Maryland Injury and Disability Law : Washington DC Metro Injury & Disability Lawyer & Attorney : Greenberg & Bederman : Accidents, Falls, Medical Malpractice : Maryland, DC, Virginia

As the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. If that’s the case, a movie must be worth considerably more words than a thousand. With that in mind, we are very much looking forward to the release of a film that is being shown at Sundance Film Festival.

The name of this film is Hot Coffee.Its intention is to challenge your preconceptions about lawsuits. The title of the film is based on a case that unfortunately became the clarion call for insurance companies and tort reform groups all over the country, and has since been used as an “example” of a “frivolous lawsuit.” In fact, neither this case nor that verdict was either “frivolous” or “excessive,” but tort reformers have never let the facts get in the way of a good story.

Even if you have never come within a hundred miles of a courtroom, you have almost certainly heard of the McDonald’s Coffee case. Here are the facts of the case: An 81 year old woman named Stella Liebeck bought a cup of coffee through the drive through window at a McDonalds.  She was a passenger in the car. Her grandson pulled the car over so Ms. Liebeck could add coffee and creamer. When she pulled the lid off, she accidentally spilled the coffee in her lap.

That doesn’t sound like the end of the world, does it? Most of us have spilled coffee on ourselves at one time or another. In fact, I spilled coffee on myself just this morning. And while it was moderately painful, and while I will most certainly have to use Clorox Color Safe Bleach on my pants, the experience didn’t exactly cause too much of a crimp in my day.

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When you look into tort reform rhetoric, you often see the same phrases and terms being used over and over again. “Frivolous lawsuits” is one. “Junk lawsuits” is another. “Lawsuit abuse,” “abusing the system,” “abusing the Constitution,” and so on and so on.

When you look at the people who are accused of doing these things, you generally see one or two people. One person accuses a doctor of medical malpractice, or one person accuses an insurance company of dealing in bad faith, or one person accuses a supermarket of not clearly marking a wet floor.

It is fairly amazing to us how these corporations that are often worth billions of dollars howl like a toddler with a scraped knee over lawsuits that would barely even show up in their ledgers at the end of the fiscal quarter. But apparently every penny counts, even when a lawsuit is completely justified and deserved. So the insurers and the corporations fund tort reform groups who call these lawsuits “unfair,” or an “abuse,” and they demand protections for themselves that won’t apply to regular private citizens, and often they get them. They get “caps” on damages that limit the amount of money that they would have to pay out. They get unrealistic standards of proof of negligence. They get loopholes and asterisks and all manner of legal bulletproofing that will eventually lead to corporate invulnerability if it is allowed to continue. We don’t know about you, but living in a country where corporations are considered above the law fills us with a great deal of apprehension.

We also notice that there is an immense double standard when it comes to how the court system is used. Corporations who decry frivolous lawsuits against them have no qualms about jamming the court dockets with cases over the meanings of clauses and verbs in contracts. Corporations who found tort reform organizations while engaging in multiple lawsuits. Do as I say and not as I do.

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