Preventing Litigation

Chapter 24

To Know or Not to Know

With all of this going for a litigation early warning system, how could it fail to be a game-changer? We’ve had more than one person suggest this question: “Wouldn’t the attorneys, or the executives, prefer not to know?” Or this variation on that theme: “What if the enterprise knew and didn’t do anything? If the failure to act, after having knowledge, were to be discovered, wouldn’t that be worse than not knowing about the threat in the first place?”

So we must be clear-eyed about this. Our view, to revisit an earlier point, is this:

[T]he profession needs to rethink its role from that of an ­ambulance at the bottom of a cliff (remedial practice) to helping people to manage risks on top of the ...