Accident litigation

The only question is whether the effort will be proactive or reactive. Proactive efforts are led by the enlightened leadership of safety, engineering, and management communities reactive efforts are pushed by accidents, litigation, and overseas competition. 

Without enlightened and aggressive leadership, the necessary expansion and improvement in the system safety effort may come as the reaction to catastrophic accidents, litigation, or initiatives begun in other parts of the world. 

Hall, J. 1998. Keynote address. The Tracking Associations Foundation Conference on Highway Accidents Litigation. National Transportation Safety Board, Washington, D.C. 

Priest (1988,190-94), however, argues that the explosion in product liability litigation has not measurably deterred accidental or job-related death rates. But he recognizes that simple time-series bivariate analysis is rather crude evidence, because there is no coun-terfactual of how many accidents would have occurred if a noliability, first-party-insurance regime had existed. 

The nature of tort litigation precludes systematic empirical investigation of the effect of legal rules on behavior. Not all accidents result in litigation. In addition, not all litigation actually stems from accidents some cases stem from nonaccidents (i.e., fraud). Finally, not all litigation results in a court decision. 

We cannot infer from court decisions whether the underlying legal rules favor the defendant or the plaintiff because legal rules affecf the selection of disputes from the universe of accidents (and nonaccidents) as well as the outcome (Eisenberg 1990). That, in itself, would not be a problem if there were data about people s decisions to litigate and settle but, for the most part, trials are the only window on the liability system... 

Realizing that the decisions of accident victims to litigate and of litigants to settle are not random yields several insights. First, few litigated cases involve facts that lie far from the decision standards that courts use to render judgments. Plaintiffs and defendants make errors about the relationship between the facts of their particular cases and the rules used by courts to separate successful from unsuccessful torts, but large errors are uncommon (Priest and Klein 1984 Priest 1985, 220). 

There is a tendency to assume that the principles of informed consent are self-evident. In fact, evidence that this is not the case comes from many sources, such as ethics committees that are frequently dissatisfied with proposed informed consent documents, and sophisticated Western governments that, from time to time have conducted clinical trials without it (e.g. the Tuskeegee travesty). A recent gene therapy accident in the eastern United States, which led to the death of the participant, led to litigation which was centered not around whether the clinical trial was unduly hazardous but rather on whether the consent that the patient gave was truly and fully informed. 

A strong risk communication program can also assist a company if there is a serious accident. The more the public knows ahead of time about the facUity, the less likely they are to feel outrage. Also, the existence of the risk communication program will support the defense in any ensuring litigation. 

These accidents, and many less devastating incidents that continue to occur today, were linked by an incomplete analysis of human factors. The human side of safety was ignored with high costs. Chemical manufacturers have yet to get over the impact of Bhopal, which killed 3,800 and injured over 200,000. Litigation is still in process. It required 4.5 years and 970 million to clean up after the Three Mile Island nuclear plant accident. That cost is hundreds of millions more than the cost to build the plant. Long-term environmental and health impacts of Chernobyl continue to haunt Russia and her neighbors. 

One Large Risk Management Consideration Litigation... 29 Preventing Vehicle Accidents... 

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