Mass Torts Lawsuit

• Mass Accidents
• Toxic Torts

Mass Accident

It is a tortious misconduct that affects large number of persons in similar ways. The most familiar torts of this type arise from localized disasters involving a particular physical structure.

Example:

A Hotel fire

Mass accidents exhibit numerosity, often geographic dispersion and injury patterns. The physical impairments produced by a hotel file or an airplane crash is burns, broken bones, or death. The absence of temporal dispersion makes mass accidents simply a more wide ranging variation on the chain of events.

Toxic Torts

It is a tortious misconduct involving toxic substances said to produce latent disease.

Example:

Residents near an industrial facility

They might sue in tort based upon their exposure to a toxic chemical. The residents claim may well entail some manner of present-day harm. But an even more challenging component of their claims likely will center on allegations of latent disease. Cancer is the classic example of a latent disease.

What makes Mass Tort Litigation different from all other litigations?

It is a single event with many victims. Mass tort is large. There are many plaintiffs involved, number of parties involved are often a challenge in themselves especially when parties are approaching the issue from different perspectives. Because, it involves manufacturers, distributors, Pharmaceutical case doctors, multiple jurisdictions and courts, scope of discovery, sheer size, expense, time, multiplicity of counsel and management challenges.

Causation

• Plaintiff must connect their injury to defendant’s conduct sufficiently to justify relief.
• Potential Issues to raise are : Product Identification or Tracing, Attenuated or remote casual chain, Concurrent alleged wrongdoing, multiple casual factors of which defendant’s conduct is only one, Intervening wrongdoing by others, Opportunity for plaintiffs to mitigate damages and Proof issues.