Tobacco was on the menu in Geneva, Switzerland last October, when around 30 high powered lawyers gathered at the Hotel Metropole, not far from the headquarters of the World Health Organization. It was the monthly meeting of the Association of International Business Lawyers, and the speaker was Bruce Ventura of the US (now Japanese owned) tobacco giant RJ Reynolds. His topic was "Smoking and health litigation", a review of the industry's legal headaches past and present.

After giving a brief history of US tobacco litigation, Mr Ventura reviewed the main categories of litigation: individual cases, class actions, and health care cost recovery actions. He saw three distinct waves of litigation, from personal injury cases up to the late 1960s, through product liability and "failure to warn" cases in the decade beginning in the early 1980s, to the class actions and health care recovery actions of today. As he saw it, the . . . [Full text of this article]