Law and Human Behavior, Vol. 7, No. 4, 1983 Note~Discussion Grief and Involvement Death Litigation in Wrongful Paul C. Rosenblatt* The theory of grief work, symbolic interaction theory, and family systems theory are used to gain theoretical perspective on the impact on a family of involvement in wrongful death litigation. Involve- ment in litigation may speed up, slow down, or alter an individual litigant's grieving, and any of these effects may alienate the litigant from nonlitigant kin. The completion of litigation, no matter what the outcome, may lead to renewed or to new grieving and relationship problems. The theoretical analysis includes discussion of the entanglement of the attorney in the individual grief process and in family tensions. INTRODUCTION Following the traumatic death (for example, by automobile accident, accident at work, or apparent error in medical treatment), one or more relatives of the de- ceased may choose to sue (the driver of a car involved in the fatal accident, the employer, or physician of the deceased). If the 517 wrongful death suits filed in Minnesota in 1980 provide a representative estimate of how many such suits are filed nationally (no national statistics are available), there were nearly 29,000 wrongful death suits filed in the U.S. in 1980. Although the large majority of wrongful death suits are settled out of court, they still require the preparation of * Department of Family Social Science, University of Minnesota, St. Paul, Minnesota 55108. For comments on an earlier draft, the author is indebted to Roxanne Marie Anderson, Ann R. Blihovde, M. Geraldine Gage, Patricia A. Johnson, Linda Olson-Keller, Jeffrey E Rosenfeld, Marvin B. Sussman, and Sandra L. Titus. A version of this paper was presented at the 1981 annual meeting of the National Council on Family Relations. 351 0147-7307/83/1200-0351 $03.00/0 9 1983 Plenum Publishing Corporation