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

There is no such thing as a “guaranteed win” in a court case. This is a principle that all aspiring lawyers should have drilled into their brains the instant they set foot in law school. We can’t think of a better example of this premise than the Casey Anthony case.

This case was simply impossible to avoid, unless you happened to live in a place where there was no television, radio, internet or newspapers of any kind. However, for those of you who lacked the time or the inclination to delve deeply into the facts of the case, here is a brief summary.

The last time anyone saw 2 year old Caylee Anthony alive was on June 16, 2008. She was in the company of her mother, Casey Anthony. Ms. Anthony’s parents repeatedly asked to see the child over the next 31 days, but were told by Ms. Anthony that since she was busy with a work assignment, it would be impossible to see her. She also mentioned that Caylee was occasionally under the care of a nanny.

On July 13, 2008, Mr. and Mrs. Anthony received a certified letter which stated that their daughter’s car had been impounded. This was news to the Anthony’s, as they had assumed that the car was with their daughter and granddaughter. When Mr. Anthony picked up the car at the impound yard, they discovered an odor coming from the trunk of the car. They opened the trunk and found a bag of garbage, but no human remains. It was at this point where Ms. Anthony claimed that Caylee had been abducted by the nanny. This later turned out to be a lie, along with a whole host of other statements made by Ms. Anthony. Investigators also found other suspicious elements of Ms. Anthony’s story, such as her behavior during the month that her child was supposed to be missing. There are a great many pictures of her enjoying the company of friends and attending parties, which is hardly the behavior expected of a woman with a missing child.

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All of a sudden, people at Foggy Bottom Metro station are in considerably less danger than they were three weeks ago. All of a sudden, riders can simply get on a moving escalator rather than trudge up the stairs in almost 100 degree heat. All of a sudden, nobody has to worry about escalators collapsing, causing harm to Metro’s riders.

And all they had to do was get rid of the old, malfunctioning escalators that were beyond servicing, and put in new ones.

From the July 11^th edition of The Washington Post:

“For the first time in more than a decade, Metro has a new escalator that isn’t in a new station. The pristine escalator unveiled during Monday morning’s rush hour at the Foggy Bottom station is part of a $6 million project to replace three at the entrance, install a staircase and build a canopy to cover it all.”

The escalators at Foggy Bottom were in particular need of repair, especially since one escalator at that station suffered a partial collapse back in February. It is a miracle that no one was seriously hurt.

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How important are lawsuits in the grand scheme of things?

It depends on who you ask and when you ask them.

If you ask someone who has been injured due to the negligence of someone else, they would probably tell you that their particular lawsuit was quite important. If you asked one huge corporation that was suing another huge corporation, they would probably both consider that lawsuit to be important. Based on our experience, most people consider lawsuits the same way that they consider Congress. That is to say that just as they hate Congress but like their particular Congressman, they generally are against lawsuits right up to the point where they need to file one.

However, there are quite a few well funded organizations that seem to be convinced that lawsuits are incredibly important. They are convinced that lawsuits are nothing short of a plague of locusts on the economy and on American society in general. The American Tort Reform Association, the Chamber of Commerce, and all manner of other advocacy groups have done their best to further the premise that every single person, business, corporation and public entity in the United States is being crushed under and avalanche of litigation. They further claim that the chief victims of these lawsuits are “small businesses.”

We have a lot of problems with these assertions. In the first place, someone who is on the receiving end of a lawsuit is, legally speaking, the exact opposite of a victim. In fact, in any tort case, it is the contention of the plaintiff that he or she has been victimized. To put it in perspective, consider Union Carbide. When their chemical plant leaked deadly poisonous gas in Bhopal, India and killed just fewer than 4,000 people, would it be fair to say that Union Carbide was a “victim of lawsuits” when the survivors went to the courts? Or, on a smaller scale, if a doctor makes an easily preventable mistake that damages a patient permanently, would you say that the doctor was the “victim” in the scenario if the patient files a lawsuit? If a delivery driver is allowed to go on his route after his supervisor catches him drinking, and that driver hurts someone, is the business supervisor a “victim?” What about the person who got hurt by the driver?

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