This is a lawsuit whose result you disagree with. Your disagreement with the result does not make the case frivolous. A frivolous case is one that is not supported by existing law or a good faith argument for a change in existing law. The case was supported by basic principles of tort law.
I’m going to be nice. VCO3, if you get past the talk show monologues and actually look to the facts of the infamous McDonalds Coffee case, you would find that the case is not the textbook example of a frivilous lawsuit as much as a textbook case of corporate strong-arming and arrogance.
The legal issues have adequately been addressed by my brethren (although I’d add that your argument actually cuts against you, if you analyze it for a moment). I will simply confine myself to noting that sometimes the way the world works – or what the law is – can be different from what you assume it is.
Okay, okay. I’ve gotten a lot of good information from everyone, and I thank you all. Now people are just getting into arguments.
Moderator, I think it’s time to close this thread.
Arguments? Your use of this term (arguments) connotes two opposing sides, each presenting a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition. In other words, an intellectual process.
Here, I see one argument, contradicted by unsupported nonsense.
In any event, as sad as it may be, the true facts of this case – which have been explained at length by throughful Dopers in dozens of threads here-- still are unknown to some. Either that, or they’re being wilfully ignored. Call me a deluded optomist, but maybe a few more repetitions of the logic and facts will do the trick.
I just don’t understand - it would all be immaterial if she hadn’t spilled the coffee on herself. Doesn’t it not matter how hot it was - or if disclaimers said that it was hot - if she didn’t spill it on herself? I’m not trying to argue, I’m just trying to understand the line of thinking that leads to this making sense.
Wasn’t the suit not over how hot the coffee actually was, but simiply that there wasn’t a text disclaimer saying the coffee was hotter than normal? Doesn’t the new disclaimer simply say, “warning, this drink is hot” rather than saying “warning, this drink is 20 degrees hotter than coffee normally is?”
Slip & falls can be quite difficlut to prove. For example, it’s going to be hard to prove that the store had knowledge of the problem that caused the slip and failed to remedy the problem. How long had the slippery thing been there? What if there is no video tape and an employee says that they inspected that area just a couple of minutes before the slip?
BTW, this is especially true in Indian casinos, at least in CA. If you are going to slip & fall, please don’t do it in an Indian casino. There’s this little thing called “soverign immunity.” That’s fancy talk for, “You can’t sue them.”
So, by simply walking into an Indian casino, you are gambling.
Most lawsuits settle or are dismissed well before trial.
When they settle, they often do so for reasons that have very little indeed to do with the merits (viz., the likelihood that even a defendant who prevails at trial will have invested tens of thousands of dollars, which he will rarely if ever recoup). This largely has to do with the “American Rule” which oddly enough allows prevailing plaintiffs to recover their attorneys fees in many cases but rarely allows prevailing defendants to do so. This being so, defendants often succumb before trial to plaintiffs’ in terrorem demands that they settle for some fraction of the defendant’s anticipated (and unrecoupable) litigation costs.
Also, “winning” in front of some of the more egregiously pro-plaintiff judges and juries in the U.S. (Rio Grande Valley, S. Alabama, East Texas) is hardly a feat of forensic skill or real success on the merits – anyone who sues a company or government agency has a good hope of getting a largish kneejerk jury verdict just as a matter of local policy.
Few suits would proceed if the injury had never happened. Liebeck’s compensatory damages were reduced by 20% because that was the percentage of the negligence that the jury attributed to her conduct. http://www.dsba.org/AssocPubs/InRe/dec02pe.htm.
No. It was about McDonalds’ serving coffee that was too hot for its intended purpose (drinking) and very dangerous if spilled. Drinking coffee and spilling coffee are two expected consequences of purchasing coffee.
And while the parties probably argued about whether a warning would have been sufficient, there was none, so the real argument was over whether McDonald’s acted negligently by selling coffee that it knew was dangerous.
Agreed, but in most cases, the attorney fee award goes to the prevailing party, not just a prevailing plaintiff, as Huerta88 suggested.
Oh, and for those who are wondering, the English Rule (aka “Loser Pays”) is that attorney fees are generally awarded to the prevailing party, but the American Rule is that each party generally pays their own atorney fees regardless of the outcome of the case. As mentioned, there are exceptions to the American rule (e.g., “fee shifting” provisions in contracts and certain statutes).
Simply put:
The public policy behind the English Rule is that it deters frivolous lawsuits.
The public policy behind the American Rule is that a plaintiff with a marginally good case should not be afraid to seek justice through the courts simply because the plaintiff fears having to pay a huge attorney fee award to the defendant if the plaintiff loses the case.
Just to expand on this point - VCO3, if I’ve correctly understood your questions, you’re assuming that since the plaintiff spilled the coffee, that means it’s her fault, not McDonald’s, so McDonald’s is off the hook.
But in real life, how often can we say that there was one and only one cause for an accident? There’s usually several factors that may have contributed to an accident: one driver in an accident may have been drunk, but the other driver may have taken the curve too fast, and it turns out the engineers designed the curve too steeply, and so on.
That’s why most jurisdictions now have statutes for contributory negligence, in which degrees of fault can be assigned by the jury trying the case. The statutes are based on the principle that there can be more than one contributing factor for an injury, including the plaintiff’s own conduct. The statutes give the jury the power to apportion fault among the parties, based on the jurors’ sense of how much each contributed to the accident.
So in the McDonald’s case, the jury apparently decided that both McDonald’s and the plaintiff contributed to the accident - McDonald’s by serving excessively hot coffee, and the plaintiff by spilling it on herself. They determined that McDonald’s was 80% liable, and the plaintiff 20% liable. The jury then assessed the total cost of the accident to the plaintiff, and reduced it by 20% to take into account her own contributory negligence.
I was in a store when a guy came in saying his wife had just tripped on our front step and cut her lip, maybe lost a tooth. But it was a sham. He said that one of the clerks saw the fall, but none of us can see the front steps because of the vestibule.
And it turned out she had sued like this three times before and gotten settlements. But the insurance company said that because she had gotten undisclosed settlements that they were not admissible in court to denigrate her claim. They gave her a settlement and dropped the insurance on the store as a bad risk.
The thing is, you can expect that if you serve millions of cups of coffee, some of them will be spilled. Whether the spill is due to the customer’s actions or not in any particular case (in this case the woman was found to be partially at fault, which reduced her award), it’s necessarily the case that some of the coffee is going to end up spilled on people. Coffee that is far hotter than what you’d get anywhere else, and too hot to drink, is dangerous in that when it inevitably ends up spilled on someone, they get seriously injured.
I’ve had coffee spill a million times. Once, I was carrying a cup of it to a table in a café, and slipped on a wet floor, spilling some on my hands (probably my own fault, since it was winter and people were walking around with wet shoes.) Once, a waitress refilling my coffee cup simply missed, and poured it all over my hand straight out of a carafe. I’ve knocked cups over on occasion. These things happen. It’s inevitable that a certain percentage of the time, mistakes will be made. (A previous McDonald’s customer, for instance, had settled after a cup of coffee slipped out of the hands of the drive through worker, spilling it on her lap and causing similar injuries to Stella Liebeck’s.)
The point is, though, that I wasn’t injured any of these times. I drink a lot of coffee, and I’ve spilled it on myself or had others spill it on me plenty of times. The worst I’ve ever suffered was stains on my clothes, since the coffee was a reasonable temperature. McDonald’s, though, kept their coffee carafes heated so much hotter than any other restaurant (and thus, hotter than any customer would reasonably expect given previous experience with coffee) that the coffee wasn’t drinkable until it sat and cooled for some time, and was hot enough to cause third degree - full skin depth - burns when spilled.
Sure, Stella Liebeck wouldn’t have spilled her coffee in an ideal world. But since some coffee spills are inevitable, and since there’s no reason to serve coffee hotter than can be drunk (except to make very poor quality coffee so hot that customers can’t taste the difference), coffee shouldn’t be deliberately kept so hot that it causes hundreds of instances (which, in the McDonald’s case, there were - hundreds of prior instances were settled out of court) of very severe injuries.
