It is a widely held belief that the amount of personal injury litigation has grown dramatically over the past thirty years. The proliferation of litigation has been explored by Walter K. Olson in The Litigation Explosion: What Happened When America Unleashed the Lawsuit. The rapid growth in the number of attorneys nationwide supports this impression. Data from The Statistical Abstract of the United States shows that the growth rate in the number of attorneys has exceeded the growth rate of the population. Over the period 1970–2004, the number of attorneys increased from 355,000 to 954,000, a 2.95 percent annual growth rate. The U.S. population increased from 203 million to 296 million over the same period, a 1.12 percent annual growth rate. This phenomenon is especially pronounced in New York State where the number of attorneys increased from 48,000 in 1970 to 143,000 in 2004, a 3.22 percent annual growth rate. The New York State population grew by only .15 percent per annum over this period from 18.237 million to 19.190 million. The escalation in the number of attorneys is coincident with tort reform legislation enacted by several state legislatures. The stated intention of the reforms was to reduce the amount of litigation and stem the rapid increase in liability insurance costs. We believe that these reforms have had the opposite effect. We focus on the New York State tort reform legislation enacted in 1985 which is known as the Article 50-B statute. This statute requires that monetary damages at trial be expressed in future dollar terms. After the trial, a hearing is held in which future damages are converted into annuities by applying the rules of the Article 50-B statute. These rules do not comport with economic theory. Consequently, the present value of the structured annuities under Article 50-B bear little resemblance to the true present value of the plaintiff’s losses. We will show that this distortion benefits the plaintiff1, increases the incentive for bringing even marginal cases to trial and is largely responsible for the increase in litigation in New York State.