It seems that Styrabucks has been sued 9successfully). this from “OVERLAWYERED.COM”:
The Return of the Coffee Tort
Where’s Ted Frank when you need him?
A bad experience at Starbucks turned into big bucks – 301,000 of them – for a Manhattan lawyer who got a painful hotfoot when a steaming cup of coffee toppled onto her at the java palace.
“I jumped back and looked down,” Alice Griffin, 42, testified. “My foot was steaming, and the puddle was steaming.”
The jury’s April verdict was upheld yesterday by [New York] Supreme Court Justice Emily Jane Goodman – even though the jurist said she was “inclined to agree” the $301,000 that Griffin won at trial “was excessive.”
Gee, absolute deference by a judge. Go figure. I guess remittitur (let alone JNOV) would be “judicial activism.”
In any event, I’m far too humble to blog about hot coffee lawsuits at this site.
Maybe Ted will make a cameo today… [Editor’s note: And he did.]
So, I s sueing for a hot coffee burn a good way to make easy money?
Pertinent information:
The coffee was spilled by a Starbucks employee, not the plaintiff.
A neurologist testified to nerve damage and indicated that interfered with the plaintiff’s ballet dancing (presumably a hobby?).
The judge denied a motion by Starbucks to set aside the verdict and a separate motion for a new trial.
The judge then agreed that the $50,000 for past pain and $250,000 for future pain was excessive and ordered both parties to hammer out a settlement on which she will rule next month.
The key issue to me is whether or not the coffee was just normal coffee hot, or if it was overheated, creating an overly dangerous situation (over and above whatever risk normal coffee heat entails).
How hot is hot coffee, normally? Can “normally” hot coffee cause the damage described in the article?
This isn’t a product liability case. This is a negligence case. The defendant (through it’s employee) failed to exercise the standard of care due to the plaintiff (the employee spilled coffee all over the plaintiff’s foot). This was the actual and proximate cause of damages suffered by the plaintiff, which damages are the subject now of some dispute, though the jury has awarded roughly $300,000.
How hot the coffee is would only be relevant in a product liability case (for example, the notorious McDonald’s coffee-in-lap case). The only way that the defendant in THIS case could have avoided liability would be to show that the spill wasn’t the result of negligence on the part of the employee, which would have been damn difficult under the apparent circumstances. If I accidentally spill coffee on you, whatever the temperature, and you get burned by it, I’m going to be liable for the damage, more than likely.
Optimum temperature to make coffee is 180 F and the hottest it could be at sea level is 212 F. The other limiting factor would be the amount of liquid involved and the length of exposure. Assuming it was something between 16 oz and 32 oz and I doubt the “victim” was exposed to the heat for more than a few seconds. It’s not like she was bumped into a vat of boiling water.
As lawsuits go this was pretty lame and the judge did the right thing. It’s this kind of nonsense that gives rise to the iconic description of lawyers as ambulance-chasing bottom-feeders. Probably another example of the 80/20 rule. Maybe the “burn victim” will get a lifetime supply of Starbucks coffee so life can continue to imitate art.
It’s only worker’s comp if the person was injured while working there. When you’re injured by a worker while shopping there, it’s lawsuit/settlement time.
Suing over hot coffee is definitely an easy way to make money, as long as you can convince a Starbucks worker to pour hot coffee on you and get permanently injured. You can also get run over by a dude in an expensive car, it’s practially free money!
