Law Department Management Blog
Why is “bet the company litigation” (aka “bet-the-company litigation”) consistently among the most popular search terms for those who arrive at my blog? On October 26th I looked on SiteMeter under Referring Search Words Ranked by Visits. Number one (13 searches) was the unhyphenated version and number seven (8 searches) was the hyphenated form.
I have used the terms a few times in posts, mostly with criticisms attached (See my post of Dec. 5, 2005: an estimate of fees spent in the UK; Feb. 28, 2006 chastising the over-use of term; April 27, 2008: big suits not suitable for AFAs; Jan. 18, 2009: some data on stock price effects of law suits; April 1, 2009: data from another study on median damages; June 17, 2009: legal risks much less important than operational and financial; July 28, 2009: girdle-the-globe transactions and bet-the-company litigation as blue moon events; and April 9, 2010: rare events.).
The popularity of the term may because it is an idiom, and non-litigators don’t know what it refers to: what I might term prevail-or-wail lawsuits.