[epivosism]

Another problem is that due to fear of lawsuits, you really are not allowed to talk to candidates afterwards.

Even innocuous things like "We all really thought you'resmart, and loved your projects, but in the end we thought you needed a bit more experience. Please, please reapply in a few years" - you may mean it to encourage the person and show them that the lack of an offer is just a time mismatch, they or their lawyers might reinterpret it as a type of age discrimination, or worse.

Basically as a company employee you are in a "live fire" environment when talking to candidates and you need to keep your head down and minimize exposure

The obvious answer is to make the average validity of successful suits against companies much higher, so that the feeling changed from "it's Very very easy to be sued and lose money+status+reputation wise, regardless of the merits of the case" to "it's a free country, if you do clear, overt, intentional wrong, you may be in trouble, but in general as long as you are honest you are in the clear"