Originally posted by Spiderman
I think if the frivolous claims ARE dismissed, the plantiff's should be paying ALL court costs or something. That might discourage future ones... as far as I know right now, there's not really a penalty for bringing them to court.
I agree to a point. I certainly think there should be penalties. But the people doing this are just greedy and probably don't have a lot of money, so minimal penalties. The majority of the penalties should go to the lawyers, who can afford it and who should know better. You could argue that they are just doing there job, but the bottom line is that in many cases, they are getting paid either way. Or, they figure the odds of receiving a huge contingency make it worthwhile to take on as many "frivolous" cases as possible on the offhand chance that one hits big.
Perhaps after each case that fails, a panel of 3 judges sits down for 10 minutes to decide if the case was obviously frivolous. If they can't agree immediately, then maybe there was enough merit in the case. But eventually, you start hitting the lawyers with fines and they will no longer be willing to take on a case that is obviously frivolous.
In criminal cases, that's the purpose of the grand jury, but I don't know if there is such a concept in civil cases.