Expert system for evaluating product liability claims

The SKADE 2 expert system evaluates product liability claims and generates ‘litigate or settle’ decisions. This expert-system application may achieve savings for corporations. It can help to reduce excessive settlements and unnecessary trials by giving decision makers precise information about the eventual outcomes of similar past cases, or by organizing and structuring complex high-stakes product liability claims. The blackboard model provides the conceptual framework and organizing schema for the system. Interviews with litigators, claims adjusters, technical (product) experts, managers and lawyers provided the knowledge needed to develop the conceptual model and the system knowledge base. The results of experiments with the validation and analysis of a hypothetical case indicate that the blackboard is an appropriate model for the development of expert systems in the product liability domain. The initial success with the SKADE 2 system suggests that further work needs to be done on whether more complex models can be built to incorporate a broader range of determinants of product liability claims evaluation.