Juries in the Longhorn State have a reputation for being generous with other people's money. But even by Texas standards, the verdict against Illinois drugmaker Abbott Laboratories this June was a whopper. After a four-day trial a jury in the tiny city of Marshall ordered Abbott to pay $1.7 billion.

It wasn't a case of sympathetic jurors socking it to an out-of-state corporation for injuring one of their own. The plaintiff was Johnson & Johnson, of New Brunswick, N.J. The dispute was a technical one over patents on the companies' competing arthritis drugs, J&J's Remicade and Abbott's Humira.

Companies love to complain about liability lawyers who shop around for plaintiff-friendly jurisdictions. But when they have a patent case to prosecute, they do the same thing. Often they go to Marshall or two other federal courts in the Eastern District of Texas. With lightning-fast deadlines and a preference for putting matters before a jury, the judges there have created a patent plaintiff's paradise.

Read the full story here on the Forbes website.

Federal regulators are preparing to launch "a very serious look" at requiring corporations to assess and reveal the effects of climate change on their financial health, according to a commissioner on the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Initial efforts are under way, moving the commission toward a conclusion that investment groups had sought unsuccessfully throughout much of the Bush administration: forcing public companies to report the dangers they face from releasing carbon dioxide and its warming aftermath.

"I think with the changes in the environment and everything that's been happening, it's really time for us to take another very serious look at the disclosure system in this area," Elisse Walter, one of five commissioners at the SEC, told E&E on Friday. "I think it's a very serious issue."

Read the full story here on the New York Times website.

Our medical liability system needs reform. But anyone who thinks that limiting liability would reduce health care costs is fooling himself. Preventable medical injuries, not patient compensation, are what ring up extra costs for additional treatment. This means taxpayers, employers and everyone else who buys health insurance — all of us — have a big stake in patient safety.

Read this op-ed piece by PLUS contributer and presenter Tom Baker here on the New York Times website.

Lloyd’s of London has begun the biggest strategic review it has undertaken this decade in an attempt to ensure the more than 320-year-old insurance market does not fail in exploiting the gaps in the market thrown up by the financial crisis.

The London-based institution, which deals in large and complex insurance risks from all over the world, has brought in consultants from Deloitte to assist in the review, which Lloyd’s hopes will lead to a new strategic plan to be published in January.

Read the full story here from the Financial Times website.

Too many people die needlessly at U.S. hospitals, according to a sweeping new Medicare analysis showing wide variation in death rates between the best hospitals and the worst.

The analysis examined death rates for heart attacks, heart failure and pneumonia at more than 4,600 hospitals across the USA. At 5.9% of hospitals, patients with pneumonia died at rates significantly higher than the national average. With heart failure, 3.4% of hospitals had death rates higher than the average, and 1.2% of hospitals were higher when it came to heart attack.

Researchers also found that the majority of U.S. hospitals operate the equivalent of revolving doors for their patients. One of every four heart failure patients and slightly less than one in five heart attack and pneumonia patients land back in the hospital within 30 days, data show.

Read this full story here on the USA Today website.

When Courtney Love fell into a dispute with a clothing designer this year, she aired her beef on MySpace and Twitter.

The designer sued Love for libel after the rocker claimed on her blog and in tweets that the designer was a thief, liar and drug dealer with a record of prostitution, according to court documents.

Love's case is one of the high-profile libel lawsuits involving comments on social networking sites. But you don't have to be famous to be sued. As more people blog or tweet whatever pops into their minds, they run the risk that someone somewhere may take offense--rightly or wrongly--and sue. They could end up with big legal bills.

If you blog, that's why it may be worth buying insurance to make sure you are covered in case you are accused of making libelous or defamatory statements.

Read the full story here on the Chicago Tribune website.

In his recent speech to the American Medical Association, President Barack Obama held out the tantalizing possibility of reforming medical malpractice law as part of a comprehensive overhaul of the U.S. health-care system. As usual, he hedged his bets by declining to endorse the only medical malpractice reform with real bite -- a national cap on damages for pain and suffering, such as the ones enacted in more than 30 states.

These caps are usually set between $250,000 to $500,000, and they can make a substantial difference. Other reforms, such as rules that limit contingency fees, shorten statutes of limitation, or confine each defendant's tort exposure to his proportionate share of the harm, have small and uncertain effects.

Medical malpractice, of course, is not just an American issue. And now that the U.S. is considering universal health-care systems similar to those found elsewhere, it's worth a quick peek at their medical malpractice systems -- which usually attract far less controversy, and are far less expensive, than our own.

Read the full story here on The Wall Street Journal website.

Investors whose money was placed in Bernard Madoff’s firm through money managers and other feeder funds call themselves "indirects" and complain about not being able to recover their losses.  Jen Meerow, a New York television producer who invested Madoff through a feeder fund, says that the indirects are being treated like second class citizens.  Thousands of these indirect investors do not have access to the programs that offer tax breaks and securities insurance to direct investors.

Last March the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) announced that investors in Bernard Madoff Investment Securities LLC would be able to recover some losses through tax relief, providing investors with the same treatment as small businesses.  The IRS rule allows Madoff investors to declare a theft loss for most of their investment with Madoff and on fictitious earnings they did not withdraw.  The investors are also allowed to reclaim taxes paid on any other earnings over five years.  The break was provided to investors with earnings of less than $15 million, similar to a rule for small businesses.  The IRS rule applied only to qualified investors, or the feeder funds themselves.  Most feeder funds do not qualify since they have gross receipts exceeding $15 million, and their investors.

The article, from The Wall Street Journal, includes a chart with data about the Madoff case from court records the Federal Bureau of Prisons and Securities Investor Protection Corp.

Emerging Trends in Credit Crisis Litigation include:

• Credit crisis filings increased 172% in 2008 over 2007, rising to 188 cases from 69.
• The percentage of cases in which D&O are named as defendants remains high, with 62% named in suits in 2008, compared to 68% in 2007.
• Asset management firms became the main defendants in litigation in 2008 as opposed to lenders and home builders in the previous year.
• Structured products (CDOs and CDS) were involved in 3% of the lawsuits in 2007 and 22% of the lawsuits in 2008.

An Update on the Credit Crisis Litigation, co-authored by NERA Vice President Dr. Faten Sabry, Senior Analyst Anmol Sinha, and Associate Analyst Sungi Lee, may be found on the NERA website at http://www.nera.com/publication.asp?p_ID=3847.

An investigation by U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has cleared Fairfax Financial Holding Ltd., based in Toronto, of any wrongdoing in its use of a controversial product known as finite reinsurance, a finding that will strengthen Fairfax’s case against a group of hedge funds.

The SEC has sent Fairfax a letter saying that the agency did not plan to take any enforcement action related to its use of finite reinsurance.  Fairfax has filed a lawsuit alleging that a group of hedge funds and their employees conspired to bring down the firm’s stock price by releasing false information through analysts.  A lawyer said that the letter will be a crucial factor in its lawsuit now in proceedings in a court in New Jersey.

Read the full story here on the GlobeAdvisor website.