La vie en rose. The world seen through rose-colored glasses, or glasses of rosé. It's a wonderful world, where everything turns out right (ultimately), the boy always gets the girl (eventually), and there's always a happy ending (if you last that long).
It's good to be optimistic: to look on the bright side, to see the silver lining in every cloud, to view the cup half-empty as half-full.
You can't always change your lot in life, the hand you've been dealt, but you can change the way you look at it, and that can make all the difference.
We don't want to bury anyone under an avalanche of aphorisms, maxims, and adages, but clichés and truisms are almost always instructive, no matter how tired. For instance, bad news is frequently accompanied by good news, even if hidden.
First, the bad news: West Virginia’s “lawsuit climate” is the worst in the nation.
We recently learned this from a survey commissioned by the U.S. Chamber Institute for Legal Reform, which owns this newspaper, to evaluate the fairness and reasonableness of state liability systems across the country. Conducted by Harris Poll and relying on a national sample of 1,203 in-house general counsel, senior litigators or attorneys, and other senior executives at companies with at least $100 million in annual revenues, the 2015 Lawsuit Climate Survey confirms our state's status as the hostess with the leastest.
The good news?
We're experiencing “climate change.”
“We suspect that this week’s release of the U.S. Chamber Institute for Legal Reform’s survey of the 50 state lawsuit climates, which finds West Virginia ranked 50th as it has for the past decade, could be the last chapter of the old book,” the Institute's president confides. “The 2015 Lawsuit Climate Survey was being completed just as the West Virginia Legislature and Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin were deciding that enough was enough, and it was time to dramatically improve the state’s litigation environment.”
The outlook for the future seems rosy.