This should limit the pool of potentially successful litigants to younger non-smokers who did regular exercise and so on, says Mr Schwartz.
Mr Lewin says the vast majority of those e-mails say nothing more than "yup", "OK" and "sure" (in whatever language), but lawyers have to go through them all anyway.American courts give litigants an expansive right to discovery.
Similar movements have popped up in Britain, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand.In trying to make sense of the various movements, Justice Rooke grouped them together as "Organised Pseudolegal Commercial Argument litigants".
A year ago, Islamic litigants got Egypt's highest court to brand a university professor an apostate, forcing him to flee the country.
Some MPs feel that judges have got too big for their wigs for example, by becoming too fond of ordering litigants to talk to nobody about the case.This raises deep questions.
But the SEC, Mr Spitzer and private litigants still have a long list of cases to bring against them for ramping share issues during the stockmarket bubble and for allocating shares at below-market prices to their friends (often big investment-banking clients—such as Bernie Ebbers, the disgraced former boss of WorldCom).
But it has also encouraged unscrupulous and frivolous litigants, and a legal industry that caters to them.
Sino Legend has just sued an agency affiliated with the Shanghai government that verifies claims made by litigants, alleging it revealed trade secrets to SI Group.
Between March 2008 and March 2013, almost two-thirds of all litigants in the High Court's commercial division came from overseas.
The plaintiff has to prove only that a statement was defamatory; it is up to the defendant to justify it, usually on grounds of truth or fairness.The growing use of English courts by foreign litigants is arousing increasing concern among free-speech campaigners such as Chris Walker of Freedom House, an American lobby group.
They don't belong to the judge, the lawyers or the litigants.
