Absolutely not. The notion that our courts are clogged up with too many personal injury claims is totally false, and in most cases, purposefully deceitful. The fact is that personal injury claims represent only a tiny fraction of cases filed in court. The vast majority of cases on court calendars involve criminal cases and civil cases such as hospitals and medical care providers suing their patients, financial institutions foreclosing on and suing their customers, credit card and other very large financial companies suing their customers, landlords suing their tenants, husbands and wives suing each other for a dissolution of their marriage, and small claims disputes between individuals over personal obligations, property disputes or many of the other issues that one can see decided on television in an episode of “Judge Judy.” The fact is that in the last thirty years there has never been a time where personal injury cases accounted for more than 9% of all cases filed in Sangamon County in any one year.

If personal injury claims make up such a small fraction of all cases filed in court, why then do we often hear false reports that our courts are clogged up with too many personal injury claims. The answer is that many large companies would like to limit or extinguish the right of an injured victim to be compensated in court. These companies, and their spin masters, seek to turn public opinion against those who have legitimate claims and limit the right of the injured victims to obtain fair and reasonable compensation. Such a result would have the obvious effect of increasing the profits of a wrongdoing company at the expense of the injured victim. One of the ways in which these spin masters try to sway public opinion to their side is to make up false and outlandish stories about injury claims that never happened and then post such stories on the internet as if they were fact. If you notice a story about a personal injury case that sounds outlandish, check to see if information is given which includes the full name of the case, the court case number, the judge presiding, the county or district where the case was filed, and the date the judgment was entered. If all of that information, which could be used to verify the accuracy of the story is not given, chances are you are reading a story that was hatched by the imagination of a “tort reform” spin master.