Sanctions Study: Lying to Court is Costly, But Baseless Claims are Most Common
A study of sanctions against attorneys in the St. Louis-based 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found that frivolous claims were the biggest source of penalties.
Failure to comply with discovery requirements was the second-most common reason for sanctions, but this category accounted for only about a dozen punishments, reports the National Law Journal. Frivolous claims accounted for one-third of the 96 sanctions cases over the 14-year period studied by professor Margaret Raymond of the University of Iowa College of Law.
Plaintiffs lawyers in civil rights cases were the most commonly sanctioned counsel, she found, followed by plaintiffs lawyers in general commercial litigation.
Among 87 sanctions cases in which she looked at penalties, almost one-third involved fines of less than $200. At the high end, however, sanctions—most often based on the opposing side’s attorney fees and costs—were more than $50,000 in 6 percent of the cases, and more than $25,000 in another 3 percent.
“The only two characteristics that the small number of sanctions greater than $25,000 shared were that lawyers in those cases tried to relitigate matters that had already been decided or tried to mislead or lie to the court,” the legal publication reports.
