The American Tort Reform Foundation (ATRF) recently released its annual "Judicial Hellholes" report ranking our country's worst legal climates. This year, the City of Baltimore was named to the report's "Watch List" of jurisdictions that may soon become Hellholes.

It's bad enough that our state's largest city has been singled out by the report for the second year in a row. It's even worse that our ranking is moving in the wrong direction. Baltimore City is quickly becoming a haven for out-of-control personal injury lawyers seeking multimillion-dollar jackpot verdicts in questionable cases.

With a projected budget shortfall of nearly $2 billion in 2010, the last thing our state needs is greedy personal injury lawyers making a mockery of our legal system at taxpayers' expense. According to consulting firm Tillinghast-Towers Perrin, the U.S. tort system costs every man, woman and child in the U.S. a yearly a "tort tax" of $825. In uncertain economic times, businesses looking to relocate or expand will shy away from jurisdictions with unfavorable legal climates. This means that Maryland risks losing new jobs if we continue down this slippery slope.

This alarming trend, described in ATRF's report, is signaled by Baltimore's reputation as "a welcoming host to a disproportionate share of East Coast asbestos litigation" and several questionable multimillion-dollar verdicts in lead paint lawsuits that have come out of our courts in recent months. Moreover, Maryland's limits on how much plaintiffs can win in pain and suffering damages has come under serious attack. Personal injury lawyers, who can take up to 30 percent of a total award, want to do away with this cap so that they can expand their own paychecks.

While ATRF's report acknowledges that most judges across the country do a fine job of protecting against lawsuit abuse in the systems they manage, a distinct list of extreme violators stand out from the pack. Consequently, the report's purpose is to highlight a number of judicial districts that are repeat offenders. Some offenders have made noticeable strides to rid themselves of this label and the report makes note of those improvements.

Indeed, the news isn't all bad in Maryland. Maryland's Court of Appeals was applauded for its recent decision recognizing that pharmaceutical manufacturers may owe a responsibility for adverse reactions to those who take their medications but owe no such a responsibility to those who haven't taken those medications but were affected by another patient's reaction. The study concluded that the Maryland court's decision should provide a positive example for other courts considering the limits of product liability.

Despite the positive news, Baltimore's reputation as a poor legal climate that is only worsening raises serious concerns for the city and Maryland as a whole. This kind of reputation means that Baltimore is now far less likely to attract employers, which means less job availability and lower tax revenues at a time when we could not need them more. President-elect Obama has said that in the face of the current economy -- jobs are the No. 1 priority in taking office. Baltimore's worsening legal climate only retards that effort locally.

We as citizens truly pay the price for our out-of-control legal system. Junk lawsuits clog our court system and delay justice for those who have been truly injured and deserve compensation. These lawsuits and the outrageous jury awards that sometimes derive from them sap our tax dollars at a time when they are ever more precious. Moreover, abusive and frivolous lawsuits increase the prices we pay for goods and services, threaten many of our small businesses, and make it harder for us to access affordable health care.

As we confront the worst economic downturn in several generations, the sobering findings of the ATRF study should serve as another wake-up call to the judicial stewards of our courts (judges) as well as our legislators as they reconvene in Annapolis.

Our legislators must defend the legal reforms we have in place to curb lawsuit abuse, including the cap on pain-and-suffering damages, and support efforts to bring common sense and fairness to our legal system. We as citizens and taxpayers simply cannot afford to have lawsuit abuse run rampant in our state.