You Live For the Fight When It’s All That You’ve Got
Perhaps realizing that the Spitzer Gang has never won in court, Liberty Mutual elected to defend itself against the suits brought by Mr. Spitzer and Mr. Blumenthal.
In its press release, Liberty Mutual specifically objected to the extraterritorial sweep of the AGs:
We have tried to reach resolution and can only describe their settlement demands as excessive and unreasonable: both in terms of magnitude and in their demands that we change legitimate business practices in states outside their legal jurisdictions.
We’ve been saying that all along, and we wish that the jurisdictional question settled the matter unequivocally. But Liberty Mutual runs a risk greater than the chance that they’ll lose in court: the AG Litigation Settlement Regime rests on the tilted public relations playing field. Companies that fight the AG suits lose market value. AGs, of course, have no market value. As Robert Schmidt of Bloomberg writes, ” An indictment is often fatal, and company lawyers say they will agree to almost any demand to avoid charges.”
Liberty Mutual’s Bon Jovi-esque vigor is admirable, but we don’t expect the trend of uniform acquiescence to AG litigulatory stipulations to end until people realize that a lawsuit with an AG listed as plaintiff really doesn’t mean much at all.