The Australian/English solution to frivolous lawsuits is the awarding of legal costs against losing parties.
But in fact I really don’t think frivolous lawsuits make much difference. They make the news, they make a good story, but in the end changes to the design of mowers would occur more through cases that have at least some foundation in the eyes of the jury and which therefore win.
The frivolous ones usually make a splash when filed, but then go nowhere, or lose, or lose on appeal.
I actually think there is more wrong with the system than you, Anthracite. I think lawsuits have in fact become a kind of unplanned, inefficient public accident insurance scheme. If you are badly injured, you sue someone on some reasonably tenuous basis, the court feels sorry for you and awards damages against someone who can pay, and that gets built into the cost of products and spread to the community. It’s a very inefficient way of insuring accidents, because you have to go through this charade of finding someone negligent, when at least in my experience everyone really knows that it’s all a game, and that the real underlying social issue is: how is this injured person going to live, pay their hospital bills etc unless we give them some money?
I think that there is a large element of intellectual dishonesty involved. The definitions of negligence as applicable in everyday life, and as applicable in court (in Australia at least) have diverged to what I regard as a ridiculous extent. If I am defending a matter (and I’m basically an insurance defence lawyer), and if I relate the bare facts of the cause of an accident to friends or family, without telling them who was injured, or who might have to pay if someone is found negligent, 9 times out of 10 they will say “just an accident, no one’s fault really”. And yet a court will find my client negligent, because someone was badly hurt, and there is an insurer involved.
It was interesting, earlier in the year a large Australian insurer collapsed, and I had a couple of cases where I was defending, backed by that insurer (at first). In both those cases the grounds of negligence were distinctly tenous but I had no doubt that we would lose because I have been involved in very similar cases before. Then the insurer collapsed. The court knew that. The actual defendants had no money. A judgement against them would have been financially devastating. We won both cases.
Total intellectual dishonesty. The facts hadn’t changed, the negligence (such as it was) hadn’t changed, the lawyers involved hadn’t changed, but suddenly the defendant was no longer negligent, because they had no money. Pardon?
The same forces drive changes in mower design and are what makes the changes made so stupid from an engineering/consumer point of view. They are driven not by what anyone actually needs, not to actually correct real safety problems, but rather as a kneejerk reaction to lawsuits in which manufacturers have been found liable for stupid reasons, so the changes they make to the design of their products are correspondingly stupid.
I don’t know what the answers are. New Zealand reached the same conclusion that I did above. They decided exactly as I say above, namely that the whole tort/personal injury schmozzle was an arbitrary, inefficient public insurance scheme, so they largely outlawed personal injury actions, and replaced them with a national public insurance scheme. Problem is, last I heard, that didn’t work too well either, because at least at first what happened was that making claims was too easy and every Kiwi and his sheep made claims and the cost blew out. I’m not sure if the scheme was scrapped or if it was just tightened down till it worked. Any Kiwis listening?
