I knew it was going to happen sooner or later with our litiginous society gone rampant. Apparently a man is suing McDs, BK, Wendy's and KFC for his obesity and health problems.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,58652,00.html

And the really disconcerting thing is part of the lawsuit seeks to force fast food places to provide more "low fat" alternatives. I guess this is so in a few years when people realize low fat diets are a big part of the problem they can all sue again and get double the money.

Glen

Crazy! Let's hope the verdict isn't handed down until all the jurors get to see the news on the low carb diet!

What's next. The grocery store? After all they sold me all that bread....

Mark

Simply Amazing

What goes on in the minds of some people? I thought we were a species that would progress as time goes on. Some things just go too far!

thats why I am all for planned parenthood for parents who wants children as Lawyers.

REV AL SHARPTON WHERE ARE YOU WE NEED $$$$!!!!!!!

*sniff*

"Society is going to hell in a Silence of the Lamb Handbasket and all we can do is sit down and have some bacon."
1992 - Mr. Lee 12th grade English class

Damn grocery store

oh what will they think of next, yah like mcdonalds just forced that big mac or so in his mouth... give me a break... and besides that even if they realize that it wasn't the fat and such that caused him to be fat, he probably just eats too much junk anyway, and like i said, who forced him to go there and eat it.....even if he wins i am sure they will appeal, this is as stupid as the woman who sued cuz she burned her "more sensitive" areas putting hot coffee between her legs and stepping on the gas peddle, were these people born with a brain? is it possible to transplant?

maybe if Congress passed a law so that the penalty for nuisance lawsuits was public flogging....

Okay, enough with the lawyer jokes...ahem, there are good lawyers out here! Plus, the case will get thrown out if the court determines, at the preliminary hearing, that there is no basis for a causal link between the plaintiff's health claims (damages) and the selling of unhealthy fast foods. Basically, he will have to prove that "but for" these restaurants selling him fatty foods, he would not be in the condition he is in. Boils down to...almost impossible to prove. Additionally, the court will not enforce a ruling that would have the effect of regulating commerce (what is being sold or not sold) unless it is statutorily considered illegal. Sounds like he is thinking he has the next big tobacco type tort and thinks the fast food industry is a good target because they have deep pockets. Not much to be concerned about though.

Betsy

The case SHOULD get thrown out of court in the preliminary hearing - but what SHOULD happen and what WILL happen are not necessarily the same thing. TONS of lawsuits are allowed to move forward that failed to establish a causal link - silicone implants to name one and lots of other diseases and syndromes fall into this category. When it comes to medical issues in particular, judges and juries are too easily swayed by junk science and too easily dismiss claims by the plaintiff that the causal links do not exist or have not been adequately established. Even with the tobacco lawsuits, the plaintiffs didn't have to establish a firm causal link between smoking and THEIR lung cancer and other problems. It's pretty hard to establish that a causal link exists in a particular case when you figure that 90% of smokers do NOT get lung cancer and that about 25% of people that DO get lung cancer never smoked. So to get around that problem they start touting the concept of "second-hand smoke" trying to plant the notion that all lung cancer is caused directly or indirectly by smoking. I'll never forget the ads that proclaimed loudly and repeatedly that the smoke that nonsmokers breath contains many times as much tar and nicotine as what the smoker inhales. Gee, so somehow all of this tar and nicotine laden smoke leaves the end of the cigaratte less than four inches away from the smoker's nose and then travels several feet BEFORE concentrating at the OTHER person's nose!

And lots of rulings have the effect of regulating the commerce of products that are not considered illegal - though admittedly it depends on what is considered "effect of regulating". The tobacco settlements imposed lots of conditions on the advertising methods for a legal product. The frivolous lawsuits that plagued civil aviation in the 70's and 80's drove most manufacturer's completely out of the small aircraft market. Only some of them have re-entered the market, after long overdue tort reform, but they have to charge airplanes for over $200,000 that used to sell for $50,000 and should, by all rights, sell for $20,000 or less. The cost for aircraft parts is ridiculous. A light aircraft battery (which is smaller than a car battery and has to deliver less current and have less capacity) costs over $250. A two-way radio that is no more complex than a $200 ham handheld costs a couple thousand dollars. Why? Because of the liability costs that the manufacturers have to cover. When Piper get sued - and loses - when a pilot disregards all regulations and taxis into a parked fuel truck in a 50 year old Cub and claims that it's Piper's fault because the airplane, like nearly all airplanes made back then, is a tail dragger and has limited forward visibility on the ground, something is very wrong - especially since it wasn't by any means an isolated occurance.

As for this lawsuit....will it get thrown out? Hopefully. It's true that most such assinine suits do. It's the ones that don't that are the problem. They create a situation whereby these lawyers (notice that I say "these" lawyers - and not "all" lawyers) treat it as a gambling strategy. They file suit after suit after suit knowing that most of them will get thrown out or that they will lose the ones that don't. But they keep their costs to a minimum and know and hope that they will just happen to file the magic lawsuit that, by all rights and expectations when they filed it, should have been thrown out but managed to slip through and either garners a huge out-of-court settlement or just happens to land in the lap of a reality-challenged jury.

The solution is to impose real costs on the lawyers that file these types of lawsuits - such as loser pays - to force them to consider - truly consider - the merits of their case instead of being willing to roll the dice and see what happens. If nothing else, they should be held to the same standards that they claim they are holding everyone else to. If you or I do something that, they claim, led to nebulous and ill defined injuries to their client such as "denying them the enjoyment of the view from their property" they claim that their clients have a right to monetary damages. Yet if their unfounded roll-of-the-dice lawsuit saddles me with so many legal expenses that I go out of business, they claim that they should be held immune to having to pay me damages because "that's just the way the legal system works". Have lawyers been penalized for outrageously frivolous lawsuits? Yes, it has happened. But it is the exception and not the rule and is infrequent enough that it poses no realistic concern for most of these types of lawyers.

Your comments sound very personal. I think its natural to want to penalize lawyers on the winning end of the suit; but feel differently if they or a family member has been a victim. I have felt the same way myself. I also undertsand your point that lawyers should not file frivelous law suits. The professional rules in most states will impose sanctions on lawyers who do this and they often get reputations in the court system. But I also think we have to leave it to judges and to the jury decide what has merits in many cases. Its easy to make judgements about what we think about a case in hindsight. I, for one, have not elected lawyers to make these decisions about the merits of all cases solely. Nor do I want attorneys to regulate the exercise of anyones consitutional rights or decide what has been deemed the domain of jury. The jury is supposed to represent all of us. I find it interesting so few people participate in the jury system and opt out. There are costs to individuals involved in our legal system, and it is not perfect, but I beleive it is the best system. The best way to change a system you don't like...be active, vote, and express views in a way that effects change.

It might well be natural to want to penalize lawyers on the winning end of the suit - considering how much they receive when they aren't even the victim - but I don't see how that has any bearing on what I was saying. Perhaps you mistyped and meant on the losing side?

If you are sued and you win the suit, why should you be faced with financial ruin as the winner of the suit? If the person suing you claims that you should be required to "make them whole" as a result of some alleged action that caused them injury and the jury determines that their suit lacks sufficient merit, why is it unreasonable for you to expect that the person suing you should have to make YOU whole as a result of their actions that caused injury to you?

Why do my comments sound very personal? They aren't. And I don't feel differently if myself or a family member stands to benefit. Case in point. When I lost my ROTC scholarship and was called involuntarily to active duty a lawyer called me up and said that for about $1200 to $2000 he could get be released from my obligation. While I certainly did NOT want to have to drop out of school a second time and serve enlisted for two years before getting on with my life I was adamant that I did not have the right to be released from a contract that I had willingly signed. The lawyer spent two hours trying to convince me that what I had signed meant nothing, that the point was to make the Air Force's life sufficiently miserable that they would release me from my obligation rather that do what was necessary to enforce the contract and kept telling me that he had over an 80% success rate at getting people released and that I would owe him nothing if he wasn't successful. For the entire two hours I said over and over that it didn't matter what COULD be done legally - it was a matter of what was RIGHT and that I was legally, morally and ethically bound to honor the contract that both I and the Air Force had entered into in good faith. The last thing he said before I gave up and hung up on him was how sad it was that I was so naive about our legal system and how I need to learn how to use it to accomplish my goals. Now, I have never held up that particular individual as an example of the typical lawyer. He was an ambulance chaser pure and simple. Most lawyers try to do not only what is legal but what is right and make a good faith effort to operate at the intersection of those two goals as much as possible. But he IS typical of the subset of lawyers we are talking about here. A huge fraction of class-action lawyers are nothing but ambulance chasers.

But I am an ardent supporter of the concept of "The Rule of Law" - I have been willing to in the past and am willing to in the future to defend that concept both at the risk of my own life and at the risk of having to take someone else's life. But I fervently believe that no system that purports to embody the concept of The Rule of Law can truly do so unless it accepts and demands that those laws apply equally to everyone.

You'll notice that I talked about the tobacco settlement quite a bit yet I am not a smoker and can't stand the smell of cigarette smoke and think that it is a very vile and unhealthy habit to have and am categorically opposed to tobacco subsidies (and nearly all other subsidies - in fact I can't think off the top of my head of any that I do support).

My beef with out legal system is hypocrisy (and I have that beef about many aspects of our society - and other countries' institutions). The oft quoted position that "the system isn't perfect and there are costs to the individuals" never recognizes that this same position applies to EVERY thing. Everything has risks. Everything has costs. Yet the legal system believes that people should simply accept the costs it burdens people with while every other aspect of society should be held accountable and penalized for every cost it results in.

You can't manufacture ANY thing with an absolute zero defect rate yet the person that is injured by a defective hammer is entitled to have their case heard and an award made even if it was the only defective hammer out of millions that were manufactured. A surgeon that misreads one patient's chart out of thousands and performs the surgery to the wrong knee is in big legal trouble and open to a huge civil lawsuit yet the judge that misreads the documents in front of her and lets a person charged with multiple murders who is not even eligible for bail out on bond faces no penalties and cannot be sued by the family of the victim that was murdered by that person while out on bail (true story from this area a few years ago).

If the legal system wants to be cut slack because no system is perfect, then where does it get the right to penalize others when things don't go perfectly? All I am asking is for the legal system to be held to the same level and type of accountability that it feels that everyone else should be held to. It can either increase the standards and liabilities for its members or acknowledge that NOTHING is perfect and that life isn't fair and that accidents and mistakes happen and that people have to live with the unfortunate costs associated with them. What I really would like to see is a middle-of-the-road compromise whereby the legal system basically says that there is a certain level of misconduct and negligence that has to be surpassed before any civil or criminal liability is encountered AND to apply that SAME level to its own practitioners.

I do not feel it is right, proper, or healthy for any segment of society, and most especially one so closely tied to one of the fundamental branches of government, to be in a position to insulate itself from the very rules that it has the power to impose on everyone else. That is a recipe for abuse (and we have seen it happen throughout history all over the world and even in this country on a limited scale because of our rather comprehensive - but not perfect - system of checks and balances).

As for the jury system (which I DO believe is the best type of system and which I fully support) it is also so very interesting to watch it manipulated relentlessly by the lawyers. I agree that it is very sad that so many people actively seek to avoid jury duty, but it is quite interesting to watch jury selection proceedings. As a rule, I can pretty quickly determine if a given person is going to be eliminated from the jury pool based on whether their answers to the questions asked indicate that they are someone that will think and analyzes the evidence before them and are apt to make up their mind based on the evidence and not on the emotional appeals of the two lawyers. The lawyers, more often than not, seem far more interested in turning the trial into a sales pitch aimed at convincing the jury that they WANT to see things a certain way as opposed to deciding for themselves what the facts in evidence mean.

Another thing that I find interesting - though I don't know what to really make of it. I had a social studies teacher in high school that first pointed out to me how quickly someone with an advanced degree was usually eliminated from the jury pool. That's distressfull enough and I have seen plenty of indications that it is the rule rather than the exception. But this same teacher said something that I was completely unwilling to accept back then. She said that people with technical professions or advanced degrees aren't even called for jury duty nearly as frequently as the general population. I couldn't see how that was even possible since calls to jury duty are supposed to be random based on various rolls - voter registrations, driver's license lists, etc - so I discounted that claim. Yet as time goes by, I am beginning to think she was right. I work for a company that has ten engineers and one non-technical, non-degreed employee. All of us vote in every election, all of us drive, all of us are homeowners. Yet none of the engineers have been called for jury duty once in the seven years I have been there while the other person has been called three times. It has been a similar situation other places I have been and others that I have asked have usually seen a similar pattern. I don't know what to make of it and, quite frankly, the implications of it - if true - are rather frightening.

This may be getting off-topic, but it's an interesting debate.

I don't have anything against lawyers as a group, and don't like the way they are all lumped together as greedy and without scruples. I have a parent and step-parent who are lawyers, and another parent who is a paralegal, so needless to say I knew a lot of folks in the legal profession growing up.

Recently, I've come to see that while most non-lawyers see things in terms of "right or wrong" or "black or white" or "moral or amoral" an attorney (even one of the good guys or gals) will judge things as "winnable or not winnable"

I learned this because my sister was involved in a motorcycle accident after she was riding illegally between lanes and hit a car. (She's recovering well, by the way.) Now she is considering suing the driver of the car, and has been told by an attorney she has a case. Apparently, it makes no difference that she was wrong for riding illegally, since he was wrong, too, for opening his car door into traffic. I am so ticked off at her for even considering this suit, but when I repeat this story in mixed company, inevitably bikers and lawyers all say she should do it. Apparently having a case is all that matters -- not taking responsibility for one's own actions.

-Rhu

Sorry for the mistype wbahn. Interesting comments. True, everyone has a duty, given our advantages of living in a democratic system, to make personal and professional choices about what is reasonable and rightful use (not abuse) of our legal system, including potential plaintiffs, lawyers, judges, and juries. Likes most things in life it boils down to moral fiber, integrity, character, and honesty. Maybe our society is being socialized to value money over all else. I do think that these issues exist in politics, corporate management, and other professions where individuals are vested with a great deal of power (and thus responsility).

And, Rhu, sadly, lawyers have to look at cases in terms of a business perspective in some respects. Sometimes there are wonderful cases that should be brought, but the reality is that a legal pratice would go under if it was not likely to settle or render a decision that covered all the expenses of the suit. And if a suit will only cover the lawyers fees and expenses, leaving the plaintiff little afterward, we generally do not take a case...even if it has merits. Most lawyers, except public service attorneys, cannot take an unprofitable case. The legal system is very costly. We do take pro bono suits for exactly this reason (it is a professional responsibility requirement in Florida to provide pro bono or fund the legal aid trust). Again, its not solely the lawyers decision whether your sister can file suit (she could file and respresent herself, it is her guaranteed right)...she has ultimate responsibility for her decision and a judge or a jury will hopefully come to the right decision if necessary. But there will always be members of any profession that abuse the system, regardless of safeguards.

These are the same issues that we struggle with daily and, unfortunately, there are no simple regulatory answers that don't harm some group of potential plaintiffs and chill someones rights.

Coincidentally, my husband called me from Hawaii where he is working on a tech project for McDonalds. He met with the owners on the islands this week and they think the suit is interesting. They feel that they offer a great deal of healthy alternatives and this will be their chance to absolve themselves of their repuatation for greasy, unhealthy, food. Interesting.

I hope everyone is having a great weekend. Back to work.

Betsy

Absolutely ... I agree. But conversely, not every case that can be won should be brought. Such as the case of a reckless motorcycle rider who hits an unsuspecting driver and then wants to sue him. Or a consumer who makes a daily habit of fast food, and wants to sue the purveyors

I think this is how this thread began ....

-- Rhu