<p>In a thread on the Parents Forum, notrichenough posted a link to a story about a lawsuit which seems just unbelievable, at least at first glance.</p>
<p>Now I grant you, some lawsuits which sound very frivolous when all the details of the complaint are not known may in fact on careful examination of the facts prove to be quite legitimate (the famous McDonald’s hot coffee lawsuit comes to mind).</p>
<p>But I just read about a teacher who is suing her school district for firing her after she was pulled over for DUI with a .311 BAC on her way to school-where she would have been teaching students all day had she not been arrested. She claims that her termination is illegal as she is protected by the ADA for her disability (alcoholism). It just amazes me that anyone could have the gall to take this position. But, as we know, we are living in a very litigious society.</p>
<p>Any chance of either of the verdicts favoring the plaintiffs? Anyone else have a favorite crazy lawsuit story which makes your blood boil, or one where the plaintiff gets their just desserts?</p>
<p>EDIT: the original article about the teacher lawsuit didn’t have a working link, so I found a different one which describes an EEOC complaint. The original article I read says she is suing her school district.</p>
<p>Well, the first story in the second case is wrong. If there’s an active EEOC complaint she isn’t “suing.” You can’t file a lawsuit until the EEOC investigation is concluded. And in the first case, Mom is a lawyer, and filed the suit herself.</p>
<p>It shouldn’t make your blood boil. It’s just a pretty minor instance of people making claims that make sense to them, even if they don’t make sense to most people. We have to have a system to deal with situations like that. The system allows people to file lawsuits, and have them opposed by the people they’re suing. People (I’m looking at you, here) overdramatize the significance of a lawsuit being filed.</p>
<p>In my experience (almost 40 years as a lawyer, hundreds of cases) the outcome of most lawsuits is pretty reasonable. Not 100% of them, but the system works pretty well. IMNSHO.</p>
<p>Incidentally, why didn’t you solicit stories of defendants getting their “just deserts?” I can guarantee you that for every unworthy plaintiff who collects there are hundreds of guilty defendants who avoid their responsibilities because it’s too expensive to bring them to justice, and the court system is stacked in their favor - and I’m not talking about criminal law, either.</p>
<p>“Any chance of either of the verdicts favoring the plaintiffs? Anyone else have a favorite crazy lawsuit story which makes your blood boil, or one where the plaintiff gets their just desserts?”</p>
<p>Yeah…me.</p>
<p>I can’t say too much about this…</p>
<p>I am being sued…based on accusations that are speculations that are made up.</p>
<p>I am outside the statue of limitations which means it is too late to sue me. I am getting sued by somebody that has incomplete records…and the records were given to him by a convicted felon. </p>
<p>I am not guilty of the charges…the accuser doesn’t know me. It has been 4 years…and the case has barely started…saying barely started is a stretch…</p>
<p>I have a great lawyer…who hasn’t charged me for 2 years…because nothing is happening.
I hear…any year now… There might be a decision on one of the motions…</p>
<p>What the heck? I didn’t “solicit” any stories! These were in the news. On the front pages of news outlets. In the second instance, I pointed out that the initial news story states she is now suing her school district, but the link wouldn’t work, so the second source talked about an EEOC complaint-I didn’t misinform, but maybe you didn’t care to read that. Sheesh.<br>
And you’re a lawyer…shocker.</p>
<p>notrichenough, I remember that pants lawsuit! Probably “just a pretty minor instance of people making claims that make sense to them, even if they don’t make sense to most people.” Of course, the fact that people sometimes lose their a$$ paying lawyers to defend them against these kind of harassment suits means little…</p>
<p>About 20 or so years ago, my mom turned left and was hit by a car that did not have its light on. The driver of the other car got a ticket. That driver also sued my mother … saying she should have seen her, even without the lights. My mom had to pay a lawyer and miss work. The two insurance companies came to some sort of agreement, which I am sure is what the other driver was after all along. Stupid, stupid, stupid … but I guess it must have made sense to the other driver, eh? (Yeah, she knew she could get a few bucks in a settlement)</p>
<p>OP, you said: “Anyone else have a favorite crazy lawsuit story which makes your blood boil, or one where the plaintiff gets their just desserts?” That sounds to me like soliciting stories.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Here’s a case of a defendant getting its just desserts because a jury decided to do the right thing:</p>
<p>In the 80s, Domino’s Pizza instituted its famous “30 minutes or its free” delivery guarantee and was rewarded by rapid growth, soon becoming the nation’s largest pizza-delivery company. The drivers were under enormous pressure not to give away pizzas, which predictably led to speeding and unsafe driving. Inevitably, people were killed and just as inevitably, Domino’s was sued on a regular basis. However, this marketing gimmick proved so profitable that Domino’s came to see jury awards in the $1-2 million range as just another cost of doing business. This went on for almost ten years.</p>
<p>Until the day that a jury awarded a plaintiff almost $80 million. Less than a week later, Domino’s discontinued the guarantee. </p>
<p>If not for that award, does anyone doubt that Domino’s would still be killing people for profit?</p>
<p>My bad. I meant to write “or the defendant” gets their just desserts. I’ve worked two 12 hour days as a nurse which were only supposed to be 8 hour shifts, after getting up at 4 am. I’ve been out of my head tired. And you’re right, I did solicit stories. I still don’t feel like my brain is working right after another night of constant tossing and turning. </p>
<p>Really I was looking for stories about “crazy lawsuits” as in, you know, crazy. The ones you read about are usually the ones with ridiculous plaintiffs. I am not a lawyer, so I usually only know about the ones which make the news.</p>
<p>I am also interested in the lawsuit where the millionaire defendant has adopted his girlfriend, *allegedly *as an attempt to spare some of his fortune from a lawsuit filed by the parents of a young man he killed while driving drunk. Haven’t heard much about that one lately other than the guy’s natural children are suing him now because they don’t appreciate the adoption stunt and the prospect of sharing their trust fund or potential inheritance or whatever.</p>
<p>Coincidentally, I just read an article which makes reference to a UK law which can fine a plaintiff for a suit which is deemed to be frivolous in nature. If true, this is something which at least would give someone pause before litigating-perhaps it would encourage mediation or give and take behind the scenes and not in the courtroom.</p>
<p>And really-a constitutional right to play varsity basketball?</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>It’s not insignificant-it costs money to defend oneself from a lawsuit, whereas many plaintiffs’ lawyers work on a contingency basis. Not everyone who gets sued are large corporations with deep pockets and an in-house legal department.</p>
<p>Reminds me of a movie I saw long ago whose premise was that auto makers would knowingly refuse to make safety upgrades because it was actually cheaper to settle wrongful death lawsuits. Don’t remember the movie, though.</p>
<p>And speaking of crazy lawsuits, I was reminded of a case about 20 years ago when my husband was working in the claims department of a cruise line. A passenger sued because she got a mosquito bite while in her cabin and she felt that it was the cruise line’s fault. It supposedly caused her much pain and suffering so that she couldn’t enjoy her cruise. And of course, the line settled because it’s so much cheaper to do that than to fight the suit in court. H used to come home with tons of similar stories :eek:.</p>
<p>Nrdsb4, I don’t know if this is the one you’re thinking of, but there’s the case of the infamous [Ford</a> Pinto](<a href=“Could not find the page you requested”>Ford Pinto | Engineering.com). Ford produced this car in the 70s knowing that it had a design flaw which would cause fiery death, a design flaw which could have been easily fixed during production. But Ford did a cost-benefit analysis, weighing the expense of the fix against the cost of not fixing it. Here it is, the price of a human life as determined by Ford Motor Company:</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Based on this analysis, Ford decided that it wasn’t profitable to make the car safe, and that 180 foreseeable deaths were perfectly acceptable to them. So the Pinto rolled off the assembly line.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, Ford badly underestimated the actual fatalities (almost 9,000 over four years, according to the NHTSA) and serious injuries (tens of thousands). They also failed to anticipate another jury doing the right thing:</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Even this wasn’t enough for Ford, though, and it was only several months later, when the NHTSA demanded a recall, that the Pinto was finally taken out of production.</p>
<p>OK - reality check here. Plaintiff’s lawyers who work on a contingency basis don’t take no-value cases, because their own time and investment in a case isn’t free. And insurance companies don’t make settlements in nuisance cases in an amount sufficient to make the lawyer’s expenditure of time and money pay off.</p>
<p>Second reality check: the UK style of cost-shifting will never be adopted here - not because plaintiff’s lawyers oppose it, but because corporations oppose it. That’s because any such law would have to be reciprocal - that is, a defendant making a frivolous denial or imposing a false factual defense would have to pay the plaintiff’s lawyers’ fees (we have that here in a limited category of cases) Corporations would hate that, because they routinely, with official court approval and authorization, do exactly that. Students in law school are taught how “inconsistent defenses” - such as “I didn’t cause the accident/I caused the accident but it was really somebody else’s fault/There was no accident/There was an accident but you weren’t in it” are standard - in fact, it’s considered legal malpractice for a lawyer defending a lawsuit not to make multiple claims in defense which cannot all be true. Corporations win more cases by making it too time-consuming and too expensive to sue them than by any other means. The last thing they’d want to do is change that.</p>
<p>The reason I get exercised over this - and I’m not meaning to pick on you Nrdsb4, there are millions of people who repeat the exact same message you’re sending - is that it is so intensely and unconsciously pro-corporate defendant and anti-consumer.</p>
<p>You’ll never read the story of the defendant who claimed that their truck wasn’t even at the intersection where the accident happened (their own employee had confirmed it was within days, before being fired, and a handwriting expert proved that the fake insurance information left at the scene was written by the driver of the company’s truck) or the one which almost won the case by claiming that their employee was just commuting to work, and hadn’t been called on for a special job which put him at the scene of the accident (proven false through bridge toll records) or the dozens of cases I know of personally where corporate executives blandly denied making promises to their employees which were later proven by combing through thousands af pages of records.</p>
<p>Corporate defendants get away with thousands of lies for every case you read about in the paper. *Thousands. * But that doesn’t make your blood boil. I’m not criticizing you - I’m suggesting that you should think a bit about why it is that the things that make your blood boil do so, and where they actually fit in in the scheme of life’s daily injustices.</p>
<p>My future FIL routinely raises frivolous lawsuits against my future MIL. I think the most ridiculous one had to do with property that he put into storage in a barn. Apparently, he knew someone who rented out barn space and after FMIL left him (for cheating), he lost the house due to his own irresponsibility. So, he had to store a bunch of stuff there in a hurry. Two years later, he had never paid for the rental space and ignored all attempts to be contacted. At last, the owner of the property contacted FMIL and asked her to come retrieve the property because it was now considered abandoned and would be otherwise thrown out. They went to the barn and found that much of the property had been destroyed by rats, and salvaged what they could. FFIL, a couple years down the line, tried to sue her for the return of the abandoned property AND for the cost of property that she had thrown out (because it was irreparably damaged). As far as what was explained to me, the judge was not pleased with FFIL and did not rule in his favor. I think she was also awarded some back child support but I’m not sure if that was a separate suit or not.</p>
<p>Abusive claims and tactics are unfortunately common in family law. I’ve dealt with several myself. The people bringing the claims invariably (in my experience) truly believe they are in the right, regardless of all evidence to the contrary. In family law there are provisions for making the abusive litigant ex-spouse pay (in California, anyway) but a lot of the time they don’t have any money so it’s pointless.</p>
<p>For the most part (disregarding those who sue as a pastime or are involved in insurance fraud), people don’t sue because they’re hurt. People sue because they’re mad. The jury didn’t award the plaintiffs $28 million because their injuries were so much greater than anyone else’s. They awarded it to send a message to Ford - that they were angry.</p>
<p>The easiest way to avoid frivolous lawsuits (and as an attorney, I have seen my fair share - usually brought by people without lawyers, since plaintiff’s attorneys don’t usually take frivolous cases) is to treat people with respect, like they matter. People want to be heard.</p>