| I can't believe how often this comes up. It goes
to show that the corporate PR
used to make us
all think that personal injury lawsuits have
gotten out of
hand worked. But it was deceptive.
It would have to be to get you and me, us
nobodies, to think that we should be against our
own interests, which are to be
able to get some
monetary help if we are injured by a corporate
entity's
product.
This particular
case was one where the plaintiff
was asking for her medical bills, some
$800, to be
covered,
which McDonald's refused to pay for. It was only
after
that she sued. She offered even then to settle
for much less than the jury
ultimately gave her more than once. And the arbitration resulted in McDonald's
being told to pay her a couple of hundred thousand, and they refused to settle.
So
this was not a greedy plaintiff by any definition. And she was 81 years old.
So McDonald's said the severity of the burns were because she spilled on herself
and anyway she was old and had thin skin. Blech. That's the defense.
Why
would a jury find for the plaintiff when the
woman spilled the coffee on
herself? The issue that
turned the tide was the temperature of the coffee
and
the callousness of the company, as the Wall St. Journal
explained back in 1994: When a law firm here found
itself defending McDonald's Corp. in a suit last year that claimed the company
served dangerously hot coffee, it hired a law student to take temperatures at
other local restaurants for comparison.
After dutifully slipping a
thermometer into steaming cups and mugs all over the city, Danny Jarrett found
that none came closer than about 20 degrees to the temperature at which
McDonald's coffee is poured, about 180 degrees.
It should have been a
warning.
But McDonald's lawyers went on to dismiss several opportunities to
settle out of court, apparently convinced that no jury would punish a company
for serving coffee the way customers like it. After all, its coffee's
temperature helps explain why McDonald's sells a billion cups a year.
But
now - days after a jury here awarded $2.9 million to an 81-year-old woman
scalded by McDonald's coffee - some observers say the defense was naïve. "I
drink McDonald's coffee because it's hot, the hottest coffee around," says
Robert Gregg, a Dallas defense attorney who consumes it during morning drives to
the office. "But I've predicted for years that someone's going to win a suit,
because I've spilled it on myself. And unlike the coffee I make at home, it's
really hot. I mean, man, it hurts."...
At the beginning of the trial, jury
foreman Jerry Goens says he "wasn't convinced as to why I needed to be there to
settle a coffee spill."
At that point, Mr. Goens and the other jurors knew
only the basic facts: that two years earlier, Stella Liebeck had bought a
49-cent cup of coffee at the drive-in window of an Albuquerque McDonald's, and
while removing the lid to add cream and sugar had spilled it, causing
third-degree burns of the groin, inner thighs and buttocks. Her suit, filed in
state court in Albuquerque, claimed the coffee was "defective" because it was so
hot.
What the jury didn't realize initially was the severity of her burns.
Told during the trial of Mrs. Liebeck's seven days in the hospital and her skin
grafts, and shown gruesome photographs, jurors began taking the matter more
seriously. "It made me come home and tell my wife and daughters don't drink
coffee in the car, at least not hot," says juror Jack Elliott.
Even more
eye-opening was the revelation that McDonald's had seen such injuries many times
before. Company documents showed that in the past decade McDonald's had received
at least 700 reports of coffee burns ranging from mild to third degree, and had
settled claims arising from scalding injuries for more than
$500,000. So McDonald's knew people were getting burned. They
knew their coffee was hotter than at other restauranst, and it knew, since it
served coffee at windows to people in cars that somebody sometime would spill,
and they knew before this case that it had happened to other customers. Here is
a bit more about the temperature:
Then there was the matter of Mrs.
Liebeck's attorney. While recuperating from her injuries in the Santa Fe home of
her daughter, Mrs. Liebeck happened to meet a pair of Texas transplants familiar
with a Houston attorney who had handled a 1986 hot-coffee lawsuit against
McDonald's. His name was Reed Morgan, and ever since he had deeply believed that
McDonald's coffee is too hot.
For that case, involving a Houston woman with
third-degree burns, Mr. Morgan had the temperature of coffee taken at 18
restaurants such as Dairy Queen, Wendy's and Dunkin' Donuts, and at 20
McDonald's restaurants. McDonald's, his investigator found, accounted for nine
of the 12 hottest readings. Also for that case, Mr. Morgan deposed Christopher
Appleton, a McDonald's quality assurance manager, who said "he was aware of this
risk…and had no plans to turn down the heat," according to Mr. Morgan....
A
scientist testifying for McDonald's argued that any coffee hotter than 130
degrees could produce third-degree burns, so it didn't matter whether Mc
Donald's coffee was hotter. But a doctor testifying on behalf of Mrs. Liebeck
argued that lowering the serving temperature to about 160 degrees could make a
big difference, because it takes less than three seconds to produce a
third-degree burn at 190 degrees, about 12 to 15 seconds at 180 degrees and
about 20 seconds at 160 degrees.
The testimony of Mr. Appleton, the
McDonald's executive, didn't help the company, jurors said later. He testified
that McDonald's knew its coffee sometimes caused serious burns, but hadn't
consulted burn experts about it. He also testified that McDonald's had decided
not to warn customers about the possibility of severe burns, even though most
people wouldn't think it possible. Finally, he testified that McDonald's didn't
intend to change any of its coffee policies or procedures, saying, "There are
more serious dangers in restaurants."
Mr. Elliott, the juror, says he began
to realize that the case was about "callous disregard for the safety of the
people."
Next for the defense came P. Robert Knaff, a human-factors engineer
who earned $15,000 in fees from the case and who, several jurors said later,
didn't help McDonald's either. Dr. Knaff told the jury that hot-coffee burns
were statistically insignificant when compared to the billion cups of coffee
McDonald's sells annually.
To jurors, Dr. Knaff seemed to be saying that the
graphic photos they had seen of Mrs. Liebeck's burns didn't matter because they
were rare. "There was a person behind every number and I don't think the
corporation was attaching enough importance to that," says juror Betty
Farnham.
Now, you can decide that if you were on the jury you
would not have found for the plaintiff, although if it were your mom who was
burned that badly I'll bet you would feel a lot differently. But no one can
argue that there are no differences in coffee temperatures, that boiling is
boiling, because there are differences, and no one can argue that this was a
frivolous lawsuit, in that this woman suffered third degree burns, a
predicatable event at some unknown point, and yet the company didn't even warn
customers of the possibility, or change its temperature, even after others were
badly burned. After the trial, they did reduce the temperature. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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