Idiots like this, and judges that give them a stupid verdict like this give all civil cases a bad name, but just because some cases are absurd, does not mean all are.

The concept of limiting the amount I can recover through the courts no matter what the damages are and the circumstances is absolutely disgusting. And companies trying to pass laws limiting their own liability is even worse. I guess as a doctor if I know my max liability is $500K I know I can do whatever I want, and take whatever risks I want because the max I am out is 500K… never mind if I cause permanent damage to a child that will easily need more than 500K in care over the rest of their life.

There are better ways to limit frivolous lawsuits, like making the loser responsible for all court costs for example.

Frankly if I made that kind of decision based on the facts I was given (and I thoroughly suspect I would) I’d seriously want to vomit after hearing the “inadmissible” part of the story.

I think of obama old firm. It must of been called Lyin and Lyin representing you.

I know the story above is not about medical malpractice, but with Obamacare in the air 24/7, everyone seems to be talking about tort reforn, as if it only applies to medical malpractice. Marco has talked about lawsuit refrom.

It is all about the ambulance chasers. The higher the jury award, the higher their legal fees. Daily, there is a barage of ads on TV, asking you to call this ambulance chaser or that if you took – name the drug, it’s probably on the list. If these drugs are so dangerous, doesn’t the FDA have something to do with that? I wonder how much these lawsuits have driven up the cost of drugs with the drug companies.

The tobacco companies are another target. They have awarded gazzilions of dollars to people who didn’t know it was dangerous to smoke?????? As far back as 10 years ago, cave dwellers knew it was unhealthy.

I agree with the poster above, anyone filing a frivilous lawsuit, or loses in court, should be required to pay the legal fees of the aggrieved party. Actually, the plaintiff’s attorney should also be required to pay as much as the plaintiff.

If by tort reform you mean limiting the amount of damages available in this case, I disagree that this case signals a need for tort reform. Rather, it sounds like the judge made some bad decisions about what evidence the jury heard, and whether certain affirmative defenses were available to the defendants. I am not familiar with California tort law, but I suspect that this award will get reversed on appeal.

If California or any other state enacted tort reform to “fix” this case, it would also “fix” any case where the little girl was unrelated to the truck driver, meaning the girl’s family could not get compensated for her injuries. At most, this case shows that California needs to replace this particular judge, reform its rules on evidence, or revise its rules on affirmative defenses.

Let me play the big mean conservative for a second. What if it wasn’t his own daughter? How is it the fault of the company and not the driver? Was he not given adequate enough training? Should the company have a strongly defined written rule that every driver needs to sign off on? Did the driver have a history of reckless actions such that the company should have fired him in order for them to prevent something like this from happening?

Or is it because the company has more money than the driver. Certainly in this case it would have been foolish to sue the driver because he would have been just paying himself. But even if it had not been his own driver, would the family have sued the driver and not the company? Are all companies at fault just because they have deeper pockets, no matter what precautions they take and no matter how many idiot rules they have on the books? Is this justice?

Personally, I think the focus on damages is misplaced. The number of awards like this are very small and, while they get lots of press, they are not the driving force in litigation costs.

Rather than focus on the damages, I would focus first on the standards for bringing and prevailing in litigation. It’s the litany of baseless suits that companies must defend that drive up costs. The cost of responding to the most baseless lawsuit starts in the tens of thousands of dollars, can run quickly into the hundreds of thousands of dollars once you get into discovery. Of course, most of these expenses are one-sided because they plaintiff has no documents to produce, no employees to prep for depositions, and on and on. So start with things like:
- Statutes of Repose to limit suits based on items manufactured long ago under different standards.
- Higher pleading standards with sanctions that actually have bite to prevent a shotgun approach to litigation — look at the caption on an asbestos claim to see that any company that maybe might have made something that touched asbestos gets named, regardless of the jobs the plaintiff held.
- Preclude judges from adopting new theories of liability — this should be the provence of the legislature, not activist judges.

If you want to look at damages, especially in med-mal type cases, I would limit damages in simple negligence cases — you are dealing with human decision-making, perfection cannot be expected. Eliminate the caps for gross negligence or recklessness, but make sure the standard for meeting those is meaningful.

The interesting thing, while the left is fond of looking to Europe for how to do things, I suspect they would be strongly opposed to adopting a European style litigation structure. The chance of a 24.3mm verdict in Europe. Zero.

With Tort Law is the concept of “punitive damages”. These are punishments imposed by a court after conviction for a misdeed. As such, they should be governed by the Constitutional prohibition against “cruel and unusual punishment”. Guidelines should be passed by Legislature, penalties imposed by the judge, not a jury, and collected by the court (as are other fines for misdeeds), not the plaintiff (or his lawyer). The purpose of tort action should be to make the (successful) plaintiff whole (as much as possible) not to make him rich.

And, of course,” loser pays”.