It’s Hard To Let Go!
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One of the hardest things about settling a lawsuit is for the parties to let go. They have spent all this time and energy (mental and emotional) as well as money on it over a period of months (if not years) and now, in the face of an offer to settle that is less than they had hoped for, they are faced with the choice of settling or moving forward towards a trial that they may not win. In other words, they might be “throwing good money after bad”.
Many of us feel that we should keep moving forward precisely because of all the time and energy invested. If we settle for less than we originally wanted, we will “lose” our investment. We do not realize, that no matter what we do in the future, we will never recover the past investment so that the past should not govern our decision whether to settle.
This “logic” is known as the “sunk cost fallacy” which is a tendency to continue to spend more time, energy and/or money on something because of all of the time, energy and/or money we have already poured into it, even though the returns are diminishing.(see: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escalation_of_commitment ). We are unwilling to admit that we should walk away but instead we escalate our commitment to the endeavor!
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