All litigators see frivolous claims and defenses. Having worked for a sleazeball ambulance chaser (I used to find news searches lying around for things like car crash +amputated arm), I got an education.
Want some examples:
Cases with no liability
–He filed suit on behalf of a woman who, while driving drunk, had crashed into the back of a garbage truck. The truck had flashing lights on the back of it and the flourescent orange triangle in the street.
–He wanted me to sue the manufacturer of a deep fryer. It was in a school cafeteria where a school janitor had stepped in it. I said no.
–When I was working for the high profile lawyer, there was a disgruntled ex-employee incident that everyone saw on the news. The guy invaded the office and shot some people. The standoff ended when he came out of the building with a shotgun taped to an employee’s head. When he refused to drop the gun, the cops blew him away. We got a call from the shotgun holder’s family. They thought we could sue because he had already fired the gun twice, and “everyone knew that shotguns only hold two shells.” Again, I declined the case.
Even more common are cases where the plaintiff simply lies
–I inherited a case where a guy had two claims for cars that had been “stolen” and torched. The case was already set for summary judgment, though the previous lawyer had done a poor job. I rebriefed it and won the case, despite my doubts that the plaintiff was telling the truth. He also had a personal injury case arising from a rear-end collision. He was the front car. His primary injury was a ruptured achilles tendon. The case moved along. Eventually I found a note in his medical records where he told his doctor one week before the accident that he had injured the tendon when a Samoan guy fell on him while he was playing basketball. I only discovered this about a week before the case was set for arbitration. I was amazed that the lawyer representing the insurance company featured this item at the end of a six page brief, and didn’t mention it at all at the arbitration. Ultimately karma caught up with the plaintiff (my colleagues nicknamed him the Lyin’ Hawaiian) when he was videotaped doing heavy landscaping work despite his claims that he could not work because of his ankle and his back.
–My friend was conned into filing a complaint for a woman who was seeking compensation for an abortion. It was later established that she had never been pregnant.
But there are also frivolous defenses and dirty tricks played by defense attorneys
–In a products liability case involving brake fluid boil over (when your brake fluid boils over, your brakes don’t work, and you usually crash into something). This particular accident happend while the plaintiff was driving her new truck down a volcano. People heading in the other direction testified that they saw the people in the truck in an obvious state of distress, that was just before they lost control and died in a fiery crash. Anyway, the manufacturer argued that the brake fluid had not boiled over, because the remains of the brake assembly would have looked different if it had. Sadly, the same expert had made the same argument in another case, and used photos from our case as an example of clear evidence of brake fluid boilover.
–Represented a passenger in a car that belonged to the driver’s father, or rather the driver’s father’s car lot. They had been drinking and drugging all the way up to Michigan from Texas, literally flinging spent liquor and pill bottles out the window. They ultimately crashed, and my client died in the accident. Defense counsel’s brilliant defense? Lack of personal jurisdiction because neither defendant was a resident of Michigan. An argument that the United States Supreme Court had rejected a mere half a decade before.
So it cuts both ways. And in either case, there are already rules in place to deal with frivolous lawsuits.
And oh yeah, a frivolous lawsuit can’t result in a huge verdict, because a frivolous lawsuit has no merit. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frivolous_lawsuit. It can waste people’s time and money, though.
