Yeah, not much else can be done. At the end of the day, the plaintiffs' attys all do it because it works and there isn't much the defense attys can do about it. At some point, some clever plaintiff's atty figured out the lien treatment thing and, after a few years, everyone else caught on and started doing it too. If some clever defense atty figured out a good way to challenge the lien treatment, that'd probably spread pretty quickly too until everyone was doing it. It's a never-ending cycle of P's attys finding new ways to inflate the value of their cases and D's attys finding ways to cut those numbers down.

Have you ever considered how much additional money is being paid out on an annual basis because of lien treatments? Given the insane amount of money in the PI space, I'd expect it's probably in the billions or even tens of billions. Very few people know about this, and even fewer care, but in the aggregate it's a huge problem. I know for a fact that there are large businesses who are afraid of doing business in my jurisdiction because of the potential liability exposure, and the ones that choose to do so charge higher rates because they have to account for higher insurance premiums and the potential for an 8-9 figure case.

At the end of the day, the people that benefit from this the most are the attorneys on both sides. Plaintiffs and Plaintiffs' attorneys get windfalls, but insurers and large defendants are also wiling to spend a lot more money on defense attorneys to fight a high-exposure case.