Lawyers representing Amy Williams have countered that a federal district court should not dismiss her wrongful death lawsuit against Quest Diagnostics and subsidiary Athena Diagnostics because she did not know their lab had performed a critical genetic test for her now deceased son until 2014.

In April, Quest and Athena asked the US District Court in the District of South Carolina to dismiss the wrongful death lawsuit because the six-year time limit for medical malpractice claims has expired since Athena issued a 2007 genetic test report for Williams’ son, Christian Millare, who died in January 2008. Tort cases in the US rarely go to trial, and Quest and Athena want to ensure that this case doesn’t.

“Defendants in cases like this don’t want it to go to trial and they don’t want it to go to a jury, which is completely sensible because both trials and juries are expensive and unpredictable,” said Hank Greely, director of Stanford Law School’s Center for Law and the Biosciences.

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“I’ve seen some of the comments that a plaintiff’s victory in this [case] would be terrible and kill genetic testing. That’s bullshit,” Greely said. “Mistakes happen. People pay for their mistakes.” Because this is the reality within the US legal system, whether the error is made by an individual, a grocery store, or a hospital, “there’s no reason to think that genetic testing labs will dry up and blow away because they are held responsible for mistakes,” he added.

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“Simply amending a VUS call to benign or disease causing can’t be actionable in and of itself,” Greely said. “That’s the sort of thing we want labs to do.”

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Given the same evidence, could a lab be reasonably expected to classify the mutation as disease causing instead of a VUS? “That’s the kind of question we ask all the time, [and] … those are hard questions,” Greely said. “But there is no reason to think that courts will think that calling something a VUS is always negligent. Most of the time it won’t be, but sometimes it will be. Whether it was here is the core question in this case.”