The Hot Coffee Case
Aug 14th, 2005 at 8:56 am by Susie
I like to remind people occasionally how the famous McDonald’s burn case is a lot more egregious than talk radio would have you believe:
The cases are often listed together on Internet postings as winners of the “Stella Awards,” — supposedly a dubious achievement list of the nation’s most outrageous and ridiculous lawsuits. Although entirely fictitious, the Stellas take their name from the real-life case of 79-year-old Stella Liebeck, whose hot-coffee case against McDonald’s became the poster child for frivolous claims.
According to popular accounts of the lawsuit, Liebeck coaxed nearly $3 million from an Albuquerque jury in 1994 after being scalded by McDonald’s coffee she spilled on herself while riding in a car. These are the story’s best-known elements, but filling in the missing facts puts the case in a different light.
Trial testimony showed that at 180 to 190 degrees, McDonald’s coffee was much hotter than that served by other restaurants or by people in their homes. The fast-food chain had received at least 700 complaints about hot coffee in the previous decade and had paid more than half a million dollars in settlements, according to trial testimony cited by the Wall Street Journal.
Liebeck’s injuries were hardly minor. She suffered third-degree burns on her thighs and groin area, was hospitalized for a week and had to undergo painful skin grafts. Before filing a lawsuit, she wrote McDonald’s requesting that it lower the temperature of its coffee and cover her uninsured medical bills and incidental costs of about $20,000. McDonald’s offered $800.
Later, as the case neared trial, a mediator recommended that McDonald’s pay a settlement of $225,000. The company refused.
Jurors ultimately awarded Liebeck $160,000 in compensatory damages and about $2.7 million in punitive damages. “The facts were so overwhelmingly against the company,” one of the jurors told the Journal. “Their callous disregard was very upsetting,” another said.
Soon after the verdict, the trial judge slashed the punitive damages by more than 80% to $480,000. Then the case settled for an undisclosed amount.
“The irony about the McDonald’s case is that it actually, in my view, was a meaningful and worthy lawsuit,” George Washington University’s Turley said. Yet advocates and pundits have “made it synonymous with court abuse.”
What this story doesn’t mention is, the previous rulings against McDonald’s directed them to lower their coffee temperature. McDonald’s ignored them, which is one of the things that really pissed off the judge in this case.
if the judge was so pissed off, why were the punitive damages lowered?
Er, isn’t that how it works in most of those cases? First, there are extremely high fines, just to get the company to listen up and pay attention. Otherwise they’d just ignore it and pay the damages from the CEO’s pocketchange.
Once they start whining about the large sum, the amount is reduced to a realistic level.
The point of the high damage payments is to force the corporation into reacting and changing their behaviour.
Unfortunately, the high numbers are always reported first, and nobody mentions the real numbers afterwards.
One other interesting point that I heard from a lawyer familiar with the case: apparently the reason Macdonalds wanted to keep the coffee so hot is that spreads the aroma better. And their research had shown that people bought more food when there was a stronger coffee smell. So, it was the tried and true profits over people paradigm, as usual.
I read a report of the case written by the plaintiff’s lawyer. He said that the punitive damages were so high because the jury actively hated the suit that McDonald’s sent to testify, who was arrogant and said that McDonald’s had no intention of lowering the temperature of the coffee no matter what the outcome of the trial. The amount of the punitive damages were equal to McDonald’s profits from coffee for a three-day period. The judge did reduce that amount as excessive, and also reduced the amount of the compensatory damages for comparative negligence on the plaintiff’s part (that is, for spilling the coffee on herself). But the amount of the punitive damages was purposely chosen by the jury to send a message.
The woman had to have skin grafts on her genitals. That’s some hot freaking coffee.
1) No court has ever ordered McDonald’s to lower the temperature of its coffee.
2) McDonald’s coffee was not and is not hotter than other coffee chains. Starbucks serves their coffee hotter than McDonald’s because coffee is required to be hot for optimal taste.
3) “700 complaints” equals one complaint per 24 million cups of coffee.
4) The vast majority of courts throw out hot-coffee-spill lawsuits as meritless. McDonald’s refused to settle for $225,000 because they shouldn’t have had to pay a penny. The Liebeck case was an outrageous outlier that never should have gone to the jury. What’s worse is that tort professors like Jonathan Turley are teaching that it should be an aspirational goal of the tort system to produce ridiculous cases like this one. A shame that the LA Times publishes only a fraction of the story.
Ted, I notice you don’t document any of your claims, and neither does your website. I do notice, however, that overlawyered.com is a “Conservative Site of the Day” (always synonymous with non-biased facts!), and affiliated with The Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, founded by former CIA chief spook William Casey, famous for being underwritten by Exxon-Mobil and coincidentally, a fervent debunker of … global warming! Other funders include the Sarah Scaife Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation - you know, the usual right-wing suspects. One may perhaps assume it is funded for the usual right-wing agenda.
You’re going to have to do better than vehement, unsupported statements to win any credibility here. My readers just aren’t that naive.
Excuse me, but how does one drink coffee that BURNT THE SKIN OFF A WOMAN’S GENITALS to the point that she needed skin grafts?!?
The coffee. Was. Too. Hot. This is just common sense and logic, which I know is difficult for conservatives to process.
Also, my comment above was partly incorrect: the jury reduced the compensatory damages for comparative negligence, not the judge. I think it was by 40%, so they thought it was almost half her fault; yet they still awarded humongous punitive damages. The jury was sending a message. They understood the facts of the case and sent a message.
Depleting My Inventory
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FUCK MCDONALDS THIS SHIT IS GAY WHY THE FUCK SHOULD WE BE PAYING HER 480,000 DOLLARS FOR BURNS
IT’S HER FUCKING FAULT