[fabsroman]

Dom,

I will agree with you for the most part about the lawsuit issue for personal injury. Honestly, I think we need some serious tort reform in the US. However, some of the judgments handed out are for punitive damages to punish companies. While most of us don't like to think things like this happen, most companies do really stupid things. For instance, they might make baby pajamas that are not fire retardant because their study shows that in the long run it will be cheaper (i.e., more profitable to do so) because only X number of kids will catch on fire and each kid on average will be injuried to the degree of Y dollars, and it costs Z, which is a lot more than X times Y, to make the pajamas fire retardant.

I was actually thinking about this subject this morning while eating breakfast. A lot of people have no idea what goes on where these million dollar judgments are given out. For instance, most people think that the McDonald's coffee judgment was rather high, but when you look at the details of the case it doesn't seem that bad. The plaintiff got 3rd degree burns and McDonalds purposefully made the coffee that hot in all its restaurants so that it would take longer for people to drink it and less people would ask for refills, thereby reducing the amount of employee time used for refills and the amount of coffee used. I am all for taking an olive out of an airline salad to save $100,000 a year, but I think McDonalds could foresee somebody getting burned pretty badly with the coffee being as hot as they made it.

On the flip side, I had a client with soft tissue injury in an auto accident and she wanted $70,000 to settle the case. She wouldn't listen to me at first, and made me send out the demand letter in that amount. The adjuster wasn't all too happy about it. I ended up settling that case for $17,500. Yep, our Court system has some problems, but it is still pretty good. I think most of the problems come from there being too many attorneys needing work. They take stupid cases and try them on the prayer that the jury will award something big. If you get enough of those cases and try all of them, eventually you will get lucky I guess. Me, I stay away from that stuff.