Professional liability doesn’t stop at the grave

Liable after death.

It’s a haunting thought because for all of us, the mess we leave behind becomes someone else’s problem. After all, there’s not a whole lot you can do about cleaning up and resolving your problems when you’re dead. Everything has just been taken care of for you.

Even those second and third mortgages on the 6000 square foot house you couldn’t afford in the first place aren’t a worry anymore now that you’ve just downsized into a rent-free pine box.

In other words, dying is a trouble-free time for the deceased but as many of us know first-hand, it can also be an extremely stressful time for those left behind. Parents, spouses, children, siblings, and sometimes even close friends, are often left to clean up messes.

In most cases they may simply involve minor things like unpaid phone bills or an outstanding parking ticket or two, but on a larger and more devastating scale, they may involve something the deceased designed or built as a “licensed professional” that later failed and injured, or even killed, someone.

Being Liable After Death is something that few people have heard of, but it pertains to almost anyone (usually engineers) who is responsible for building something that fails and injures or kills someone.

Even after death, there’s a certain period of responsibility for design work; and while it doesn’t happen too often, estates can and have been sued for losses as a result of the deceased’s workmanship.

I know it sounds hard to believe, but a dead mining engineer’s family, for example, can be sued for damages should one of his or her designs fail and others are hurt or lose their lives as a result of a proven design fault or negligence.

Proving responsibility for a design fault of negligence, however, is no easy task; but in today’s “lawyered-up” world, finding fault with others has become an obsession, and unfortunately, designers (including mining engineers) are the first ones under the microscope.

Because of this, it’s no wonder the “true” professions (engineering, architecture, medicine, etc) are struggling to attract bodies, whereas law firms are overflowing with candidates. We all know it’s easier to criticize than create, and I guess that’s why we’re churning out more lawyers than we are designers.

Anyway, the point I’m trying to make is that society has become so litigation happy that even the estates of the dead aren’t safe from the courts.

Thankfully, if there is a “thankfully” to what I’m saying, other professionals (scientists) are now being taken to court, too, over issues that are on a par with the ridiculousness of suing dead designers.

Under the headline, “Italian scientists face trial over 2009 quake” there’s a story about six Italian geophysicists and a government official going on trial for “manslaughter” for not predicting an earthquake in Italy that killed 309 people, injured 1500 more and destroyed 20,000 buildings.

It turns out that The National Commission for Forecasting and Predicting Great Risks provided “incomplete, imprecise and contradictory information” about an earthquake that hit The City of L’Aquila and nearby towns in 2009.

The scientists on trial face up to 15 years in jail if convicted of manslaughter. A separate civil lawsuit is asking for $30 million in damages.

While the situation involving the scientists is somewhat different than the Liable After Death scenario, it ties in with my message about how ridiculous the laws have gotten and how dangerous it is today to be a “true” professional, even when you’re dead.