Meatwagon Chasers

"Ambulance chaser" is a long accepted term for lawyers who chase down victims and try to file suits on their behalf.  (If a victim contacts an attorney it isn't quite as ghoulishly greedy.)  I mentioned a while back that:  

the Brady Center filed suit against Lucky Gunner and everyone else who had sold anything to the theater shooter in Aurora, but because the suit violated both federal and state Colorado law (you can't sue if the gun or ammo works as advertised, short of negligence) the judge ordered the plaintiffs, the parents of a murder victim, to pay defendant's legal fees.  

Now another absurd lawsuit rebounds on the injured.  9/2/16 BizPacReview:

After losing their lawsuit, a group of survivors of the 2012 Aurora movie theater massacre were ordered to pay the Cinemark theater chain $700,000 in legal fees the theater claims it incurred.

You’ll recall the horrendous incident in July of 2012 when a single gunman loaded with firearms and smoke bombs entered the Cinemark theater in Aurora, Colorado, and gunned down 12 people and injured up to 70 more. The killer fashioned himself the embodiment of a character in the Batman movies.

Not long after the attack, a group of survivors of the massacre gathered together to sue the movie chain insisting the company was at fault for not having enough security to stop such an attack. But after a four-year battle, a judge decided the survivors had no case and ruled in favor of the theater chain.

Worse for the litigants, after losing the lawsuit the judge ordered the survivors and family members of victims to pay the $700,000 in legal fees incurred by the theater the L.A. Times said.

It isn’t as if the survivors weren’t warned. During the trial the judge urged the group to take a settlement offered by the theater chain and thereby avoid having to pay the theater’s legal fees.

According to court documents the group at first agreed to the $150,000 settlement. But the deal fell apart when one member of the group who lost her child and was left paralyzed from the attack rejected the offer. The rest then agreed to take a pass on the settlement.

Read more: http://www.bizpacreview.com/2016/09/02/judge-rules-aurora-shooting-survivors-now-owe-cinemark-theaters-700000-lawsuit-385909#ixzz4JCkkqsth

 Failing to have enough security seems like a non-starter of an argument.  Suing them for their no guns policy might have made more sense, but the only parties responsible for this are the shooter (no assets) and those who were not armed to defend themselves.  Don't do business in gun-free zones.