A Word About Lawsuits

Lawsuits, in my opinion, are generally a good thing. Let's face it: many companies are going to try to screw regular people for as long as possible unless there's a threat of being sued. There's no reason for them NOT to screw you--suing somebody is a big production, and you've got to be pretty pissed off to do it. In other words, companies can get away with a lot before the lawyers attack.

Still, I'm often dismayed by how many people berate lawsuits. True, some of them are stupid and unfair. In my former life working at a trial consulting firm, I learned that most lawsuits, however, have some merit once you get past the headlines to the facts. We often heard references to the McDonald's coffee case, where a woman sued McDonald's because she spilled coffee on herself and was badly burned, as an example of a ridiculous lawsuit. But our respondents usually didn't know the facts, only the headlines. McDonald's was saving a tiny bit of money on every round of coffee by serving it at a temperature far above standard, hundreds of people had already been badly burned by their coffee, and the woman only sued them because they refused to pay her medical bills.

Read the Mcfacts here, and you'll see that McDonald's NEEDED to be sued. Now they serve their coffee at a normal temperature--the lawsuit worked.

Today, I read a headline in the SF Chronicle that said a convicted bank robber settled a lawsuit for $15,000 in a case where he'd being kicked in the groin during his apprehension after a bank robbery. That's the kind of headline that gets the blood flowing--until you read the rest of the article, which explains that the robber, at the time, was lying on the ground, shot and bleeding, and that the cop basically kicked him as hard as he could in the nuts for no good reason. On top of that, the cops, conscious of a camera present, were doing their best to stand in front of it and block the view.

$15,000? The cops got off easy. Read it here.