Thanks to the Internet and telecommunications, the globe is shrinking, figuratively. Thus, many risk managers — especially those with far-flung foreign operations — no longer focus parochially on loss exposures inside the U.S. While the tort explosion has detonated loudest in this country, companies must ponder the possibility of foreign claims. This is doubly true as commentators see some foreign jurisdictions becoming almost as lawsuit happy as America. Japan, for example, faces a shortage of attorneys and is trying to get more students into law schools. Be careful what you wish for!

Risk managers must assess whether or not they have liability exposures abroad. If so, their insurers or adjusting companies must be able to service claim-handling needs in foreign countries. Increasingly, risk managers have foreign loss exposures and, hence, claims abroad. Consider the following scenarios:

• A visitor slips and falls at a company-owned manufacturing site in Ontario, Canada.
• A hand-tool your company manufactures injures a German national in Frankfurt; he brings legal action against the company in his local court.
• A sales rep traveling in Buenos Aires on business is involved in a fatal car collision.
• A product that your company manufactures allegedly malfunctions and injures a Chinese citizen in Beijing.

Any of these situations suggest that the sun may never set on tort liability. While America can pride itself on leading the world in the number of lawyers per capita and its jackpot (some might say crackpot) tort system, much of the world is waking up to smell the whiplash. American tort trends could migrate overseas faster than Disney and McDonalds. This will negate any presumption that injury claims in foreign jurisdictions are inherently de minimus matters.