Texas Business Owners Say Lawsuit Reforms Have Improved the Texas Business Climate and Boosted Job Creation
What’s one of the best ways to find out whether legal reforms have helped create jobs in Texas? Talk to the business owners who do the hiring.
A few months ago, that’s exactly what the Texas Association of Business did. The Association surveyed several hundred members – most of whom are small employers with fewer than 50 people – and asked them about the importance of lawsuit reform for the business climate in Texas.
Given what we know about the relationship between legal reform and the booming economy in Texas, the results are not surprising. More than 95 percent of the respondents said lawsuit reform is important to the Texas business climate, and 88.6 percent of respondents agreed that lawsuit reform has had a positive impact on Texas’ business climate,
Specifically, the majority of employers surveyed said legal reform allows businesses to focus more on products/services and business instead of liability concerns, and makes it less expensive to operate a business.
These views are borne out by facts. Data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics show that Texas has added 732,000 private sector jobs over the past 10 years – seven times more than any other state. And in 2012 CEO Magazine ranked Texas as the best state in the nation for business for the eighth year in a row.
Legal reform works for Texas. Some personal injury lawyers, though, continue to attempt to roll back these reforms by looking for new ways to sue, threatening to take Texas employers, and the workers who depend on them, back to the days when Texas was known as the “wild west of lawsuit abuse.” We must remain vigilant against efforts to weaken or roll back legal reform in Texas. Before you vote, be sure you ask your candidates how they will work to protect and strengthen legal reform.
