Experienced defense counsel Beck and Herrmann have a must-read post summarizing the lifecycle of a mass tort., touching on many of the themes Walter and I have covered in the past: the at-best parasitic irrelevance of the plaintiffs’ bar to the safety of the product (at worst, trial lawyers are counterproductive); the feeding frenzy of peripheral litigation and ambulance-chasing to sign up clients; the irrelevancies of game-show style trials to the ultimate issues of the case, much less public safety.
Beck and Herrmann’s model could certainly use some expansion; if anything, they understate the absurdity of the status quo. There’s no mention of the peripheral “consumer-fraud” class actions on behalf of the customers who have suffered no injury; the expense and harassment of discovery; the jockeying of the plaintiffs’ bar to plant misleading stories in the press to taint the jury; the efforts to use taxpayer resources of various trial-lawyer-friendly state attorney generals to harass the defendant; the lobbying by the plaintiffs’ bar to force the defendant to settle before plaintiffs have to test their complaints’ theories in the judicial system; the mass fraud by trial lawyers that almost invariably accompanies the mass tort.