9/20/2007

7 Responses to “Pants Suit Dry Cleaner Closes”

1. This country needs to adopt loser pays to discourage those who use the legal system as an instrument of intimidation and to harry businesses and the law abiding. I hope the man who brought this idiotic suit suffers his entire life for what he did to these people.

   Thomas Jackson (bf83e0) — 9/20/2007 @ 6:34 am

   
   

2. He won’t.

   He’s a black democrat. He’ll never be held accountable.

   Scott Jacobs (425810) — 9/20/2007 @ 6:57 am

   
   

3. Thomas Jackson, you want “loser pays” now — but wait until a large corporation or rich person with unlimited legal funds sues YOU for something little, like backing into one of their utility poles. Every dollar they spend is a dollar added to what you’ll have to pay if you lose. Imagine that first meeting: They’ll tell you “We’ve already spend twenty grand just researching our case against you. We could spend ten million more litigating you into the ground, or you can just give us all your money now. Whadya say?”

   Or say your local power company employee runs over your kid with one of their trucks, and you get hit with $200k in medical bills. The power company refuses to pay a dime towards your kid’s care, saying “go ahead, sue us.” You know that if you had unlimited legal funds, you could win. But you know they’ll spend $100k easy to defend the case, because it’s worth it to spend $100k to avoid paying $200k. Can you afford to fight the defense they’ll put up, knowing that if you run out of money and give up, you’ll have to pay the $100k they spent in addition to your $200k in medical bills?

   The current system is certainly wasteful and inefficient at times. You can say that about any system — but that’s not a reason to simply switch to a new system without considering the results. Loswer pays would mean that the person with the most money would be able to utterly destroy anyone else coming into the courts.

   At any rate, frivolous claims can and do result in fee-shifting to the person found to be filing a frivolous claim. And those are the ones you’re trying to prevent with the ham-fisted “loser pays” rule. If there was no finding of a frivolous claim in the pants case, then that’s either the fault of the lawyers for the defendants, or there’s more to the case than we know.

   Phil (6d9f2f) — 9/20/2007 @ 9:59 am

   
   

4. Phil, first of all the court systems’ standard on “frivolous” claims is so high that fee awards are rare in tort cases. Courts simply don’t believe that there is anything like a frivolous case. The trend outside of tort is actually for statutory provisions of atty fees and that should be adopted for tort cases as well.

   Robin Roberts (6c18fd) — 9/20/2007 @ 11:31 am

   
   

5. Phil…
   In the examples you posit, I would think we would just have to revert to visiting our friend “Don Vito”, instead of a lawyer. He always seemed to get a better result, or at least justice.

   Another Drew (8018ee) — 9/20/2007 @ 4:19 pm

   
   

6. but wait until a large corporation or rich person with unlimited legal funds sues YOU for something little, like backing into one of their utility poles. Every dollar they spend is a dollar added to what you’ll have to pay if you lose.

   Ive been through that. Loser theoretically doesn’t pay legal fees… unless they’re put in the `suit as part of a (bogus) debt.

   David N. Scott (5986fc) — 9/20/2007 @ 9:39 pm

   
   

7. (I guess that was a little fragmentary)

   Suffice it to say, I paid $30,000 to pay off a $1,500 debt someone else incurred. Cos the legal fees alone had multipled it twenty fold.

   David N. Scott (5986fc) — 9/20/2007 @ 9:40 pm