WASHINGTON – While regular folks shop for bargains this holiday season, personal injury lawyers are venue shopping – searching for a judge or jurisdiction that will allow them to pocket millions in contingency fees no matter how outlandish their case.

Such venues have been dubbed “judicial hellholes” by the American Tort Reform Association (ATRA), a grassroots judicial reform coalition that annually ranks the worst of the worse.

This year rankings include a big surprise, Madison County, Ill. – the super-litigious jurisdiction 20 miles northwest of St. Louis – dropped to fourth place in the rankings after three years in first place.

Supplanting it is a 400-mile-long chain of Texas courtrooms stretching along the Gulf Coast and curving west into the Rio Grande Valley. One Texas jurisdiction in particular, Jefferson County, has made the Judicial Hellhole list three consecutive times and annually attracts more personal injury suits per capita than any other large county in the state.

Jefferson County has become so plaintiff-friendly over the last few years that defense lawyers often refer to it as the Texas chapter of the Association of Trial Lawyers of America.

Sherman Joyce, president of the tort reform association, calls Jefferson County and Beaumont, its largest city, places where “litigation tourists, guided by their personal injury lawyer travel agents, file their cases because they know they can circumvent the law and receive a favorable award.”

As a result of its anti-business reputation and outlandish damage awards, Jefferson County has become economically stagnant, lagging behind much of the rest of Texas in median household income and employment rates.

Other jurisdictions making ATRA’s list of judicial shame included Chicago and surrounding Cook County, St. Clair County in southwestern Illinois and South Florida.

In one recent Cook County case, Enterprise Rent-A-Car was sued by a victim of an accident that occurred in Villa Park, in neighboring DuPage County.

Although the accident did not occur in Cook County, lawyers filed suit there anyway because one of the people injured in the accident was flown by helicopter to a hospital located in that county, where jury awards rank among the highest in the nation.

Madison County, which dropped to No. 4 on this year’s list, has been the scene of asbestos litigation fishing expeditions over the past several years – some of them involving plaintiffs who not only showed no signs of actual injury from exposure to asbestos, but who weren’t even Illinois residents.

It’s obvious that the “litigation tourists” who book into the nation’s Judicial Hellholes aren’t shopping for justice but the biggest payday they can grab.

When they succeed, it drives out existing businesses – who are often ruined by the massive judgments tendered by juries and judges – and makes any company thinking about doing business in that locale think twice.

The frivolous litigation enriches personal injury lawyers but, unfortunately, it costs Americans hundreds of thousands of jobs each year – and frequently plunges local economies into long-lasting depressions.

The total drag on America’s economy is staggering. ATRA’s studies and surveys indicate the nation’s “find the right venue and sue” tort system currently costs consumers $246 billion a year. That amounts to $845 for every individual and $3,380 for a family of four.

That figure – like Topsy – is continually growing, increasing an eye-opening 35.4 percent from 2000 to 2003. Personal injury lawyers exploit the system to grab some 78 percent of every damage award in contingency fees and expenses. Plaintiffs – the parties who actually were harmed – receive a mere 22 percent of the awards to cover their economic losses and compensate for pain and suffering.

Publicizing the nation’s Judicial Hellholes each year helps by shaming some of the personal injury havens into cleaning up their acts. This year, for instance, Hampton County in southwestern South Carolina, was “delisted” after the state Legislature passed a sweeping tort reform law that manages to eliminate most “venue shopping” by out-of-state plaintiffs’ lawyers.

Reams of negative publicity haven’t helped convince the litigation-friendly jurisdictions in Texas, Illinois and Florida to embrace reform. That may have to wait until a majority of U.S. senators decide their constituents deserve better treatment than fat-cat personal injury lawyers laden with millions of dollars in campaign contributions.

There was a time when justice in America was dispensed to every citizen impartially and fairly rather than sold to the highest bidder. Voters should pressure the second session of the 109th Congress to return to that happier time.