Apologies are a way of acknowledging that what has happened was undesirable and wrong. It's also a way of signaling that you will try to prevent it from happeni

Apologies are a way of acknowledging that what has happened was undesirable and wrong. It's also a way of signaling that you will try to prevent it from happening again. Taken from that perspective an apology is useful. Of course, if the next step after an apology is "getting sued", there's not much incentive to ever acknowledge anything bad...