Hooray for the judge.
The story in a nutshell:
The NY Daily News (motto: Despite the title, you’ll find no news in here) inserted scratch tickets into their Sunday papers. Grand prize was $100,000. There was to be one grand prize. Due to a printing error with the vendor supplying the tickets, several tickets ended up giving grand prizes. The NY Daily News announced it would randomly choose a grand prize winner from among the winning tickets.
So you are a Daily News reader (and I use the term “reader” very loosely). Sunday morning, you scratch your ticket, and start doing your little happy dance. You just won $100,000. 24 hours later, you hear that you may not have won $100,000, due to a printing error. Time to sue! On what grounds, I don’t know, but this is America, and anytime someone doesn’t cross an “i” or dot a “t”, it’s a suable offense.
They find the lawyer* who lost the race to the ambulance, and get his representation. He goes to the judge, “Daily News made a mistake. They owe us money” Judge says, “Why?”. Lawyer, “Because they made a mistake.” Judge says, “Leave now.”
So the lawyer whines, “Now the Daily News can run a free contest**, make mistakes right and left***, and they can get away with it!” Mind you, he’s not alleging fraud (and if it was, it was the worst fraud you can possibly imagine), he’s not alleging his clients were damaged (such as happens when a doctor makes a mistake), he’s just saying that the paper made a mistake and therefore everyone affected by the mistake is owed money.
Time to lace up the sneakers again, Mr. Mollins.
- Not an indictment on all lawyers, just the ones who do chase ambulances or waste court time saying that people are coerced into eating McDonalds supersized meals 3x/day and McD’s is responsible for their obesity. I know all lawyers aren’t like this. I even met one…once…six years ago…for about 20 minutes.
** Not that you could ever figure out how to participate without actually buying a paper. But it is theoretically possible to request a scratch card without buying a paper.
*** If you’re going to sue the Daily News for errors, how about suing the Daily News for calling themselves a “newspaper”?
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