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Comment by ShrigmaMale | Hacker News Reader

this is one of the interesting problems of assessing damages in cases like this.

putting the company out of business serves no particular purpose: lost jobs, higher prices and shortages for important products.

letting it get off without a penalty establishes a clear moral hazard and makes it hard to compensate victims.

evidently, the line is in the middle. and of course, the military tested these earplugs and said they met spec - so should 3m really bear full liability?

and, even with all this: if 85% of the victims still have normal hearing, don't you think ambulance chasing plays a role here?

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> putting the company out of business serves no particular purpose

Hard disagree. Putting the company out of business strongly disincentivizes other companies from engaging in fraud.

> the military tested these earplugs and said they met spec - so should 3m really bear full liability?

This is exactly what a trial is designed to do: Decide who is liable, and to what degree. If 3M had been confident in their actions they could have gone to trial. But of course that path has the highest risk-reward.

> don't you think ambulance chasing plays a role here?

This doesn't matter? You seem to use "ambulance chasing" as a pejorative term for "lawyers trying to win suits for money," but that is literally the foundation of the civil law system. It seems like Hacker News should appreciate that government has created an incentive for private attorneys to pursue claims on behalf of people who have been harmed.

> Putting the company out of business strongly disincentivizes other companies from engaging in fraud.

It'll also disincentivize other companies from working in these areas at all.

That's often easy to justify in isolation from an abundance of caution, but in the aggregate it's the cause of things like the Cessna 172 (a design from the 50s!) still being manufactured today.

We can appreciate that while simultaneously not appreciating that it creates a linked incentive for private attorneys to find people and convince them to claim they've been harmed and/or overstate the amount of harm, particularly in cases where it's difficult to ascertain whether any loss they have suffered is linked to the product or not.

> particularly in cases where it's difficult to ascertain whether any loss they have suffered is linked to the product or not

This is what a trial is for? I'm not sure if you understand how a civil trial works. But lawyers from both sides get to present evidence supporting their case. Unless you're suggesting that 3M (market cap: $57.5 billion) did not have the resources to defend themselves against a frivolous suit.

To state what should be obvious: A company does not settle a frivolous lawsuit for $5.5 billion dollars.

https://search.brave.com/search?q=market+cap+3M&source=deskt...

My comment was responding to the ambulance-chasing-incentives aspect of the process.

That response does not make any sense. Ambulance chasers only make money if they win. In this case 3M had more than enough resources to defend itself. At worst, they could have settled for a trivial amount -- if they were not liable. The fact that they settled for $5.5 billion strongly suggests they were liable and they knew it.

tl;dr It's not ambulance chasing to sue a company guilty of corporate misconduct.

> Ambulance chasers only make money if they win.

Clarification/correction: Ambulance chasers make money if they win or if the defendant settles the case.

Do you have an alternative system in mind? I'm not sure I understand what you're getting at. Should there be a purity test for lawyers to make sure they're 100% sincere in their lawsuits?

>putting the company out of business serves no particular purpose: lost jobs, higher prices and shortages for important products.

Why not keep the company around but expropriate it from the current owners?

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