I suspect that the corporate entity may realistically run out of insurance limits, so in that case, the plaintiffs have to look for other deep pockets. The local government entity employing the building official would be a candidate as well as any other professionals who have inspected or rendered an opinion on the building.
I think you are correct. And, as a registered design professional, I find the deep pockets approach to be troubling. We might, for example, see the engineer who was working with the condo board to design repairs being sued. Why? He TOLD them they had a problem. He TOLD them it was severe, and getting worse on an escalating basis. It's impossible to predict exactly how bad is so bad that a structure will collapse. He did his job -- he should not bear any liability ... but he probably will.
I worked for years in an A/E firm that specialized in forensic investigations and building repairs. I only encountered one building that I felt was so unsafe that it should be closed ... and demolished. Before I joined the A/E firm, I worked as staff architect for a municipal public housing agency. One day the executive director took me out to look at the community building on the site of one of the projects. The building had been closed for a period of several years, for1 reasons I was not privy to.
It was a one-story, wood frame building with a huge wood truss roof. When we walked in, we saw that the ceilings had been ripped down. And then I saw that scavengers had actually gotten up in the trusses and cut out most of the diagonal struts. I told the Director that we were getting out of the building RIGHT NOW, and that it had to be condemned and demolished.
That's the funny thing. In general, buildings are engineered with enough factors of safety that even with most of the diagonals cut out, that roof stayed up. One heavy, wet snow would have finished it off, but it stayed up until it was demolished. In another case, an intern was drawing up the lower level plan of an old three-story brick building that was going to be renovated. Comparing the lower level plan with the upper floor plans, there was a column missing. The intern insisted there was no column there. We went back and checked. No column. There was a suspended ceiling. When we removed a ceiling tile and looked up, we could clearly see where someone in a previous alteration had just cut out the column. But the building stayed up.
Some us eventually started saying that some buildings continue to stand out of habit, even when logic and engineering say they should have collapsed. Structural engineering uses numbers and formulae, so it's easy to assume that it's precise and that an engineer can calculate precisely when a structure is loaded to the point of collapse. In reality, that's not possible.