As for Liggett's motive, industry and financial analysts speculated that Liggett's CEO hoped to make the marginally profitable company a more attractive merger partner by eliminating its exposure to possibly huge jury awards.
If Liggett could reduce its exposure to damages, then Liggett would be more likely to merge.
The first was in  the use of several forms of data within a single case study in order to give many reference points for verifying patterns and ruling out alternative explanations in order to achieve what evaluators call internal validity.