It covers a few cases of lawsuits that are commonly thought to be frivolous and explains why they're not. Okay? What about all the others? I can rattle off a laundry list of frivolous ones that make this McDonald's case look like the pinnacle of justice.
shareNo. I think it's making a case that torte reform supporters used the idea of frivolous lawsuits as a way to push caps which now affect all law suits and are in favor of big business. They don't differentiate between frivolous and valid lawsuits.
shareTo answer your uneducated question, I present to you a post from another user:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1445203/board/nest/184990874?p=2
I'm a Republican trial lawyer and since when did it become part of party's platform to protect insurance companies. I thought being a conservative was about less government, lower taxes, strong military to protect our borders, giving individuals the freedom to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and holding people accountable for their actions. Trial lawyers hold people accountable for their negligent actions. When a person is seriously injured it makes it difficult or prevents them from pulling themselves up by their bootstraps and we as trial lawyers hold the negligent parties responsible. Conservatives are supposed to believe in the sanctity of life, but that seems to stop in personal injury case all out of some strange alligance to the insurance industry. The insurance industry has done an outstanding job scarring people of frivolous lawsuits and we as Republicans want to cap judgments to protect against frivolous lawsuits. Problem is, if it is frivolous, there will be no verdict because there was no negligence, it's only people with legitimate cases and serious injuries that will have their verdicts capped. The other problem is that frivolous lawsuits are very rare. As a trial lawyer, we take these cases on a contingency, pay for all filing fees,expert fees, etc. and only get paid if we recover. As a result, most trial lawyers choose their cases very carefully and only accept cases with strong liability and serious injuries. I can count on one hand the number of frivolous lawsuits I have personally observed, but cannot count the number of legitimate cases that were thrown out due to tort reform. The sad thing about tort reform is that it bears no impact on insurance premiums. In 1996 the Michigan legislature adopting tort reform setting caps on medical malpractice cases and making in extremely difficult, if not impossible to file a medical malpractice case. In the three years following tort reform, doctors' insurance rates went up 120%. 15 years later I don't know any attorneys who maintain only medical malpractice cases, and yet doctors' permiums continue to climb.
Take it from a NY Attorney, Attyman is 100% correct in what he is saying. The point of this movie is that the insurance industry has gotten way too much mileage out of the Hot Coffee case, and it's time for people to wake up and take a look for themselves at both the facts of that case and the lie that is "tort reform"share
It saddens me that the primary qualification for being a conservative these days (whether Republican, Democrat Blue Dog or T-Party) seems to be a complete lack of empathy.
That is a fabulous answer.
I agree that it's only logical to say that most "frivolous" lawsuits don't even make it to court. Many (if not most) trial lawyers only take cases that they think they can win, otherwise they're left with nothing.
People have drunk the kool-aid on these issues for FAR too long.
You've already gotten excellent answers to your question...better than I can provide...but something important comes to mind. (BTW...my short answer is, "No. That's NOT the case the movie is making.")
One of the previous answers stipulates that yes, there are frivolous lawsuits, but the truth is, most of them go nowhere. BUT....the insurance/Big Tobacco/Big Business side of this fight gets mileage even out of the cases that go nowhere. They don't need a JUDGEMENT to put the smear train in motion. Just a case FILED. "In [insert town or city and state] a [insert description of plaintiff] has sued [insert defedent] for [insert ridiculous amount of money] for [insert offense]." By the time it's thrown out of court, the public has heard about YET ANOTHER frivolous lawsuit.
"What else do you like? Lazy? Ugly? Horny? I got 'em all."
"You don't look lazy."
A balanced movie will bring out frivolous lawsuits. Hwever most frivilous lawsuits fail, which is why they are frivolous.
Corporations use torte reform to kill valid lawsuits. Hence the title: Hot coffee. If the coffeee had been a comfortable drinking level, grandma wouldn't have gotten horribly burned. Her demands were reasonable, and it led to this myth that you can be a millionaire by pouring hot coffee on yourself.
jrichardsingleton.blogspot.com
> Hwever most frivilous lawsuits fail, which is why they are frivolous.
Exactly. And that is the point of the movie. Frivolous lawsuits almost always fail. The big lawsuits that do get a judgement are necessary and just. Big corporations hate paying out big awards, whether they are justified or frivolous.
So, they hired Rove to hold up the few frivolous cases as an excuse to get all judgement axed, both the few bad ones and the many good ones. Companies now know that there is a very small cap on their liability if they screw up something accidentally or even if they blatantly screw the public.
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What Would Jesus Do For A Klondike Bar (WWJDFAKB)?
But how does anyone report on frivolous lawsuits? They are rare and don't get anywhere.
Have some ambulance chasing scumbag lawyer do a documentary on frivolous lawsuits. That's the only way they'll get the light of day.
I don't think this movie is denying that there are frivolous lawsuits. The point is ONE particularly frivolous lawsuit doesn't really make the case that the courts are too tilted toward product liability plaintiffs. Maybe people like the OP have a "laundry list" of frivolous lawsuits that were actually BROUGHT TO COURT and that actually WON, but why then have they been mentioning this same McDonald's coffee case for 20 years?
There are equally outrageous cases on the other side--the documentary actually relates one of them. And those don't necessarily mean the courts are too tilted AGAINST the product liability plaintiffs. You simply can't draw conclusions based on a sample of ONE incident that is only newsworthy in the first place because it's an outlier. If I travel to a new town and I suddenly notice a guy who's freakishly tall, I can't draw the conclusion that EVERYONE in town is tall. This is one guy and I only noticed HIM because he's freakishly tall.
This is one of my main issues with Fox News (even though I'm a moderate Republican). They always find the one outrageous story that supports their views and ignore equally outrageous stories that might support the opposite, and even worse they ignore actual objective scientific studies based on samples of more than one. For instance, they'll find one outrageous case of reverse discrimination against whites, ignore all the equally outrageously cases of discrimination against non-whites, and then ignore any objective studies on the matter if they don't support what they ALREADY believe. This is a bad thing even if you're a conservative because it ienvitably leads to erroneous beliefs about the world(and it's equally bad when MSNBC or liberal news outlets engage in it).
I certainly don't agree with everything in this documentary, but I absolutely agree with that point.
Well, go ahead and do it.
If you believe Bush and the people who suckered him into being their mouthpiece, you'd swear our courts did nothing but hear I-want-a-bajillion-dollars-for-my-hangnail cases.
We kept hearing how the "courts are jammed with frivolous lawsuits" but no one could cite any cases.
This documentary was *not* denying the existence of frivolous lawsuits. Of *course* there are frivolous lawsuits.
But this documentary made a very good point that people who deserve compensation can't get it because big business convinced an idiot President and an equally idiot Congress that that poor old lady was a clutz and dumped some coffee on her poor self.
Now, let's have your laundry list.