A Legal Myth
May 10th, 2005 at 8:07 pm by Susie
Here’s the real scoop on that infamous McDonald’s coffee case:
79-year-old Stella Liebeck of Albuquerque, New Mexico was in the passenger seat of her grandson’s stopped car when she was severely burned by spilled McDonald’s coffee. Stella suffered 3rd-degree burns over 6% of her body, including her inner thighs, genitals, and buttocks. She was hospitalized for eight days, undergoing skin grafts.Stella, a Republican who had never filed a lawsuit in her life, didn’t want to go to court. She offered to settle with McDonald’s for the cost of her medical expenses, but the company refused - even after a mediator suggested they should settle. Once in court, it was revealed that McDonald’s deliberately kept its coffee 20 degrees hotter than industry standards and was aware from 700 prior incidents that this practice could result in severe burns. The company decided not to reduce its temperature and not to warn its customers of any risk.
In the end, McDonald’s behavior outraged jury members who were skeptical of the case. Even the judge - who reduced the jury verdict by more than 80% - called McDonald’s conduct reckless, callous, and willful.
Yeah, I discovered the true story some time ago, and let me tell you, every time I hear someone bash that plaintiff and her “greedy, ambulance-chasing lawyers”, I let them know that the facts are pretty compelling and that they might want to check ‘em out.
Thanks for posting this, Susita.
I’d heard this too, years ago, from a lawyer who knew the facts of the case. One thing not mentioned in your excerpt was *why* McDonalds kept their coffee too hot to drink, which seems kind of stupid in any case. The aroma spreads through the restaurant better the hotter the coffee is, and their market research had shown that people bought more stuff when there was a stronger coffee smell. So, it’s the old story. More important to make bucks than to prevent a few customers from being boiled.
For another source of information, I did some digging several years back and wrote up McDonalds coffee and the Liebeck lawsuit detailing all the facts that could be found.
Some of the links may be defunct, but the truth still stands. Including the fact that the original award which so many decry as exorbitant amounted to two days profits on coffee.
It’s probably worth mentioning that the jury found the plantiff partly culpable (20% percent resonsible for the incident) for holding the coffee cup between her legs. As in, she should have expected the coffee to spill on her, but she shouldn’t have expected third-degree burns.
When people have the full facts of this case reported to them, they usually think the outcome is reasonable. It still persists in popular thought as an example of the out-of-control court system–I was on a jury panel where one of the potential jurors brought it up as an example of a frivolous lawsuit, and the plantiff’s atorney flipped out. Unfortunately, she wasn’t allowed to say much about it during jury selection, but interestingly enough another one of the potential jurors had done some research into the case and gave some of the relevant facts. Needless to say, he wasn’t selected for the trial.
I’ve worked on cases with similar quantities of burns. The compensatory damages in the McDonalds case were, if anything, on the low side of average. The punitive damages were the ones reduced by the judge– and even those, given the number of people who’d been injured by McDonald’s in similar circumstances, seemed fairly reasonable, given how much money McDonald’s makes on coffee every year.
Just once, I would love to see the MSM point out that while medical malpractice insurance premiums have gone up over the last 10 or so years, claims have actually gone *down*. People see what they perceive as outrageous verdicts, and immediately blame the plaintiff’s attorneys, rather than the insurance companies, who are often far more culpable. (One medmal case which resulted in a jury verdict that made front page news a couple years back, involved a doctor that I had met as an expert witness in several cases. From what details I was able to glean from him, he *had* made a mistake, and then rather than settling, his insurance company decided to fight it to the bitter end on the chance that it might be cheaper to fight than settle. It was such an obvious screwup on the doctor’s part that the jury got angry at what they saw as his arrogance in continuing to fight it, and absolutely *slammed* him well out of proportion to the [very real, but not life-threatening] injury. The verdict ended up being more than 20 times what the Plaintiff’s lawyers had offered to settle for before trial.)
Yes, Lionel. Merits and morality aside, it’s usually a winning plan for the physician and insurance company to continue their defense. The plaintiff’s attorney is almost always working on contingency, so that can mean several years of huge out-of-pocket expenditures. The plaintiff’s attorney has to pay for expert reviews, deposition costs, investigator’s reports, economists’ analyses, document retrieval, court costs…while still maintaining the rest of his or her practice. A plaintiff’s attorney has to be pretty damn sure of a malpractice case, at least if they ever intend to pursue a second malpractice case. Even then, it’s a huge gamble.
Meanwhile, the insurance company sees that its retained counsel and all of its experts are paid regularly, and it has the resources to generate mountains of discovery requests, tying up the other side even more.
Mostly, if your case isn’t potentially worth at least a million dollars, you’re not going to be able to find a lawyer. There are plenty of people who’ve suffered significant yet still moderate injuries - people who could be reasonably compensated by, say, $35,000 - who are shut out of any recourse.
And as for people trumpeting about the outrageous verdicts…I’m no expert here, but as a regular citizen/consumer/potential jurist, I’ve always assumed that the huge verdict a jury may deliver is meant in part to indicate its opinion, not just (or even not necessarily) what it thinks is reasonable compensation. I’ve always figured that the jury says, “Eleventy-seven bazillion dollars!” and then the judge says, “So noted,” and then the parties reach a settlement.
In other words, I’ve never assumed that the eleventy-seven bazillion dollar verdicts got paid out literally, so I’m not inclined to blame such verdicts for the health care crisis.
I also knew the facts in this case but I think it’s important to keep it in front of people because it seems the case everyone cites.
Reality Check on the McDonald’s Lawsuit…
As a tribute to my ill-advised Sonic experience this weekend, I would like to direct you to a reality check on the McDonald’s coffee lawsuit via this post at Suburban Guerrilla. Selected bullet points: A vascular surgeon determined that Liebeck……