What can an asbestos defendant do about lawsuits in which they don’t belong? Asbestos personal injury is the highest volume, longest-running and most mature litigation in the history of the United States. One byproduct of this legal system behemoth is that the lawsuit filing process is unlike any other.
To be as thorough as possible serving their clients, plaintiffs’ counsel casts a wide net and files claims against defendants that never should be a party to the complaint. Indeed, nearly all corporate asbestos defendants are dismissed out of the majority of asbestos lawsuits without paying any settlement dollars due to the overzealousness of plaintiff firms.
This practice of over-naming of defendants on complaints may seem insignificant, but the costs associated with managing these claims are not. Even though these claims will most likely be dismissed somewhere down the judicial road, a defendant must nevertheless divert legal resources and incur defense costs to resolve these claims.
For decades defendants have tried to work with plaintiff firms in the hopes of reducing extraneous filings but have had only limited success. More recently, some defendants have turned to technology to help limit the burden of these claims.
PACE’s Intelligent Claims Management applies predictive coding technology at the time of filing to identify asbestos lawsuits that are likely to be dismissed without payment. Armed with this knowledge, defendants are moving management of these lawsuits to a separate, lower-cost, track for handling.
By turning to predictive modeling technology, defendants are easing their caseload burden and, more significantly, saving defense costs associated with lawsuits that will ultimately be dismissed.
