Ambulance chasers before the bodies or plane are discovered: 1st lawsuit over MH370

[Ms. Toad]

195. Sorry - but you need a refresher course in Rule 11.

And rule 8. It is an ethical violation, and legally sanctionable, to file suit just for the sake of preserving evidence which may be in the possession of an entity which may not have committed any wrongful act - or to claim without a specific legal theory sufficient to put the defendant on notice of what is being alleged against them (a short and plain statement of the claim showing that the pleader is entitled to relief).

A hospital setting is somewhat different. There you have pretty well defined set of actors - the hospital, and medical staff which have a legal relationship to the entity for which they work. You also have an event which generally does not normally happen without negligence by one or more of that closed universe of actors. In circumstances like that, the concept of res ipsa loqitur (the thing speaks for itself) permits all parties - one of which must have been acting negligently - to be made defendants.

In this case, we do not have that scenario. Something went wrong - but as of today we don't know whether it was innocent or wrongful (although it certainly appears wrongful). we don't know whether it was mechanical failure, deliberate diversion, or an outside force which brought the plane down.

We don't have any good reason to believe that the actors against whom claims were brought acted wrongfully - and that (under Rule 11) is a prerequisite to filing a claim. Both the airline and the manufacturer may be entirely blameless - in fact the bulk of the evidence I have seen suggests they are - it appears that the pilot or co-pilot, acting independently or together, diverted the plane and no one, so far, has been able to connect the dots in a way which would make the airline negligent via a respondeat superior or negligent hiring theory. An injured party isn't ethically entitled to bring claims against them just because they may possess evidence they believe might be helpful to sort out what really happened.