Though this is primarily a way of strengthening each plaintiff's case and their cases as a whole, it has certain benefits to defendants as well. By dealing with the Vioxx cases as a class action and coming to an out-of-court resolution with the class action, Merck avoided incurring additional legal costs in resolving or bringing to trial each of the individual cases that it was faced with. This is one way of managing the legal risks of the company; given a different set of circumstances, it might have been advantageous to try each case separately and many cases might have been dismissed due to lack of merit; in this case; the harm caused was fairly evident and materially the same in every case, so the legal exposure would have been increased by severing (or attempting...
In such cases, the plaintiff must prove that a structure or item of the defendant's is wholly or partially on the plaintiff's property as defined by official property/parcel records. The defendant can really only resist the claim if the parcel records show that their structures are wholly contained on their own property. Torts from business operations can include false advertising, in which the plaintiff must prove that the defendant knowingly made a claim or advertisement that was materially false and not obvious puffery. The defendant can resist such torts either by substantiating the questioned claim or demonstrating that it was self-evident puffery.
