Q&A - Geoffrey Shields: Vermont Law School

Vermont Business Magazine, Jul 01, 2005 by Smith, Robert

We should keep our eyes on that and try to avoid it. I think that the medical malpractice and the general negligence litigation issues that have been raised in political campaigns over the last decade or so have highlighted one area where there's a fair amount of abuse. How do you correct that abuse while at the same time allowing those have a legitimate injury to access the courts, which we all know is important? We haven't come to a good resolution of that.

VBM: What about this idea of putting a cap on how much a person can receive for an injury?

Shields: I think that that is a good approach, but you also need to be very careful so that if there is a tremendously egregious situation or a tremendously expensive situation, where somebody is terribly injured, that they're not left with such a low rate that it becomes unfair. The British, for example, generally do not permit punitive damages. That would be one way to go to hold down fees to a more reasonable level. This is not my area of expertise, but it is an area that I know is really important for society and for lawyers in general to address.

VBM: What are some areas that you feel are important that we haven't touched on?

Shields: As I mentioned when you came in, I spent yesterday at the Business Roundtable, and there are areas of tremendous interest to businesses - because it affects their employees, it affects the taxes they have to pay, it affects the regulatory structure in which they work - that are also very important to lawyers. These are not always areas of direct taxes or direct regulation of businesses. They are things that can come in sort of sideways.

Environmental issues are one. There are a lot of costs in being in an area that is polluted. There are a lot of costs to living in an area where there hasn't been logical development. In this particular state, there would be a tremendous amount to lose if we don't keep a fair semblance of the beauty and the connection with the land that makes Vermont unique. In many instances that has a really strong impact on the business environment, on the ability to attract good businesses and people who want to live here. It affects the ability to sell products, in part because of the cachet of Vermont.

When we come into contact with business in helping to try to parse through ways to address the medical insurance crisis that we have, or the environmental crisis that we have, we bring our particular set of skills, which is to know about the regulations and to know about the history of the development of the law in that area, to know how other jurisdictions both in this country and outside have dealt with those sorts of issues. So we bring our perspective, others like scientists bring their perspective. There's an interaction between lawyers and the Law School and the business community to try to solve some of these big issues that face Vermont and sometimes the broader society.

It's important that we always be talking among ourselves, trying to figure out what the different angles are to this or that particular problem and how we can resolve it in an informed way. Lawyers in this law school have to be informed by business and business has to be informed by lawyers and law school professors. Because we're in a small, fairly tight knit state, we have the advantage of being able to interact with each other to address some of these issues. I think I'd like to end on that note, that we have a lot to give to business, and the Law School is focused on that.