It's Not My Fault - Some Thoughts on Product Liability
by Darren Ashby

"Let's kill all the lawyers" is a suggestion in the Eagle's song entitled "Get Over It." I really connected with that thought. It's not that I hate any lawyers in particular. In fact, I know several men in the legal profession that are good, honorable and kind. What has me bothered is the way the legal profession seems to be stripping our nation of personal responsibility, all for the love of money.

It doesn't take much searching to find cases where the lawyers get huge settlements, most of the money going to legal fees while the person injured gets squat. Even when the injured person was simply stupid ⁱ, it seems now possible to sue someone over it. What happened to personal responsibility for our actions? I fault two professions in general. First, the shrinks that told their patient that "it really isn't your fault, XYZ in your past is the cause of all your problems, so don't blame yourself, blame someone else." Secondly, the lawyers who at some point seem to have traded the pursuit of justice for the pursuit of cash. Does a thirteen million-dollar coffee burn settlement make sense to anyone? We'll focus on the lawyers for this treatise.

The beginning of this rant came to me when I read about what I call the cheese burger suit ⁱⁱ. No, it's not what you get when you spill your happy meal on your best three-piece. It's much messier than that. What you have is a fat guy suing all the big fast food joints for making their food taste so good that it is addictive, leading of course to his obesity and all the problems associated with that. I even read a quote in The Onion that stated several of the restaurants involved were considering "cheese limits" on their burgers. So does that mean if you want extra cheese you will have to sign a waiver? Maybe there should be an under 30/over 30 rule; you can't have over 30 ounces of cheese unless your waste is under 30 inches. The worst part is that this craziness in the fast food world is not without precedent. Recently, McDonalds lost a case in which it was found that a potato is not necessarily a vegetable.

What I hope my readers realize it that all the money that passes hands in these cases hurts all of us. It is money that does zero, zip, nadda for us as a society. Even a CEO that drives a company into the ground, while making millions, at least added to our gross national product. You can't say that for these cases. If we continue to reward people for being stupid, it should be no surprise that the intellectual capability of our great country is steadily falling. There is even a trillion-dollar suit in the works to sue any company that has any connection with slavery in the past. How in the world is that going to help the world today!? As someone who focuses on bringing products to the consumer to make life better, easier, healthier, more enjoyable, I just have a hard time with the idiocy of some lawsuits besieging our corporations.

Don't get me wrong, I do think corporations should be held responsible for things they do. And now more than ever, we know we can't trust them. So what should we do? I think there should be some way to limit the greed of the lawyer from arbitrarily hiking up a settlement cost. Maybe there should be a cap on what the lawyers can make. Would that stop the "they've got deep pockets so lets sue" mentality? Having spent some time on a witness stand defending a product, I realized that the lawyer questioning me had zero interest in the truth, just a desire to win at all costs. This has to change somehow. Your suggestions are welcome!

The system is broke and I think it is time we do something. I don't want to buy a screwdriver someday and see a warning label on the side saying, "do not poke this in your eye as injury may result."

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Footnotes

ⁱ This type of stupidity is the reason I have to put disclaimers in my engineers=pyro articles.

ⁱⁱ Here are a bunch of links to articles on the cheese burger suit:
http://www.consumerfreedom.com/headline_detail.cfm?HEADLINE_ID=1500 http://www.consumerfreedom.com/headline_detail.cfm?HEADLINE_ID=1532
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,58652,00.html
http://www.wnbc.com/sh/health/stories/health-157680920020725-100706.html

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