Attorneys and Legal Information

In that case, it will perceive investments in precaution to be twice as valuable as they are to society as a whole, and thus it will have an incentive to spend up to two dollars for every additional dollar in actual costs saved. All of the spending that returned less than one dollar per dollar from society's standpoint would reduce the net savings from precaution, making it less likely that tort costs on the whole were efficient.
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Class Action Lawsuits and Lawyers

In the past 20 years, many states have either eliminated joint-and-several liability under some or all circumstances or have restricted it in various ways--for example, by limiting it to certain types of damages or to injurers whose liability exceeds a certain percentage threshold. Whether such changes have increased or decreased efficiency is not clear. Ideal incentives require joint injurers to each face liability equal to the incremental effect of their own actions, but neither joint-and-several nor several liability reliably achieves that result. To illustrate, consider a case in which the actions of two injurers are both necessary to cause harm--for example, in which each one disposes of a chemical and the two chemicals then combine to produce an explosion.
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Class Action Lawsuits and Lawyers

See Thomas J. Miceli and Kathleen Segerson, "Joint Liability in Torts: Marginal and Infra-Marginal Efficiency," International Review of Law and Economics, vol. 11, no. 3 (December 1991), pp.
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Class Action Lawsuits and Lawyers

(12) Second--as advocates of the creation of special courts to hear medical malpractice claims argue--assigning certain types of complex cases to judges with particular expertise in a subject may improve the quality of case outcomes.(13) The idea is that judges who have experience or specialized training can more accurately interpret scientific or technical issues (in the terms discussed in Chapter 3, lower the cost of information), provide more consistent application of the law, or both. One potential argument against specialized courts is that to the extent that they make the process of litigation more efficient, they may encourage additional plaintiffs to bring suits. Indeed, some analysts argue that efforts to streamline asbestos cases (in part by consolidating claims for trial) "actually increased the total dollars spent on the litigation by increasing the numbers of claims filed and resolved.
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Attorneys and Legal Information

3 percent in Germany--the next two closest countries. 6.
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