A challenge for the industry is an increasingly litigious society, where people seek retribution with little consideration of the much higher standard of safety. This could restrain learning from events required to improve, or at least to maintain existing standards.
An emerging risk of inaction could reduce the perceived level of safety, continuing a vicious circle of more procedures, rules and litigation.
The baseline for the legal action was an accident resulting from simultaneous multiple sensor malfunctions where the acceptable probability of occurrence was beyond the certification requirements. It might be argued that the in-flight risk pending modifications identified from previous malfunctions could have been better judged; which would rely on on human (crew) understanding in real time.
The regulator has responsibilities for both design requirements and airworthiness issues, thus with increasing complexity in systems and operations the regulator should also be involved in the legal process - but to what point. Ever increasing systems integrity to counter extremely rare, and often unforeseeable circumstances which involve indeterminate human response - another vicious circle in the quest for perfect safety.