There is no option but to ‘let the courts sort it out’. Courts have a tendency to go a different route than the plaintiff would expect. Even if in your opinion company A should be primarily responsible, it could very well happen that the court decides company X (whom per Brutus recommendation, was not included) is the real culprit. Better to be safe than sorry, so you better cast a sufficiently wide net.
That said, I can understand the irritation with some of the stories you hear. For one, there are indeed cases where there is just a very tenuous connection between the defendant and the accident, and where it seems to be a case of ‘deep pockets’ only.
But with respect to the costs to fend of a lawsuit, this might be more a problem with the general state of the U.S. legal system. I’m no expert on this; I just finished reading The Moral Compass of the American Lawyer by Zitrin and Langford, who give a balanced view of the current problems. While they debunk some of the criticism, they are aware of certain problems and offer suggestions for improvement (unfortunately mostly would need a change in the mind-set of organizations and institutions, which are rather hard to accomplish).
Like other folks said, it’s sometimes hard to know in advance who the responsible party is. For what it’s worth, in the case I’ve been discussing, I spent several hours poking around the web sites of the organizations in question; doing internet searches; and studying the form 990s of the one non-profit involved. But I wasn’t able to find the answer I was looking for. I finally chatted about the issue with a more experienced attorney who told me it would be malpractice not to sue all 4 entities - and sort things out later.
Derleth - It was something like ten years ago. The primary e mail system is a proprietary DOS based one, with a transition to cc:Mail in the later part of the time period we needed to search The servers (Netware 3.12) only hold 500 mg - and we could only free up two of them for this work, and the restores are about 300 meg a month, there were something on the order of 12 e-mail servers, each with its own extensive tape set. Because of the time period, we had multiple tape systems during that time, and two or three different backup software programs. Oh, and its a 15,000 person company - the to: from: list the lawyers provided is about 200 names - across all those servers. I had scripts, but the scripts didn’t take care of everything - or in fact most of the work. The restores were what took so long - as each tape needed to be restored, its contents searched via script, the hits copied out, and then a new restore over the top of the previous one. Oh, and back then, the lawyers wanted everything translated to ASCII text files and put on FLOPPY! Yep, thousands of floppies. So yes, scripting was part of the solution, but it was just time consuming and labor intensive even with the scripts.
Never, ever, ever, hang onto your mail backups any longer than needed for disaster recovery purposes.
(And yes, I was properly exempted as a proper exempt professional employee, since this is the company I had a sexual harrassment claim against, getting paid for overtime was the least of my legal concerns there. The company - a former Fortune 100, has been bought by a competator and exists no more.)
I know nothing about this case, (just what I’ve seen on the news), and even I can tell you Shell has nothing to do with it. I guess they need to be dismissed of wrong doing, but what the hell could they possibly have been responsible for?