Motivations may be fair grist for personal criticism of the litigants, but on that level, it’s unpersuasive to suggest that the parents would be incurious if their son had died at a janitor’s house. If the intended suggestion is actually that the parents didn’t care about their dead child and were simply exploiting their son’s death in cynical pursuit of a payday — well, that seems an over-the-top charge to level, if based on nothing more than the filing of a lawsuit (and I see no other basis for the charge here). Where’s the similar post on Fred Goldman?

Fred Goldman, it may be responded, had much better grounds to sue. But now we’re discussing the merits of the claims. Whether there was a good-faith basis for suit seems a slight change of subject, but in any event, there does appear to have been such as basis, in this case, as a matter of positive law: the claim made it to trial and settled only there. There may be arguments that it shouldn’t have — that motions for summary judgment were wrongly decided, that doctrine should be changed, etc. But the post doesn’t make them. It attacks the litigants’ motivations instead. From the post, I can’t even glean the legal theory under which the claims proceeded. The only cited source is a press article that doesn’t do much to explain the legal details either.

On the level of policy, speculating about people’s motives for filing litigation seems unproductive. People’s motives in bringing and defending litigation often are not pretty — and someone, somewhere, will find some motive to bring any lawsuit the system permits them to bring. The interesting policy question is which ones to permit, and how to weed out the undesirable ones, without extirpating the valid ones too.

In the site’s coverage of the “Litigation is Coercive” story (https://www.overlawyered.com/2007/03/litigation_is_coercive.html), the method used (admittedly, in that case, for an improper purpose) was a “Deposition Before Suit” under Texas Rule of Civil Procedure 202.

A Rule 202 Petition can be filed to either (1) preserve deposition testimony (from, e.g., witnesses who may be close to death), or (2) to investigate whether you have a claim against the deponent or some other third party. The only relief available for a Rule 202 Petition is a deposition. It allows parties to investigate potential claims so that they don’t file frivolous (or, in the vocabulary of the Rules, “groundless,” “harassing,” or “bad faith”) claims.

This case and the one in San Antonio do not appear exactly as paragons of good faith or propriety. But lawsuit as means of discovery? Neither remarkable nor illegitimate.