(right:  Andy Warhol’s Green Car Crash (Green Burning Car I) sold for $71,720,000 at Christies in May of this year, bringing the total price for ten Warhols sold in the same evening to $136.7 million)

When I read articles like Clyde Haberman's The City’s New Motto: ‘See You in Court’ I want to understand and not simply condemn any one of the following (no matter how easy it may be):

1. the lawyer who worked 30 to 40 hours — nearly $10,000 in billable time — to fight a $65 parking ticket. 
2. former Supreme Court nominee Robert H. Bork who wants $1 million from the Yale Club in Manhattan as compensation for the pain he suffered after falling at the dais before a scheduled speech.
3. an immigrant from Mali who is seeking $100 million against the City of New York for the death of his wife and 4 children "in a terrible fire in the Bronx three months ago."

I am not even going to posit the possibility that Bork suffered genuine injuries; the lawyer  "took on City Hall" for the principle of the thing; and, the loss of five lives might just be worth the price paid for ten Warhols at Christies in May of this year.   

What interests me, as always, is why.  

Why Do People Bring Lawsuits? 

Fortunately, we do not need to speculate or call in the usual suspects of greedy lawyers, the over-reaching victims of minor injuries or the evil-doing citizens we (too often?) assume lurk among us.

Nera Economic Consulting, along with the Rand Institute, neither known for their love of the plaintiffs' trial bar, recently published an article sufficiently scholarly to carry the dry-as-bones title, The Propensity to Sue: Why Do People Seek Legal Actions?   The answers to the question -- why do we sue - in order of importance - are:

•  When we believe someone else is to blame for our injuries, we are nearly five times as likely to make a claim against another.  The good news is that we do not sue, even for catastrophic injuries, if we do not believe someone else was at fault.  As Rand and Nera report:

For a person who sustained a severe injury in an accident, such as life threatening impairment, there is a 10% probability of claiming if he blames no one else for his or her injury. The probability increases to 61% if the person perceives that some other individual, company or organization caused this severe injury. 

• Nevertheless, the severity of the injury (measured by bruises and fractures) does positively relate to the rate at which claims are made.  Rand and Nera again:

The predicted claiming rate is 12% for a minor injury, 16% for a moderate injury (including crushes and fractures), and 35% for a serious injury (including life threatening and long-term impairment). Measuring severity in terms of days from work [also] has a persistent, statistically significant impact on claiming rate.

• People tend to make claims for injuries more often in automobile accidents than for any other type of injury-causing event.  "The odds ratio of claiming in a case of car accidents," we are told, "is almost 11 times more likely than any other type of accident." 

Whether these suit-filing rates and reasons suggest a nation-gone-mad with litigation is for the more scholarly researchers to determine.  I report this data here only because I'm a trained skeptic of the anecdotal to explain personal or societal pathology.

(and for the reference of readers who don't know who in the world I am, I spent my litigation and trial career primarily representing corporate commercial interests -- not injured plaintiffs)