'InJustice' Review: Lawsuit Abuse Exposed in Must-See Documentary

InJustice is like a lawyer joke that draws tears, not laughter.

The new documentary examines the damage tort lawyers, particularly the so-called King of Torts Dickie Scruggs, have had on our culture. In short, they’ve seriously damaged the public’s trust in our courts, bludgeoned the economy and sent thousands of Americans to the unemployment lines.

InJustice runs less than an hour, yet the array of data presented is enough to make the case for serious tort reform–for starters. Yet InJustice doesn’t offer any simple answers. It means to shed serious light on the problem and its far-reaching effects.

The saga of Scruggs is the film’s through line, but along the way we meet farmers who cannot exist without million dollar liability insurance policies, companies trembling at the names of high profile lawyers and asbestos sufferers who get stiffed while their lawyers howl all the way to their banks.

The tort lawyers featured see asbestos, silicosis and tobacco–any product or industry where there are fat wallets to be pilfered–as potential cash cows.

The Scruggs saga matters because so many lawyers used his dog-eared playbook, shaking down companies with nary a thought about the ethical implications.

Perhaps the most fascinating case study is how lawyers shook down tobacco companies even though everyone understands the health hazards that come with smoking. Shrewd lawyers used rising Medicaid costs as a means to reach the tobacco companies’ coffers, eventually squeezing millions out of them and getting fabulously rich in the process.

In most cases, those participating in these class action lawsuits (the truly injured, as opposed to the sea of fraudulent claimants) see a fraction of that cash.

The film’s visual style is simple and straightforward, with very little distracting us from the legal horrors on display. The facts themselves paint a vivid enough picture of greed, and of a grievance industry invented by creative tort lawyers and complicit doctors.

InJustice is a mind-blowing look at a serious problem, one all but ignored by most mainstream documentary filmmakers. As usual, the mainstream media dodges anything that gets in the way of its liberal belief system, but InJustice is a gem nonetheless. Watch it and see our broken civil justice system largely for what it is: a system “by lawyers, for lawyers, and in lawyers’ interests.”