Gary Marchant, Robert Milligan, and Brian Wilhelmi of the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at ASU write an excellent paper regarding the nature of American law and the nascent genomics industry: “Legal pressures and incentives for personalized medicine”

As individual plaintiffs [of personal injury from medical malpractice or product liability cases] usually cannot afford to finance the litigation, their attorneys must fund the case using their own resources on a contingency fee basis. One implication of this financial relationship is that plaintiffs’ attorneys are generally reluctant to litigate and fund novel claims based on new scientific evidence. However, once a However, once a new claim has proven to be successful by one or more favorable verdicts and ‘blood is in the water’, there will be a swarm of lawyers willing to file and finance similar ‘copycat’ suits. For a new field such as pharmacogenomics, this litigation dynamic means that there will likely be an initial calm until there has been a breakthrough case, and then there will be a sudden storm of litigation that will have immediate and enormous implications for defendants, including manufacturers, providers and payors.