We tend to think of it as a problem of the social media age that people only read the headlines, they never look at the actual story. Well, the truth is that we’ve always been this way. In the 80’s and 90’s, we would listen to Johnny Carson and David Letterman riff on news stories and we’d wind up taking their jokes as fact, maybe embellishing it with some assumptions we’d made, and before long, a news story has become an urban legend. Here are three major liability stories that we’ve pretty much all gotten wrong:
McDonald’s Hot Coffee Case
This is perhaps the most famous liability case in recent history. The story we all heard on late night television was that an old lady spilled some coffee on herself and squeezed McDonald’s for millions of dollars. The truth is that McDonald’s had received hundreds of complaints over their scalding hot coffee, the woman had initially only solicited the fast food chain for $800 to cover her skin grafts (yes, she actually suffered serious injury in the incident). When it became a courtroom drama, she tried to settle for $20,000. McDonald’s refused, not wanting to set a precedent that would make them responsible for any future injuries. Finally she wound up taking home just $640,000, minus what she had to pay for her medical bills, of course.
Worker Sues Ladder Company
It was actually 60 Minutes that reported this one: a worker mounted a ladder in frozen manure, and when the manure melted throughout the day, the ladder slipped and he injured himself. That’s a funny story, so that’s the one that spread, not the real one: That the ladder actually broke with the weight of just one adult man on it. With that in mind, it’s easy to see why the manufacturer got sued.
Lady Bankrupts Town Tripping On A Pothole
The story that we heard was that Sally Stewart was shopping in Reeds Spring, MO. Stewart tripped on a pothole in the street and sued the small town, bankrupting the entire village. The reality: The pothole was actually in the sidewalk, not the middle of the street, and it was covered by grass, and Stewart required expensive surgery to repair the injury she sustained. And she didn’t sue the town, she sued the owners of the store where she tripped, and it was the court that decided that the city be held responsible. And the town wouldn’t have had to pay a dime if they’d had insurance. And the mayor at the time of the incident was Joe Dan Dwyer, who’d actually made his own fortune from a personal injury settlement, and who soon left office under investigation for insurance fraud. And the mayor told Stewart “you will probably have to sue us” if she wanted the town to pay for her surgery.
