Speaking during a session at the Advisen Casualty Insights conference in March, Robert Reville, the chief executive officer of Praedicat, noted that while all mass litigation, historically, has been preceded by scientific hypotheses developed over many years, “most of the hypotheses turn out not to support litigation.”

“It makes sense for insurers to know about these things, but not necessarily to overreact,” Reville told Carrier Management during a follow-up interview to describe Praedicat’s recently introduced CoMeta software, which uses big-data technology to track the momentum of scientific hypotheses and ultimately the potential for the hypotheses to support “the next asbestos” casualty catastrophe.