Is it too easy to sue someone in America?

well I don’t know…relative to what…I bet some lawyers don’t think it’s too easy…I bet certain groups facing discrimination don’t find it too easy

@Simone_De_Beauvoir Those aren’t frivolous lawsuits.

Your statement of frivolous lawsuits may well be true, but, if you are the victim of wrongdoing, I think you would be extremely appreciative of the ease at which you can seek justice and compensation. See ya….Gary/wtf

@The_Compassionate_Heretic oh believe you me there are plenty of people that think suing their son because he called another person’s son a faggot consistently for 2 years is a frivolous lawsuit

Remember the Judge that sued his dry cleaner for $54 million. I’d say that was quite frivolous! Here is an article about it.

@knitfroggy Yes! That’s a great example. Why did this take up any court time at all?

A local car dealer mailed out advertising coupons saying $500 off any car!
He neglected to put the words “one per customer”.
My daughter’s friend collected 20 of them, and tried to buy a car with them. The dealership salesmen laughed at her.
She sued.

A woman in San Francisco fell off a cable car, and said the experience turned her into a Nymphomaniac. She sued the City, who had to pay her $100,000 to pay for sexual services she now required.

There are many stories about burglars falling through roofs, and suing the business they were trying to rob.

Yes, it is too easy.

@filmfann What happened in the lawsuit with the girl and her $500 coupons? I’m curious…

It should always for anyone to sue for any reason. However, they should have to meet a certain standard of likelihood of winning the suit (a review of the evidence by an impartial mediator?) or be liable for their opponent’s court costs if they should lose.

@knitfroggy Not sure. She got her picture in the National Enquirer, and my daughter stopped talking to her about that time. She was a nutbag.

Here’s something that I saw on GMA the other morning. This guy had a hacking cough for 2 years. They couldn’t figure out what was wrong with him. He finally went to the doctor & they x-rayed his chest. There was a foreign object in his lung. They operated & found a piece of plastic. Upon closer looking, it was the broken end of a plastic spoon that had ‘Wendy’s’ on it! He’d wolfed down a meal there so fast that he’d INHALED a piece of spoon! This kills me. He didn’t swallow it…he inhaled it in his lung. He said he was from a large family & he had to eat his meals fast when he was a kid. At the end of the piece, they said he hadn’t decided whether or not to “contact” Wendys! That idiot is going to try to sue Wendy’s for this. It’s not THEIR fault that he eats like a pig! And some greedy-assed lawyer will take the case! How ridiculous!

Maybe the taxpayers have grounds for a class action law suit against the court system for allowing frivolous law suits, and wasting taxpayer money.

I like @pdworkin ‘s idea. There should be laws passed that if one does not win a civil suit they brought forward that the case enter into another phase where the judge and/or jury determine if it met certain frivolous criteria and if so, the penalty be compensation to the other party for their court costs and other losses (lost income, travel, etc) as well as compensation to the court for wasting the court’s time. Establishing those criteria could be tricky, but I would like to see it tried (no pun intended). See ya….Gary/wtf

It’s not as easy as you think. Anyone can file a complaint, but you still have to prove your case. Perhaps we need to look at the idiot judges and unethical attorneys that perpetuate these lawsuits. The legal system is broken.

I actually didn’t find it too easy. Emotionally, it was painful (when I sued for sexual harrassment) and when we sued to get money back that was rightfully ours (we won) it has cost us so much. And we haven’t seen a dime.

I don’t think it’s easy, but that’s been my experience.

…Seriously, there are far too many frivolous lawsuits happening today…

Seriously, there are too many Lawyers… Shakespeare had it right. Lose the lawyers!

Your question took up precious itouch screen space. I’M SUEING!

I am going to sue you for saying that!

I’m going to sue you for sueing me!

I’m going to sue you for suing me for me suing you.
Then I am going to sue my insurance company because you are going to sue me.

I am going to sue you, your insurance company, your family, your workplace and your government.

I’m going to sue you both for arguing about it. Hahaaaaaa

I’m going to sue you for sueing me, and how much you won in the lawsuit against ChazMaz

I going to sue you both both making be laugh so hard, I choked, banged my head agenst the desk and passed out.

I’m going to sue yourdesk for making you sue us.

If you’ve ever actually been involved in a lawsuit, you would know that it isn’t “too easy” to sue someone.

Once someone embezzled around $200,000 from me. I complained to the authorities and the State sent in the regulators to close the guy down. He even went to prison because of it; but even with the evidence developed in the criminal case against him, it still took me close to 15 years of litigation and over $90,000 in legal fees to get my money back. There were about 30 other people he stole money from as well, none of whom bothered to sue because of the trouble involved.

Lawsuits are very time consuming and very expensive. And despite what you hear about $54 million lawsuits, asking and getting are two different things—even when you are in the right and have both the law and the evidence on your side. It takes forever to get a court date; it is extremely costly to take a deposition; there are filing fees and delays at every turn; your case can be tossed on summary judgment, or if you miss a deadline; there is tremendous pressure on you to settle at a loss, and even if you “win” you practically have to sue again to collect on your judgment. When you consider the time and emotional ups and downs it is seldom “worth it” to sue even when you have a just grievance, much less if you have a frivolous one.

It is out of control. I think it is important to be able to sue, but ridiculous things like @jbfletcherfan example is annoying! I mean, do those people really think it is Wendy’s fault, or are they just trying to get what they can if they can? Come on people! These frivolous suits ruin it for people who are really harmed. It flies in the face of the golden rule. If that same person threw a party and someone inhaled a plastic spoon while eating like a pig would she/he want to be sued? You don’t get to sue just because it happened to you, or because there is a big corporation you can go after. It’s just wrong.

“That idiot is going to try to sue Wendy’s for this. It’s not THEIR fault that he eats like a pig! And some greedy-assed lawyer will take the case! How ridiculous!”

@JLeslie Neither you nor @jbfletcherfan knows whether this case was ever filed, much less what the actual causes of action would be, or any of the evidence of the case—much less the character of his lawyer, if any. You don’t know if he “inhaled” the piece of plastic because he was eating “like a pig” or if it was lurking in his food causing him to choke on it, sending it down the wrong pipe into his lung. You really don’t know if it was his negligence or Wendy’s.

Yet, without having heard a single word of testimony or anything else about the case, you are willing to pronounce it “ridiculous” based on nothing more than hearsay—i.e., @jbfletcherfan‘s speculative interpretation of what happened to “some guy” she happens to regard as a pig.

The only thing “out of control” here is your and her willingness to make something out of nothing. Trust me, if you’ve ever broken a tooth on a rock that was in some canned soup, or been served up part of a latex glove in a restaurant and choked on it, you would be very glad to have legal remedies. It is not “easy” to sue someone, unless you are very wealthy or an attorney yourself.

There are numerous protections against frivolous suits. First, you can file an answer to their pleading that argues that they have failed to state a valid cause of action and move that it be dismissed. You can countersue for abuse of process. Or, you can file a motion for summary judgment. Or, you can go to the “readiness and settlement” conference and try to persuade the judge and the other side that they have no case. By the way, if it goes to trial and the party bringing suit loses, they pay the court costs and the other guy’s attorney fees. No attorney is going to take a case on contingency that he doesn’t think he can win.

@zuma, it seems like the Wendy’s person has no idea what happened either, otherwise at the time it happened he would have realized he inhaled the food. He has no way to know, unless he never uses spoons at Wendy’s to eat, I guess that might be a detail we would need to know, but even if the spoon peice was in the food already accidently, it still went down his trachea into his lung, instead of his esophugus into his tummy, which means to me he was talking while eating, or eating quickly or something? But, you are right we do not have all of the details. And, you cannot deny that people try to sue for crazy stupid reasons all of the time. Remember, I said I think it is important for people to be able sue.

Story: I worked at Bloomigdale’s for years. One day the insurance guy came to speak to management about how we are self insured and how it works. Basically if a store incurs a $100 fee or more from an accident (so basically if someone needs to go to a doctor or ER because they had an accident in the store) the store has to pay $15,000 into the insurance kitty. Doesn’t matter if the person who had the accident winds up having doc fees that total $500 or wins a lawsuit of $50K, that store pays the $15K. So this guy, who comes to tell us about the plan says we, in Boca Raton, have more claims than any store, both Burdines (now Macy’s) and Bloomingdale’s Boca. He launches into an example…“just earler today I was at customer service and a pen that a woman was using began to leak. The person working customer service immediately grabbed paper towel to help wipe it up. The woman started complaining saying she was allergic to the ink and had to go to a doctor.” He continued… “I bet you money if that happened in the Minnesota store the customer would have been apologizing and trying to help clean it up.”

Another story: When I had a car accident, not my fault, two people said to me say your back hurts and you’ll get $10K.

Too many people have no ethics, just seek opportunity to take. It is very important to protect our ability to sue and collect damages. Some people truly have their lives significantly changed or damaged by incompetence or mistakes of others.

absolutely.
people sue each other over nothing because they want money. you can sue someone for falling on their sidewalk, to no fault of their own. it’s ridiculous.
every time i see that “whocanisue.com” billboard that’s on like every other street here, i get so annoyed.

@JLeslie I just re-read my answer. Sorry for the strong wording. I got a little carried away.

Yes, a lot of people do think that suing is going to be their big payday, but the reality of it is quite different. It is actually very difficult to come out ahead when you are paying some attorney upward of $200 per hour.

Far too easy.

Here’s a true story: ten years ago there was a large international business event somewhere in southern France an American women sued a French company because a French men doing “faire la bise” (a common French cheek-kiss greeting). The French company had a large office in New York.

Another hearsay “some guy” anecdote. Has anyone here who has actually had to sue someone think it “too easy”?

@zuma I think what you are trying to get at is a good point. I think I, and maybe others are commenting on the climate, or idea, that unfortunately is very obvious in America—many people want to make others culpable for their own mistakes, and want what they perceive as easy money, and, as I said above, lack being able to put themselves in the other persons shoes; its the mindset that is so annoying. Also, some lawyers seem to look for things that are not there, but might win. I saw commercials several years ago about lawyers who wanted to do a class action suit regarding a specific birth control pill and cervical cancer. Um, yeah, people on birth control tend to have unprotected sex, and maybe are more likely not to be married, and so they are exposed to HPV more, that is not that particular pills fault. Just putting the idea out there without real infromation I think is harmful.

@Zuma…I can tell you first hand, that nearly 40 years ago, I found it just right and learned lots about the process. When I was sixteen, some jerk backed in to my parked car in the middle of the parking lot and refused to repair my 1963 Corvair. That pissed me off and that jerk, at the time, did not realize how unwise it is for anyone to piss me off. I filed suit in Small Claims Court, subpoenaed him and his father (he, too, was a minor) and presented my case to the judge with a very simple blackboard sketch. The jerk had no defense. I won and he paid. And, his father missed a day of work which pissed him off to no end. The son soon learned (or perhaps revisited the fact) that it was not wise to piss his father off, either. I could barely contain myself….ah, the thrill of victory! I know my case is not on the scale or of the complexity (i.e., no attorneys, in my case) of the cases being discussed here….just wanted to share my experience and success.
See ya….Gary/wtf/lurve whore

Doesn’t a civil case in court eat up a lot of money? People lose their houses? It can take years for a verdict?