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October 04, 2006

Why you hate lawyers

In case you're wondering why I support tort reform, it's because I know that if the loser is forced to pay the legal costs of the other side, we'll have fewer patently ridiculous cases -- like this one.

A New Jersey jury awarded a local college student $179,001 because the manufacturer of a “loft bed” failed to warn users of the bed that if they fell out of it, they could hurt themselves.

Honest. I won’t lie and say I couldn’t make that up. I could. But it would require more tequila than I can keep down at my age.

I am presently staring — incredulously — at the opinion of the poor three-judge panel that had to confront this verdict. I tell you, people don’t have any idea how hard appellate work is. Imagine having to explain all the things wrong with giving someone $179,001 because no one warned him against falling out of bed.

[...]

According to the opinion, “At about noon on October 11, 1999, plaintiff was asleep on the bed when his pager went off. . . . Plaintiff did not hear the pager at first, but his roommate, who also had been sleeping, woke up and yelled to plaintiff to ‘turn . . . off’ the pager. Plaintiff testified that ‘when he yelled over to me to wake up, or, you know, get up, I was startled, and I — the next thing I knew, I was — I fell off the bed, I was on the floor.’ ”

[...]

But despite what that quote might suggest about him, our plaintiff was capable of learning from his mistake. According to the opinion, “Plaintiff resumed sleeping in the loft bed, but subsequently positioned himself ‘all the way against the wall,’ as far as possible from the open edge of the bed, because he ‘didn’t want to fall off the bed again.’ ”

But the damage had been done. $179,001 worth.

Tragically, “There were no warning labels on the bed, and it had never ‘cross[ed his] mind’ or ‘occurred to’ plaintiff that he could fall or that the bed was dangerous in any way. He testified that had he seen a warning, he would have been ‘aware of the hazard that was present’ and slept closer to the wall, as he had done after the accident.” Honest. Says so right in the opinion.

And he had an expert, George Widas, who testified that industry standards in the bed-making industry require that the manufacturer affix a warning “that says make sure that you protect yourself from this fall hazard.” According to Widas, the warning label should have had “black letters on an orange background” and included a warning that both identified the hazard and explained how to avoid it.

So the label should have said — in Day-Glo green letters on a phosphorescent-pink background — “THIS IS A BED. USE ONLY WHILE AWAKE.” Or perhaps “IF YOUR IQ IS NOT THIS TALL, YOU CANNOT RIDE ON THIS BED.” Or how about an arrow pointing downward, with the legend “FALLING IN THIS DIRECTION COULD BE HAZARDOUS TO YOUR HEALTH. FALL ONLY UPWARD OR TO THE SIDE.”

The poor CEO of the bed company, who probably felt like he’d wandered into a Kafka novel, testified that federal regulations governing warnings on such beds expressly “exempted colleges and universities and military.” Nonetheless, the jury, confronted with only a cause of action for failure to warn and presumably more familiar with the intellectual capacities of college students in the state than I am, found that such students could not be expected to figure out the whole bed-floor-down-owee thing and awarded the plaintiff “three trash bags fulla twenties and four tokens for the turnpike.”

Read the whole thing to find out what happened on appeal.

Gawd, stuff like this makes me ashamed to be a lawyer.

An interesting discussion on this case -- and tort reform -- in the comments section here.

Posted by Mike Lief at October 4, 2006 11:22 PM | TrackBack

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