A pending U.S. House of Representatives bill intended to reduce "frivolous" lawsuits would only provide minimal aid to large companies, General Electric Co.'s litigation chief Bradford Berenson said Monday.
Speaking on Capitol Hill at a panel discussion hosted by the Law and Economics Center at the George Mason University School of Law, Berenson said the Lawsuit Abuse Reduction Act of 2013 would "put some teeth back" into Federal Rules of Civil Procedure's Rule 11, which lost key sanction provisions concerning frivolous lawsuits in 1993. But he said the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and the Class Action Fairness Act of 2005, as well as more stringent pleading standards that have come in the past decade, are among the most important instruments for him, not Rule 11.
"There are other tools that are more powerful, more helpful, and get more at the real problems with our system," said Berenson, who added that his company is currently involved in about 14,000 lawsuits globally, about 60 percent of which are in the United States.
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