A brief rant brought on by American Airlines failing to fly this morning to London. The usual song and dance – "equipment failure" and no back up plane available. So, because American cuts costs by not having backup planes, hundreds of people are now wasting a day, and wasting lots of money that had been spent based on the idea of being on a certain flight at a more or less certain time. In my case, for example, I paid far more for a morning flight than I would for an evening

Thanks to the Empirical Legal Studies blog post here, here is the link for a student paper asserting that there no facts to back up the practice of promoting structured settlements instead of lump sum settlements. #Damages #LitigationIndustry

This August 27 press release from Abbott and Pfizer exemplifies another way science is changing and will over time create new legal issues as to remedies for tort claims. The pertinent part of the press release is quoted below; the gist is that the two are undertaking a joint effort to create a diagnostic test to find persons with a specific genetic defect so that a clinical trial can be then undertaken only with patients with that particular genetic defect. Soon enough, plai

More on brain rewiring and damages potentially recoverable in current or future tort litigation. This prior post provided some fact patterns and legal issues on future damages issues as drawn from research breakthroughs described in a wonderful book on brain plasticity – The Brain That Changes Itself — Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science, by Dr. Norman Doidge. Now, here’s more to think about as both individuals and as tort lawyers who end up in arg

More on science and tort law. Suppose medical malpractice destroys a woman’s inner ear balance function to the point she can stand up only when supported by a wall or other structure. Suppose you are the insurer for the doctor – how much do you offer to compensate for her inability to work or to live any kind of a normal life? Is the offer a structured settlement worth perhaps $ 10 million over 30 years? If you are the woman, do you accept that offer? Or, do you commit yourse

With respect to tort claiming around the world, one frequent comment is that claiming will not increase very much because persons from developing nations may well have very limited claims for lost wages. That may be true in some cases, but the plaintiff’s bar of course seeks ways to move by that barrier. One way to do that is to focus on the prospect that the claimant might have been able to or perhaps planned to immigrate to a more developed country and would have been gainf