dlq04

Who can forget this one.......

Women sued McDonalds for spilling hot coffee

She was in passenger seat and placed the coffee between her legs while parked

Everyone knows coffee is hot

She spilled it taking off the lid and was burned

She wrote McDonalds for medical compassion, $10-20,000

McD offered her $800, so she got an attorney

Jury ruled $200,000 in compensatory damage and $2.7 MILLION in punitive damages

After the trial the Judge reduced the $2.7 M to $480,000

Still $680,000 for doing something stupid … wow

buckeyesue

Yes, I remember!

Wow, 30 years ago!

S2KRAY

I remember that. I got rear ended by a distracted drive 2 years ago. Totaled my car and I had to go to PT for a long time. I got the medical bills paid and a pathetic settlement check for $5000. Then I had to pay the lawyer 25% of that. I picked the wrong lawyer. I should have hired her lawyer.

tof

Like most high profile cases that make it to court, this one was greatly oversimplified in mainstream media.

What 79 year old Stella Liebeck did was careless but she probably did not expect the entire cup of scalding hot coffee to end up in her lap.. And she didn't expect hot coffee to cause third-degree burns in her pelvic region requiring her to be hospitalized for eight days while undergoing skin grafting, followed by two years of medical treatment.

Meanwhile, this (probably) nice elderly woman became a national joke.

But here's the kicker. Documents obtained from McDonald's showed that from 1982 to 1992 the company had received more than 700 reports of people burned by McDonald's coffee to varying degrees of severity, and had settled claims arising from scalding injuries for more than $500,000. McDonald's quality control manager, Christopher Appleton, testified that this number of injuries was insufficient to cause the company to evaluate its practices.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebec...7s_Restaurants

zeroptzero

Cosmo Kramer only took free coffee for life, when he jumped the gun on the settlement offer and went against his lawyer's (Jackie Coltrane) instructions lmao

A while back our main coffee shop here had leaky coffee cup lids and they would leak onto my lap and slightly burn me, the coffee shop employees would overfill the cups and the lids would leak. We always joked about suing them , lol.

dlq04

Thanks for the research, Mike…

Yeah, back in the day comedians had a field day with this one.

One of those times when people fell into one of two camps - a frivolous lawsuit vs. the little person taking on big bad corporate America.

As for kicker, as you called it, 700 reports over 10 years would, I suspect, would be a very, very small percentage of the billions of cups of coffee sold over the same period. Something to consider on Mickey D’s part.

One thing for certain is the story changed how the courts, state and local, looked at outrageous damages. Many set limits on what a person could win because of this case.

tof

Yeah, 5000 isn't a big number, but I thought the kicker part was when McDonald's quality control manager testified that this number of injuries was insufficient to cause the company to evaluate its practices.

Really? Sure it may be true but admitting in open court that you are too big to even consider a relatively serious customer complaint? That just isn't a good look for a big company. I guess Appleton figured the company lawyers and PR staff needed to stretch their legs a little.

zeroptzero

sounds like someone did a half-assed cost-benefit analysis and the potential lawsuits seemed negligible to them in the overall scheme of things (billions upon billions served() so they changed nothing. Or the higher ups were too lazy to care about it. When you look at it that way the injured party was smart and earned every penny, or they had a good lawyer. lol.

tof

McDonalds did modify their coffee cups to include a larger and more serious warning. Now that seems like a much better response to the suit. After all, some people don't realize just how hot a spilled hot beverage can be.

S2KRAY

Especially if you spill it on your lap. The family jewels won’t like that. Good information Mike.