Recently, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a business group, issued a report on "out-of-court tactics" used in relation to transnational litigation in the United States. The basic observation of the report, titled "Think Globally, Sue Locally,"is that corporate defendants in transnational cases, which typically challenge human rights abuses or environmental damage, are also frequently subject to public education and outreach campaigns, including reports, videos, shareholder advocacy, and media outreach.  ERI agrees with this observation; when an abuse is serious enough to merit a lawsuit, it is also serious enough that we want to educate the public, shareholders, and policymakers about the problem so that the victims can obtain justice and similar abuses do not happen again.

The Chamber's report, however, draws from this observation several unwarranted conclusions, and these are based in part on numerous errors in the report, so ERI has issued a response ("Missing the Point: A response to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce report 'Think Globally, Sue Locally'") that addresses the fundamental errors of fact and analysis in the Chamber's report.  The Chamber suggests that the lawsuits are often legally weak and that the public campaigns are designed to pressure defendants into settling meritless cases.  This is simply false; legally meritless cases get dismissed before trial, and ERI alone has brought three cases to trial or to settlement just before trial in the past five years.

The report also suggests that transnational cases are prone to fraud, but cites only one fraudulent case, and a second case where false claims were filed apparently through negligence and miscommunication.  Even though the report acknowledges that there has been no evidence of fraud in any other case, it uses these two unusual cases as its "case studies."  Moreover, neither of the case studies really involves transnational litigation; both of them are primarily about cases that were initially brought in the United States but then, at the corporate defendants' request, were dismissed in order to be re-filed in another country.

Even with all its errors, the report provides a valuable warning to corporations that may be engaging in or complicit in serious human rights and environmental abuses: in addition to being sued, they may well face public outrage, a shareholder revolt, questions from lawmakers, and a media firestorm.