CCL President Robert S. Peck presented Civil Justice Today: Is a Hostile Takeover Taking Place? at the American Association for Justice’s 2015 Leaders Forum Retreat in Playa del Carmen, Mexico on April 25. Mr. Peck spoke about the many fronts on which a person’s constitutional right of access to the courts is being attacked. He described his recent testimony before a subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee, which was pushing forward legislation to create mandatory sanctions for filings that are not supported by sufficient facts or law. In that testimony, he described the “failed experiment” with precisely the same rules, how it resulted in cost and delay through significant satellite litigation and was opposed by the Judicial Conference of the United States. He also described the countless obstacles placed before the courthouse door by state legislation, proposed procedural rules changes, recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions, and arguments being made to the Court. He described CCL’s many efforts challenging legislation, commenting on rules proposals, and opposing certiorari in Supreme Court. In particular, he described CCL’s recent brief in opposition to certiorari on behalf of the plaintiffs in Wal-Mart v. Braun, where the Pennsylvania state courts upheld a $187 million verdict in a wage-and-hour class action on behalf of 187,000 current and former Wal-Mart employees. Wal-Mart asked the Supreme Court to overturn the verdict because the company did not get to cross-examine all members of the class and because some of the damages were the product of extrapolation by experts. The CCL brief explained that Wal-Mart was not prohibited from cross-examining as many employees as it chose and did not take advantage of that opportunity. Moreover, the extrapolated evidence was the product of spoliation. Wal-Mart stopped keeping employee time records after it was first sued in other states. As a result, the jury was entitled to take an adverse inference from the lack of record keeping, which was required by law