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Maryland Changes How Lawsuit Payouts Are Sold

Maryland’s highest court has approved sweeping changes that will drastically change how companies purchase the rights to legal settlement payouts, effectively remaking how a controversial industry does business with some of the state’s poorest and most vulnerable residents.

Maryland’s highest court has approved sweeping changes that will drastically change how companies purchase the rights to legal settlement payouts, effectively remaking how a controversial industry does business with some of the state’s poorest and most vulnerable residents.

 

In particular, companies interested in buying payments belonging to recipients of so-called structured settlements will now need to file significantly more information so that judges can better decide whether a proposed deal is in a recipient’s best interests. The changes, approved Thursday, will slow down the court-approval process and discourage what judicial officials called the “rubber-stamping” of some petitions.

 

“There were no guidelines before,” said Judge Alan M. Wilner, who chairs an advisory committee that last month proposed the additional rules. “The judges were left with whatever the [company] was telling them, which was next to nothing. Often, the [settlement recipient] wasn’t there in court, so I don’t know . . . whether the judges who were having these things before them even knew what kinds of findings they had to make.”

Caroline Cournoyer is GOVERNING's senior web editor.
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