Jim Walker posed the following on his CruiseLaw Blog. I have a feeling they are going to get annihilated in court. Simply clueless. I have three semesters of maritime/admiralty law under my belt and even I can tell these are all baseless claims in the wrong area of jurisdiction.
Yesterday, New York lawyers for Costa Concordia cruise survivors filed an amended lawsuit in Miami, adding 33 additional passengers as plaintiffs. The lawyers are seeking $78 million in compensatory damages and $450 in punitive damages for a total amount of $528 million on behalf of 39 passengers.
New York lawyer Marc Bern, of the law firm Napoli Bern Ripka Shkolnik and Associates said "Only one cruise ship has gone down in over 100 years, the Titanic. Now the Costa Concordia will live in infamy with it."
One of the goals of the highly publicized $528 million lawsuit is supposedly to make cruising safer. It’s painful to watch non-maritime lawyers seek over one-half billion dollars for 39 survivors without acknowledging the numerous passenger and crew deaths caused by cruise ship sinkings over the years, from the Andrea Doria to the Sea Diamond.