Outrageous Lawsuits...

[revefsreleets]

Forget ANY kind of tort reform under the current regime. The Democratic Party has literally been completely sold to the Trial lawyers...

[MasterOfPuppets]

Originally Posted by revefsreleets

Why does McD's always get sued? Easy they are a mega-conglomerate with gobs and gobs of cash...they'll actually probably have to settle this POS lawsuit because it will cost more to defend against it.

Here's super easy tort reform in action. Have the judge be able to throw these cases out WITHOUT A LAWYER HAVING TO ASK FOR THE CASE TO BE DISMISSED. The judge can just look at the case and say "This is bullshit, I'm throwing it out, and fining the plaintiff $5000 for filing a frivolous suit".

Enact THAT kind of simple solution and watch the amount of silly suits drop to next to none...

actually i'd like to see the fine go TO THE LAWYERS, then you'd definetly see this crap stop !!!

[SteelersinCA]

Originally Posted by revefsreleets

Yeah, I mean, I think when you file the original complaint or whatever, it needs to include some basic info.

Maybe we do like a grand jury inquiry, but instead of "peers" it's just a judicial review board, and they review cases and bind over the few with merit and dump out the shit (which I'm guessing is 90% of what gets processed).

The trial lawyers would HATE this, because it would essentially force most of them to move on to the only other thing they are qualified to do, which is shill used cars at the local JD Byryder writing buy here/pay here loans at 24%, but, eff em! They should have studied to be engineers instead...

I think they have that mechanism in place with summary judgments. If they just tweaked it a little bit, things would be OK. The problem with that is that judges decide law, juries decide fact. All you need to have to do is have 1 single fact in dispute and you survive a MSJ. No matter what rules you make they will always find a way around it.

I think a cap on awards would stop lots of attorneys from filing shit. If you know you aren't going to get paid, you don't have much desire to put in work. however, I also think for every person getting burned by coffee and becoming a millionaire there are 200 people who deserve more who simply aren't getting it.

[steelreserve]

Originally Posted by SteelersinCA

I think a cap on awards would stop lots of attorneys from filing shit. If you know you aren't going to get paid, you don't have much desire to put in work. however, I also think for every person getting burned by coffee and becoming a millionaire there are 200 people who deserve more who simply aren't getting it.

There's probably a lot of truth to that. The flip side is that for every spilled-coffee millionaire, 5,000 other people have to protect themselves by putting an asinine rule in place or modifying their behavior in an almost-paranoid way to guard against a copycat lawsuit by the worst possible idiot. Basically every company, city government, wealthy individual or other "sueable entity" in the country has to take evasive action, and it gradually strangles a lot of day-to-day affairs into gridlock.

I think the problem there has to do with the judicial system paying so much attention to precedent. If one case somewhere is decided a certain way, for some reason every judge everywhere is automatically compelled to rule the same way if the situation comes up again. I'm not sure how that benefits the best interest of justice, and it makes it seem like in a lot of cases, the judge is essentially reduced to the role of a referee.

[SteelersinCA]

There are reasons why products come with ridiculous warnings, like don't iron clothes while on and cruise control is not autopilot in RVs. Those reasons are called lawsuits by stupid people.