Episode 121: The Rise of Europe’s Litigation Economy – Will the New Product Liability Directive Make It Worse? with Oscar Guinea

Global Economy Podcast

ECIPE

Business

4.2 • 5 Ratings

🗓️ 3 March 2026

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In this episode, ECIPE’s Fredrik Erixon and Oscar Guinea talk about the EU’s revised Product Liability Directive (PLD) and how it risks fuelling many new class action lawsuits. Is it really good for Europe’s economy that it imports more of America’s litigation culture for managing collective redress? Together, they look into how the PLD expands “product” to include software, AI systems, algorithms, and digital files, and how new evidentiary presumptions and disclosure rules could lower the burden of proof for claimants. The discussion links the PLD to Europe’s growing “mass litigation” infrastructure (funders, specialised law firms, claim-bundling platforms), warns about forum shopping and Single Market fragmentation, and contrasts litigation-heavy models with Nordic approaches centred on public enforcement and alternative dispute resolution. You can watch a video recording of this conversation here. You can read a transcript of the chat here.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everyone and welcome to ESAMP's Global Economy Podcast. My name is Frederick Erickson.
0:18.5	And today I am joined by my colleague Oscar Guinea, who is a senior economist and director at ESAMP as well.
0:24.9	Hello, Oscar.
0:26.0	Hi, hello.
0:27.4	How are you?
0:28.6	I'm all right yourself.
0:30.3	Not too bad.
0:31.1	Not too bad.
0:31.9	We're recording this on a Friday, so I think we're both looking forward to some well-earned rest of the weekend.
0:38.2	Oscar, we are going to talk about the product liability directive today.
0:44.6	And before we start this conversation, let me just set this up a little bit.
0:49.4	We have in the past been doing a lot of work related to what sort of technically can be called
0:57.7	collective litigation, basically mass litigation, that we have a process where many more
1:05.0	countries in Europe are almost going in an American direction when it comes to using courts to deal with sometimes injury
1:14.1	and liability issues, but we have seen a development where courts and these procedures of
1:21.2	collective litigation also becomes the subject for many other types of things. And it's partly
1:27.1	been spurred by the European Union itself, because over time, it has introduced a number of new regulations, like, for instance, the GDPR or in competition policy, or in financial services regulation, that encourages people to use courts in order to have a sort of private enforcement
1:51.3	coming on top of the public enforcement that we have in most parts of Europe in terms of how
1:57.8	companies need to follow regulations. And if they don't, they go into hear from government entities that they are doing something wrong.
2:06.5	Now, to me, this has become a bit of a strange issue, especially in the past years, because on the
2:12.6	one hand, we have a new competitiveness drive in Europe, where we want to reduce the burden of regulation,
2:20.3	where we want to reduce the complexities and the costs that come with, not just an increased
	...

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