The good with the bad: Lawyers help pursue justice

In my most recent column, I covered some of the reasons people hate lawyers. This month, I promised to find reasons why lawyers aren’t utterly useless. If you ask a lawyer, most will say that they are vital to achieving justice and preserving freedom for the weak and oppressed.
Indeed, Gerry Spence, one of the best-known consumer lawyers in the country, made headlines last year by proclaiming that lawyers were more important to society than doctors. His reasoning was, “We can live without medical care, but we cannot live without justice.”
Some will take issue with the statement, but the point is that justice and freedom would take a hit if those most knowledgeable about how to pursue justice and freedom suddenly disappeared.
Guaranteeing freedom and justice often comes down to the simple task of ensuring that people are heard. Our laws virtually always guarantee people the right to be heard.
Tyrants and petty bullies, however, like to operate in secret away from prying eyes. They do all they can to prevent stories of the oppressed from coming out. The favored tactics of these people is to shut out the press, refuse to hold hearings and deny the release of documents that reveal the truth of their actions.
Lawyers understand that justice is never achieved within the confines of the tyrant’s circle of influence. He must be removed from his castle and made to answer in the courts, where his influence, at least in theory, is severely curtailed.
Another area where lawyers can and do make a significant difference is safety. Although insurance companies would like nothing better than to convince all of America that utopia can be achieved by banning lawsuits, let’s reflect for a moment about dangerous products that unthinking or even malicious manufacturers have foisted upon us while making millions for themselves: lawn darts, pet food laced with melamine, toys made with lead, and so on.
History has shown us that it is a rare manufacturer who will voluntarily fix or withdraw a profitable, but dangerous, product. Absent a recall order by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, only a lawsuit will force a correction. Even in the face of lawsuits, though, very powerful companies will sometimes persist.
The most famous dangerous-product case of the past 15 years was when McDonald’s coffee spilled on a 79-year-old woman. She received a jury verdict of $2.86 million after suffering horrific third-degree burns.
(The award was reduced by the judge to $640,000 and settled confidentially for even less. The press largely ignored whether the coffee was dangerous, focusing instead on the size of the award, decreeing that it was way too high.)
The testimony in the case revealed that McDonald’s kept its coffee around 190 degrees, 20 degrees hotter than other restaurants, and had received at least 700 reports of coffee burns ranging from mild to third degree. It had settled claims arising from scalding injuries for more than $500,000.
A corporate wonk testified that McDonald’s was well aware of the burns caused by the coffee, but 700 burned people weren’t enough to give the company pause. That’s because the morning jolt makes McDonald’s money, lots of money — $1.35 million per day. And research showed that many people preferred their coffee extremely hot, even if they couldn’t drink it until it cooled off.
The jurors were outraged at McDonald’s cavalier attitude and assessed punitive damages of $2.7 million based on two days’ sales to go with general damages of $160,000.
Did the java go cool after that loss? Most observers say yes, but some say that the money generated by very hot joe is too great an allure, so some restaurants persist in selling scalding-hot coffee.
Skeptics maintain that it is only when the cost of litigation exceeds the profits to be made that manufacturers rethink their policies. Their solution, of course, is to keep on suing.
I expect that most readers identify with my previous column, that lawyers are distasteful wretches. Nevertheless, I also suspect that, should any of these people be deprived of their liberty or injured by a thoughtless product, their first phone call would be to one of the wretched.
Gary Redenbacher of Scotts Valley is an attorney in private practice. Contact him at [email protected].