An Overview of the 1980s Mass Personal Injury Litigation

The world has seen many historical events during the 1980s. Likewise, this decade has seen notable occurrences in line with the cultural, economic and political aspects in the United States.

One of the significant issues to arise during this era, which is still continuously disserted, is the explosion of mass personal injury litigation. The United States in the 1980s has seen people by the thousands suing many companies or corporations for damages and losses that resulted from injuries and diseases they have sustained. Based from their cases, toxic substances, medical devices, pharmaceutical products and catastrophic events were mostly the causes of their injuries.

The indemnification paid by the companies and their respective insurers amounted to billions of dollars. Billions of dollars and more were also spent on defense, insurance and payment to plaintiff's personal injury litigation lawyers.

During this period, the ghost of mass liability became such a scare for insurers who were from some manufacturer and markets that are researching and developing product lines.

These mass litigations involving personal injuries have two distinguishing features that make it apart from the other cases of product liability.

1. The claims contained in litigation have great level of cohesion of issues and parties.

1. The case standards and principles have remarkable interdependence

Personal injury litigations in massive numbers are usually the result of having many claims arising from several jurisdictions in the space of fairly short intervals. Only a few law firms usually bring up these personal injury claims and only the defendants being sued for it are only one or a few in number.

In terms of judges, one or a few are handling them although the claims may increase in number. A small group of experts and special masters assist the judges throughout the litigation process.

Because there are common features in actors and issues, the collective assessment of all the claims that are involved on same mass personal injuries increases and decreases depending upon significant developments and outcomes of single cases. 

Emergence of Mass Personal Injury Litigation during the 1980s

• The interactions of varied societal and legal trends paved the emergence of this litigation phenomenon during such period.

• This was also the period in the nation when products were mass marketed. Thus, the country's population was increasingly exposed to potentially dangerous or injurious consumer products and substances.

• Several social influencing factors:

• Evolution of law firms dedicated to the issues of the plaintiffs that facilitated the filing of personal injury claims in massive and overwhelming numbers.
• Growing number of information being exposed through mass media that suggested or established the "causal links" binding the injuries sustained to the products and substances used or exposed with.

• Changes made with the legal doctrines and the product liability law, which gave an opportunity for victims of the mass injury occurrences to file charges against defendants as common as the consumer products' manufacturers.

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