Engineers versus lawyers - "We are indeed a litigious society today"
" Product liability - There is an important and disturbing trend in this country toward putting the blame and legal responsibility on the producers or manufacturer of any item or piece of equipment that fails because of corrosion or for any other reason. The U.S. Department of Commerce has issued a report on the increase of product liability claims that point out that such claims have far outstripped inflation and are approaching medical malpractice insurance claims. One estimate indicates an average loss in 1965 from a product liability claim was $11,644. By 1973 this figure was $79,940, an increase of 686 percent. Lack of “contract”, or “negligence”, is no longer a defense.
A ridiculous example (to make the point) would be blaming the auto manufacturer if your car corroded because you drove it trough a lake of hydrochloric acid! The car could be made of tantalum, but the cost would be astronomical, nobody would buy it, and then a disclaimer would have to be filed stating that hydrofluoric acid must not be present!
What this all means is that the manufacturer or producer of a product must make sure it is made of proper materials, under good quality control, to a design that is as safe as possible, and the inspection must be critical. The corrosion engineer must be doubly sure that failure will not occur in the actual environment and should also be aware of the legal liability aspects. Passage of time is not a precluding factor; lawsuits resulted from failure of a bridge that had been in use for about 40 years.
The number listed […] above have escalated tremendously. In the product liability alone, jury awards “are now approaching $100 billion dollars per year”. Corporate legal costs to defend suits are about $50 billion. One reason for this escalation is that there are roughly 600,000 attorneys in this country or about one lawyer for every 400 citizens. In Japan the corresponding number is one lawyer for every 16,000 people. In 1984 American law school graduated about 35,000 lawyers – a number higher than the total number of American graduate students “in engineering, chemistry, physics and biology, combined!”.
We are indeed a litigious society today. "
Since 1984 nothing has changed, on the contrary... .