Class Action Lawsuits and Lawyers

Avoiding the explosion is efficient if either party could do so at a cost lower than the cost of the resulting damage. But neither injurer might take care if it expected to share liability evenly under either joint-and-several or several liability and its prevention costs exceeded 50 percent of the damage.(11) What is clear is that several liability has two disadvantages for plaintiffs--and conversely, two advantages for defendants--relative to joint-and-several liability. First, it makes plaintiffs bear a higher share of the transaction costs.
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Attorneys and Legal Information

In its previous report, dated February 2002, Tillinghast included estimates of tort costs in other countries. That report stated that in 2000, tort costs equaled 1.
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Class Action Lawsuits and Lawyers

legal system has expanded dramatically in the past three decades. That expansion began early in the 20th century with a growing acceptance of the notion that more extensive tort liability would serve to compensate injured parties and reduce the level of accidents. Although no complete set of data is available, limited data call attention to several prominent features of the current tort litigation landscape--that the vast majority of tort claims are settled out of court, that state courts handle the bulk of torts, and that different types of torts have different impacts on litigants and on the tort system. The Expansion of Tort Liability in the United States U.
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Attorneys and Legal Information

"(13) The accuracy of that characterization of nonpecuniary damages is a matter of some debate. Supporters of the status quo argue that large awards for punitive damages can promote efficiency by sending appropriate signals for precaution in regard to torts that have a significant probability of escaping detection and judgment.
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Attorneys and Legal Information

(11) Finally, if potential injurers expect to pay less than one dollar in liability costs per dollar of additional social costs--or, more to the point, expect to save less than one dollar per dollar of reduced social costs--they will have too little incentive to take preventive action. That situation may occur if liability judgments have a significant arbitrary component, if avoidance efforts succeed in obscuring injurers' roles in causing some losses, or if injurers insure their liability costs and the premiums they pay do not fully reflect their injury record.
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