient care. There was a lawyer who met with Wall Street financial analysts and he tried to convince them to start a shareholder sell off not to mention downgrade HMO stocks.

This is a flawless logic. Not ever facing trials lawyers are able to generate millions in rewards and this is because as stock prices plummet the HMOs facing the lawsuits are more than happy to accommodate out of court settlements. A Yale University law professor, summed it up very well last year when he said that he doesn’t see how these lawsuits can proceed without harming the country. If they’re successful, the managed care industry basically will be eliminated. Then there will be a rise in health care costs to all Americans without a doubt.

The lawsuit against the HMOs is just the latest in a long line of greed driven class actions that ought to spur congressional Republicans and Democrats to pass a meaningful toil reform act. Growing tired of paying for the retirement funds of these lawyers are the average working Americans and they no longer want such a responsibility while these people travel on their private jets and fish on their luxury yachts.