There is a commonly held view that a defendant should always be willing to settle for nuisance value. Nuisance value is not a well defined term, but it generally means an amount of money that is less than the cost of defending the lawsuit. The logic goes, why would you spend more to defend a lawsuit than it would cost to resolve the lawsuit? Here’s why.
Settling lawsuits invites more lawsuits. This is true now more than ever, because the court dockets are so readily available to be searched using the internet. Sometimes the better approach is to defend and defeat the nuisance suit to demonstrate to other would-be nuisance claimants that the defendant takes even nuisance suits very seriously.