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Hot Coffee, a Thread About McDonalds and Its Hot Coffee
Schrodinger
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
The McDonalds lawsuit was heavily demonized in media coverage.
McDonalds spends billions of dollars every year in media ads.
There is no conflict of interest whatsoever.
McDonalds spends billions of dollars every year in media ads.
There is no conflict of interest whatsoever.
Schrodinger on
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From coffee... that she was supposed to put in her mouth?
The list starts off with Stella, of course.
I guess you can debate whether or not it was "frivolous." What you cannot debate is that it was the first and only case to ever decide the way it did, and dozens of precedents in the U.S. and U.K. had previously addressed every single issue raised in the McDonald's case, always in favor of the defense. All of the plaintiff's arguments had been raised in previous cases, always shot down. The decision in the McDonald's case was a singular anomaly, to be sure, and took a completely opposite approach to the issues that were otherwise determined by previous cases to be central to such a claim.
Cracked's link they post as suggested evidence that the suit wasn't frivilous is ironically a link to an article bashing the McDonald's-Liebeck decision.
Yes.
Irony.
Do you deny that the article they linked was in fact bashing the Liebeck decision? It was.
Are you trying to imply that anyone is contesting the facts Cracked stated about the case? They aren't.
What are you saying?
Incidentally, Cracked actually overstated a little bit. The thing about home coffee brewers is not acknowledged by StellaAwards. But it's essentially true, too.
Which is what all companies did at the time (and mostly still do), because cases that went to court always went in their favor. Liebeck was a fluke. $20,000 might seem reasonable, but do that a couple times and you'll have lawyers crawling out of the soil alleging burns and demanding settlements.
No. That's not how irony works.
Irony: "the use of words to convey a meaning that is the opposite of its literal meaning"
If Cracked cites a source that disagrees with them, and they say the source disagrees with them, then that is not the opposite of the literal meaning. That's the same as the literal meaning.
And the fact that Stella's verdict was different than past cases doesn't make it wrong.
heres a quote from one of the many analogs of the case from the UK:
So basically McDonalds negligence was serving a product to their customers in a way that filled their customers needs/desires. Time to sue Henckle to stop making their knives so damn sharp when I cut myself, or Porsche when I wrap my car(I wish) around a tree at 130 mph for making a car that's too fast.
Also: The minimum safe temperature for holding food at is 140F, though I'm not sure if/how that applies to drinks like cofee/tea etc. And certain foods need to be cooked to even higher temperatures. Some harder cheeses don't melt till 180. If you want the cheese on chicken parmigiana melted, when you send it out the sauce will probably be as warm as the coffee was. If you spill that on you're lap, you'll get burned too.
Why?
It is my understanding that Stella was unique, not so much because of the compensatory damages, but because of the exceedingly large punitive damages. Products liability and holding manufacturers responsible for their defective products have been part and parcel of American justice since the 1940s. And while Stella's punitive damages were excessive, the Supreme Court has subsequently limited the extent to which a jury may award punitive damages, so it is hardly the issue that tort-reform proponents claim. Especially because to even award punitive damages, the plaintiffs must show not merely negligence on behalf of the defendant, but at least recklessness or intent. Furthermore, punitive damages are typically only awarded in two percent of cases that go to trial, and their amount is typically between $38,000 and $50,000 (cite).
Not settling a case where you aren't at fault isn't a mark against anyone. If someone rear ends you and then sues you, but the jury flukes out and decides you're at fault cause your super-breaks stop your car too quickly, its not a mark of your greed that you didn't settle with them.
It was a decided legal issue up to that point, just like being rear-ended.
Cracked's Website: "Yes, Starbucks and other joints do serve coffee at the hotter temperatures -- because some customers prefer it -- but then again, they get sued for it also."
The article they link there: "Gee, it couldn’t possibly be the case that the plaintiffs’ bar misled us when they said the Stella Liebeck v. McDonald’s coffee case was unique because it was only McDonald’s coffee that was hot enough to cause serious burns, could it? ...it does go to show that the claims that coffee doesn’t burn people unless it’s brewed defectively by McDonald’s, and thus McDonald’s coffee was “unreasonably dangerous”, thus entitling a plaintiff who spills coffee on herself to recover from the vendor, were somewhat, well, false."
Cracked tries to make a point by linking an article about a different case, but the article they link about that other case is ironically from overlawyered.com, and ironically only mentions the other case as an example of why the Liebeck decision was so bad.
Enough about that. As I said, there was nothing new or significant in the Liebeck case that hadn't been heard in dozens of other cases. The only unusual thing about the case is that the plaintiff won. They settled before going to appeal, likely because the one other example of a similar case succeeding against Burger King was then overturned on appeal.
Ironically, we are not going to have this debate here.
In the wake of Stella's seven-figure award, have lawyers been crawling out of the soil alleging burns and demanding settlements?
Nothing like working months or years to earn enemies for maybe $5-6k if you're lucky, woo big money.
Yar, I hate to drag up ancient history, but I'm going to drag up ancient history.
The last couple of times Liebeck v McDonalds has come up on D&D, you've been critical of the judgment in the case, but then failed to actually cite your arguments.
So, please, to be citing your arguments here.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
You do know that Overlawyered.com is a pro-"tort reform" shill blog run by right wing think tanks, right?
It's run by the Cato Institute, so nice try but no
PSN/Steam/NNID: SyphonBlue | BNet: SyphonBlue#1126
It wouldn't go to court. They'd sue, settle, then move on. Which is why companies don't just settle cases 'cause they can afford it' or for whatever reason you think they should have paid the 20k.
Not settling was the right call to make.
The less educated someone is on the topic of tort issues, the more likely they are to bring up the McDonald's coffee case as an example of a clearly frivolous lawsuit.
The way I see it is the point of tort law is to force people to responsible for their behavior. IF people are wildly irresponsible they should be forced to pay. To me tort reform arguments are largely complaints about really high damages (and courts normally reduce the end cost of damages, and that doesn't get reported), complaints about judicial process (like the costs of discovery because of ease of access to courts), and failure to follow arbitration agreements.
None of these arguments make sense to me.
Having easy access to courts by plaintiffs is generally good, it is why our system switched to notice pleading instead of code pleading. Generally this complaint is that people litigate far too often over nonsense. (See the judge who sued the dry cleaning store forcing store to go bankrupt) I think these cases are in the rare and that on balance litigation, despite its hassle, is a net good considering the point is to make everyone more cautious and thoughtful regarding their potentially tortious behavior.
Arbitration to me smacks of adhesion contracts: Company X tells person "Sign this contract, which is nearly teh same as everyone elses contract, except for price" and you have no bargaining power to actually alter the terms of the company's offer. Defeats the fundamental point of contract law, that contracts are about an engagement where offeror and offeree haggle as to the contract terms before contract is formed.
Finally, excessive damages makes no sense because the judge, who ultimately makes the decision in most jurisdictions, has discretion to limit damages when a jury goes wild and awards heavy damages. A correllary to that is excessive damages normally are given when someone is excessively harmed. IE you get multi million dollar suits in cases where someone had their face caved in, or is permanently disabled, or suffered serious body burns (which happened in the McDonalds case). You don't get multi million dollar suits for getting a nose bleed.
There's also the punitive aspect. If a huge company knows it can save millions of dollars by doing something unsafe or unethical that will occasionally cost them $20k, there's no incentive to actually change their behavior; it's cheaper to just fuck people over and just pay out in the rare instance that they're called out.
If it takes a million dollar hit to get McDonalds to change their dangerous policies, then they should have to pay out a million dollars.
Considering the payout McDonalds made? Completely incorrect. Legal fees from trial are enormous, settling the case (in hindsight) would have saved McD's millions of dollars (I'm confident their defense fees were quite high, add that on to the cost of the verdict and you're looking at far more than a $20k payout by several orders of magnitude).
McDonalds was taking a risk, and it bit them in the ass and they got financially hurt for it.
Yeah all those CATO banners are just because they really really like them
Also, the first three newsposts are
PSN/Steam/NNID: SyphonBlue | BNet: SyphonBlue#1126
Regardless of bias or lack of it, their supporting links are broken.
I don't want to reject their claims based simply on their political bent, but I can't verify them, so the blog post is effectively useless.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
This is an unfortunately oft-ignored part of tort law. The payout is part restitution and part punishment, you can't fine McDonalds $500 and expect them to care. You hit them for a few million and somebody might take notice.
Certainly people will come down on different sides of how the specific case should have been decided, but it is quite clearly a terrible example of a "clearly frivolous lawsuit."
Any lawsuit involving tens-of-thousands of medical damages (not from a chiropractor either) is kind of outside the "frivolous" domain. There was an obvious injury, this wasn't a case of a woman going "oh my my garters are so warm this is unpleasant!" and getting a million dollars from a bunch of stereotypically even trial lawyers.
If it's an employee that gets burned, it's worker's comp. If your company's safety practices are in order then you can avoid getting creamed, but you've still got to reasonably settle with your employees if they get injured at work while being not-drunk, not-high, and not-stupid.
If it's an employee who burns the customer, settle. It's your employee's fault. Again, though avoid getting creamed by making sure it was just an accident and wasn't because of sloppy practices.
Same as above for an actual defective product, like a broken pot or lid or leaking cup.
In cases where it isn't any of the above, but rather just that the coffee was too damn hot, the majority of cases are dismissed by the judge before a jury ever sees them.
There were about 13 major cases prior to Liebeck that were just about the coffee being hot and that went to a jury. 12 of them were decided for the defendant, consistently on the grounds (olol) that coffee is supposed to be hot, and that the plaintiff must prove that the coffee was too hot, not because it can burn, but because it was significantly hotter than what other places serve coffee at, or hotter than what independent coffee serving authorities suggest, or hotter than what customers prefer.
The one remaining case against Burger King originally went to the plaintiff on the grounds that the cup didn't have a warning on it, but was then overturned on appeal because people are supposed to know that coffee is hot, and a warning is not necessary. Note: Liebeck's cup had a warning, but both plaintiff and defendant agreed that the warning perhaps ought to include specific wording about causing severe burns.
The main argument in the Liebeck case centered on the "unfit for human consumption" angle - that the coffee was so hot you couldn't even drink it and therefore was obviously defective, regardless of whether it was abnormally hot. This specific issue had been raised in many prior cases, and was always thrown out by the judge because being dangerous is not the same as being defective. However, the expert testimony in this case was allowed, and the "unfit for human consumption" phrase caught some wind.
McDonald's argument, other than the usual precedents for dismissing similar claims, addressed the severe burn issue by saying that they would have to serve the coffee below 130F to ensure a burn like this could never happen, and that they measured temperatures of coffee from 6 other restaurants and 2 home brewers, and never found coffee less than 130F. The National Coffee Association still today recommends that coffee be brewed and held at precisely the same temperatures that McDonald's policy stated. McDonalds and some other vendors have slightly reduced their temperatures after this case, but Starbucks and other popular coffee shops still keep to the same temperatures, even slightly higher than McDonald's.
Interviews of jurors indicate that there was a relatively high amount of sympathy for the plaintiff in this case, because she was an old lady, and because the injuries were so nasty and embarrassing. Also, McDonald's focused on the "statistically insignifcant" argument - their expert witness made the case that the tiny incidence of burns among the millions of cups of coffee they serve is statisically equivalent to zero, and thus proof that the product couldn't be dangerously defective. He may have been correct, but he was perceived as trying to say that the sad old woman and her burned hoo-hoo didn't really exist, because some maths. He even mis-spoke at one point, intending to acknowledge the seriousness of even one burn, he said "a burn is such a trivial thing" and then corrected himself to say "terrible." Several jurors interviewed said that they changed their minds at this point and became furious at McDonald's for acting like these horrible injuries were trivial or non-existent. This is likely the reason why the judge and jury were unusually biased in how the facts were weighed compared to similar cases, and why they went with the "causes injury = bad" argument over the standard "is it abnormally hot?" argument.
The jury pushed for a $10MM award, then decided on a $2.7MM award, calculated as 2 days of McD's coffee sales. One juror interviewed said that the decision was intended as a direct response to a perceived corporate indifference in McDonald's argument that their coffee was only involved in "700 burns among 17 billion cups served over the course of 10 years." The actual award amount was adjusted up and down in the hundreds of thousands for various reasons. It was going to end on something like 1/2 million, but eventually the case settled for an undisclosed amount. My guess is that the lawyers on both sides knew this was a fluke that would get overturned on appeal, and the settlement was probably for much less.
Juries come up with crazy ideas. "It was unfair this woman was burned, she deserves 10 million" is pretty tame compared to some of the things they'll decide.
I'm curious as to what place the way coffee is served and the prior incidents played into the scenario. Much like a Plaintiff with a record of frivolous lawsuits, a Defendant with 12+ burn cases dismissed can't really claim they weren't aware of the risk. "Nobody could have predicted this coffee would cause horrible burns except for all the people who already sued us and our entire legal team and corporate HQ and every insurance company we work with."
Was the way coffee is served part of the lawsuit? I can imagine drive-thru versus in-store would be a significant factor.
Fucking lawyers and their alleging third degree burns with photographic proof and medical bills.
I bet this old witch even got the painful skin graft surgery just to screw poor little McDonalds even worse!
However, that case is clearly distinguished from Liebeck because in the BK case, the plaintiffs were unable to offer a viable alternative procedure/process that would have reduced burns while at the same time not being too costly to BK nor driving away their customers. Where Liebeck succeeded was by showing that while McDonalds had attempted to be accommodating to its customers, it had also ignored a pattern of severe burns directly caused by its coffee and had failed to adjust as a result. Liebeck also tried to offer an alternative practice (lowering the temperature of the coffee) which is probably why it went through to a jury, instead of being dismissed out flat by the judge. Juries take note of those facts. The expert mentioned above who called the burns "trivial" screwed up royally on the stand, but 'dems the breaks in a jury trial.
Anyway, according to the US Product Safety Commission:
http://www.cpsc.gov/cpscpub/pubs/5098.html
If the National Coffee Association recommends that coffee be served at 180 degrees F, then they're recommending that coffee be served that will destroy your tongue.
I find it hard to believe that tort law is so narrow that you can escape responsibility for selling a product that is clearly unfit for human consumption if some unregulated professional organization says it's okay.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
My understanding is that McDonalds consistently served their coffee 30-40 degrees hotter than all of its competitors, on the theory that a super-majority of their coffee sales were drive-thru coffee that was consumed 15-20 minutes after purchase. Which was used to show negligence because they were not conforming to the industry standards.
I'm imagining a panel of expert-witness-coffee-drinkers
Each charging $1,000 an hour
trying to prove the human body can or cannot handle drinking 180 degree F coffee on the stand
best trial ever
This wouldn't surprise me in the least. The current Supreme Court would almost certainly rule that way.