Are you kidding me? The lawyers are going to sue whom?

[jberryhill]

6. Whenever you see a story about a lawsuit like this...

There is a background context which is not reported, and is actually the real story.

What you are seeing is not a shipping line suing pharmacists. That's only the form it takes.

But what's really going on is a game of "who's picking up the tab" between and among insurance companies.

Here's how it works.

Something awful happens, which is pretty much the fault of company A. Company A goes to its insurer to pay claims. A's insurer conditions its obligation to pay claims on an exclusion of liability of anyone else. For example, A's insurer might withhold or not pay claims on the grounds that someone else is at least partially liable. In order to get the claims fully paid and settled, A's insurer basically puts company A in the position of having to litigate against any other party who might remotely have some kind of liability, and the outcome of that action determines whether A's insurer is going to fully pay the claims, or whether someone else's insurer is going to have to chip in.

If you look at it as a morality tale in which you are asked to figure out who is responsible for what, from some moral perspective, then yes, these kinds of things will drive you batty. However, the other way of looking at is is simply as a system for distributing risk and the cost of risk.

A prime example of that sort of thing was an "OMG that's awful" lawsuit on DU a while back where some injured person was suing the parents of a kid who left a toy on a sidewalk outside their home on which the person tripped and suffered some spectacularly disproportionate injury. The suit alleged negligent supervision or something, but it wasn't really about the parents, the kid or the toy. It was really between the victim's medical insurer and the parents' homeowner's insurer.

The parties to a whole raft of lawsuits are merely bit players in a larger question of whose insurance company is going to have to pay for what.