Overlawyered letters

U-Haul's refusal to do business with customers who want to use Ford Explorers to tow its vehicles (Jan. 8) illustrates one of the destructive consequences of "shotgun" litigation, in which plaintiffs' attorneys name as many defendants as possible in their suits. In this case the obvious defendants in case of a rollover accident would be Ford, the tire manufacturers or both. But the U-Haul company has a deep pocket too, and lawyers could develop some "creative" or "novel" legal theory (to use a charitable description) that dragged it in by seizing on some extremely remote causal link. (Maybe the argument would be that the effects of a rollover would be more extreme if a vehicle were towing a trailer, and U-Haul had a responsibility to warn Explorer drivers of that.) The high cost of litigation then serves to persuade such peripheral defendants to chip in towards a settlement, to the plaintiffs' and their attorneys' profit. So common is this approach, and so successful, that for a plaintiffs' attorney to fail to exploit it might be the basis for a juicy legal malpractice case. -- George L. Lenard, Chesterfield, Mo. (George's Employment Blawg)