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"The difference between a bandit and a patriot is a good press agent.''
Will Rogers
Current Press Releases
Wylie Communications completes major national project
The Manhattan Institute, a highly regarded New York-based national think tank, today released a major report on the asbestos litigation industry, which imposes "staggering costs, causing $70 billion in direct losses, bankrupting 80 companies…(and threatening) the very integrity of the legal system itself."
Wylie Communications Inc. of Oologah provided the principal research, writing and graphics for the in-depth, year-long project.
It continues an investigation begun in April 2006 by WCI President John M. Wylie II for the Reader's Digest and is the culmination of two years of work by WCI.
"The more I have dug into the asbestos litigation industry, the more shocked I am by the unconscionable greed and chicanery," Wylie told a national conference call unveiling the report.
Jim Copland, director of the Manhattan Institute Center for Legal Policy, said the report is the fifth in the Center's Trial Lawyers Inc. series. He contacted Wylie after his initial Digest investigation, "The $40 Billion Scam," was published in January 2007.
Copland was director of the project, which involved a half dozen Manhattan Institute participants in New York and three WCI employees in Oklahoma.
A key finding in the new report was that after several years' absence, mass screenings of individuals for signs of asbestos-related diseases were resumed in Oklahoma late last year, with events held in Bartlesville and Pryor.
Such screenings in the past have produced widespread abuses, first documented in court in a 2005 landmark opinion by Texas U.S. District Judge Janis Graham Jack.
The report also documents cases involving a judge seeking bribes from attorneys with asbestos cases, an asbestos lawyer who stole millions of dollars from his clients (some of whom died destitute), and other instances where both legitimate victims of asbestos and companies trying to settle claims were ripped off.
"The saddest part of the entire story is that many of the truly injured have received little or nothing while the attorneys, doctors and consultants have grown wealthy," Wylie said. "In a nation of laws, it is a disgrace that the legal system has not put an end to this nightmare."
WCI Vice President Faith Wylie took John Wylie's research and the thousands of pages of documents it had produced and reduced the data into a series of arresting, easy-to-understand graphics for the report.
The entire report and the original Digest article are both available at the Wylie Communications Inc. website, www.wyliecom.com.
Wylie Communications offers small-town, common-sense communications solutions in multiple media that meet the needs of major national clients.
Its principals also publish the nationally known weekly newspaper, the Oologah Lake Leader.
Download the press release here.
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