Maybe there’s some good legal rationale for this. But from a public relations standpoint you’ve got to figure it was a bit ill-advised for Cardinal Law of Boston to argue in a legal filing in the big child sex abuse case that the “negligence of the Plaintiffs [i.e., the victim and his parents] contributed to cause the injury or damage [i.e., the six year old being raped by Father Paul Shanley].”
This article in the Boston Globe points out that the language is “boilerplate legal defense language.” But as the paper also notes, you’ve got to be a pretty big idiot not to realize that that filing might have done with a bit of editing.