I feel you on that one. It just show's can't fix stupid but you can get paid for being that stupid or try to get paid at least.

It's kinda like what happened with my insurance many years ago, My 1st wife had an accident where she slid through an intersection and hit another car in the rear wheel. She shares all the insurance information with her and she comes home. There was also a UPS driver who witnessed the accident and we had his information for the reports. A couple days later I get a phone call and a claims adjuster wants to come and check the car and is talking about totaling our car based on the claim from the the other driver. She had tried going directly to our insurance company. I show the adjuster the car and she can not believe we got the car fixed so fast and I told her it's not been repaired, showed all the bolts and such and proved there was no repairs so she asked where did the cars strike so I show her the single scratch on the under side of the front bumper so she assures me that I do not have to worry about this. 2 weeks later I get a letter in the mail and this woman has retained a lawyer and wants to take us to court because my wife totaled her car in the accident. Called the claims adjuster and a half hour later she picks it up. About a week later I hear back from the adjuster, seems the woman's boyfriend had been driving her car and had totaled her car but since she had been hit by a woman driving Mercury Marquis that woman could afford to buy her a new car.

Some peoples kids.

 

Nuisance settlements are actually called "nuisance settlements" for that reason. However, if you sue and lose, you can be counter sued for expenses by the other party and it does happen.

What I do think this case represents a a rationale to get CAT Scale weights "ready to run" and keep them in the console. You just never know!

 

That's very true and I'll admit my example was intended to be funny but still get the point across. Personal injury and product liability cases are an entirely different animal though. I've been close to quite a few "big money" cases where the defense lawyers rack up billable hours for years and then settle no matter how obvious the facts are. In my experience they'd rather settle than go to trial because a) they're working for the defendant's insurance company so they get paid no matter what and b) it looks better and sounds better to say "I got you the best deal I could" than "I'm sorry, but you lost".

The cost of liability insurance for selling any product or service in the USA is astronomically expensive and carries unbelievably high deductibles because we are a sue happy society. Where else on the planet would the instructions for an iron say "do not iron clothing while you are wearing it"? The comedian Lewis Black had it right when he said "A woman recently sued McDonald's because she claimed the Bic Macs she ate made her fat. So she was ill-informed, overweight and litigious, now that's an American trifecta!

I apologize if it seems like I'm picking a fight with you because I'm really not. Hopefully you never need to buy liability insurance! I do get wound up on this topic though because it adds unnecessary cost to almost everything we buy and it makes it expensive to manufacture anything here. Okay, I'm back down off my soap box!

 

Hey, I am not offended at all. I welcome everyone's thoughts. Actually I am intimately aware of liability insurance as I have been self-employed almost my entire life retiring when I hit 70. In a prior career, I was named in lawsuits for several million dollars; one time I was not in the state and the second time not even in the country. I also have experience testifying as an expert in a number of cases although as you have stated most of the cases in which I was subpoenaed paid me well, but I never was called to testify. They simply settled before I was called. I came away with the thought that our judical system is simply a way to organize our society and only on occasion is related to justice. Steve