Emerging liability risks aren’t likely to look like asbestos or silica in coming years, according to an expert who has been following the development of workplace torts for decades.Executive SummaryCompared to existing insurer approaches, medical science gives a very different perspective on where the next group of liability risks might come from, according to Robert Reville, CEO of Praedicat, whose company’s software, known as CoMeta, looks for clues about casualty catastrophes in the text of millions of scientific research articles.
Instead, the next wave of mass litigation and liability insurance claims will more likely be tied to endocrine-disrupting substances, says Robert Reville, chief executive officer of Praedicat, who explains that the potential harm resulting from exposure to such substances during infancy or childhood is increasingly referenced in peer-reviewed medical journals.
“Science today is much more concerned about childhood and in-utero exposures,” he says. “This is new from the perspective that this is not the kind of litigation that insurers ever saw back in the ’70s and ’80s.