jmra wrote:EEllis wrote:Jaguar wrote:EEllis wrote:I don't believe Kedane was talking specifically about the one case he is just saying generally he believe it would be better to try cases rather than paying out almost automatically. I can certainly see that point of view. Settling often encourages lawsuits to be filed regardless of wrongdoing.
But after sympathetic jurys award a few multimillion dollar lawsuits, suddenly the $1 million doesn't look too bad.
Of course it would be better to hire officers who do not engage in illegal behavior.
Yes they could do so but if every case, or every meritless case, was fought then you could believe that the overall payouts might be lower even if some of the individual cases had higher payouts.
Fight the meritless cases and settle the ones where you are at fault. Not exactly rocket science.
I agree, it has always made me mad that those that are perceived as having "deep pockets" will often roll over instead of fighting. Years ago, at a customer's request, we replaced an aerial telephone drop wire at a customer's house because they put in an above ground swimming pool and if you stood on the rail around the top of the pool, where you are not supposed to stand, and were about 7 feet tall, you could touch the drop and the customers were afraid one of their kids would get electrocuted. We laid down a buried wire and told the customer that we would not bury it because they were not in a buried service neighborhood and it would be up to them to see to it that the wire was buried. They didn't like that. I was the technician that placed the wire and I ran it down the pole and then along the fence around to the side of the house, and actually did bury it across the one gate walkway.
Fast forward a few years and the company gets a call. Seems that grandma was out walking in the yard and tripped on the phone wire and broke her hip. Having, by this time, been promoted to supervisor covering that territory, I got to be the first point of contact to go investigate. A "Right of Way and Claims" manager and I met at the house, and as soon as I recognized it, I recused myself from actually participating in the investigation, but I stuck around to see what happened anyway.
The wire was exactly where I put it (and BTW the swimming pool was now gone) no more than four inches from the fence, all the way around the fence except where it was buried under the gate path. The customer had put in a vegetable garden covering the entire area where the pool had been for a total of about one third of the yard, and supposedly grandma was out working in this garden when she tripped on the phone wire. The wire had never been buried and the customer stated that the technician that placed the wire had assured him that the company would come back a week later to bury it and they never had. The wire was thoroughly embedded in tall grass and weeds all the way along the perimeter of the fence, indeed, the entire perimeter of the fence, inside and out, had never been trimmed, and the yard itself was poorly maintained, rarely mowed, and covered with scattered junk and kids toys. The customer's service record was annotated with information about placing the wire and that the customer had agreed to bury it.
The only way grandma, who was about 5'2" and weighed about 150, could have tripped on the phone wire is if she was doing some kind of strange walk around the fence and got her foot between the wire and the fence, and besides the physical impossibility of such an act, none of the wire had ever been disturbed since it was placed and there was a battered Big Wheel sitting near one edge of the garden that had been embedded in the grass but looked as though someone had tripped on it. The ambulance crew that picked grandma up told the company that she was approximately where the Big Wheel was and that it appeared that she had tripped on it, more than 10 feet from the fence.
The company paid anyway.
The customer was very disturbed when I sent one of my techs out to take out the buried wire and put up a new aerial drop, but they didn't win that argument.