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For Immediate Release: January 10, 2008

Statement from AAJ President Kathleen Flynn Peterson on ATRA’s Latest Attack on Civil Justice Attorneys

Follow the Money for the Study: PRI to CMPI to MS&L,
a Publicis firm (other-otc: PUBGY)

January 10, 2008 (Washington, DC)—The American Tort Reform Association’s (ATRA) and the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest’s (CMPI) so-called study on legal websites is laughable at best.  ATRA and CMPI should be ashamed to issue a report whose dubious methodology consists of nothing but Google searches.

Follow the money for this study: tort reform group Pacific Research Institute spin-off CMPI, which shares an executive with Manning Selvage & Lee, a PR firm that represents major pharmaceutical manufacturers, owned by France’s Publicis (other-otc: PUBGY) that represents major pharmaceutical manufacturers.  It’s no surprise that the big drug-makers are trying to buy studies to avoid responsibility for their drugs that have harmed people.

The sham study even tries to take down an article in the widely-respected New England Journal of Medicine. 

ATRA claims that tort lawyers are putting the health and lives of Americans at risk.  Don’t you think the fact that the pharmaceutical industry spends nearly twice as much on promotion than it does on research is much more harmful to Americans?