$67M pants: prob with litigation in America?

T

theinvisibleheart

New member
Plaintiff is Mr. Pearson (actually, a civil law judge).

He sued Custom Cleaners for $67M (later reduced to $54M) over a $10.50 alteration job for his pants. Last time I heard of it, the defendant (1990s Korean emigrant) was still trying to raise tens of thousands of dollars to pay for the legal cost.

Apparently, the emotional distress over $10.50 alteration job was such that Judge Pearson (plaintiff) actually cried in court.

I wonder how much further could the suit have gone with a different judge?

I wonder if Custom Cleaners could go bankrupt if they couldn't come up with the money to pay for legal bills for defending themselves in court?

Why didn't Judge Pearson decide to patronize different cleaners? After all, most people, if they were unhappy with the service that they received, blab about it and go somewhere else. This is how poorly functioning business lose business and good ones gain more.

--John

WSJ article:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118278122093747093.html?mod=djempersonal&apl=y

Excerpt:

WSJ said:
Judge Judith Bartnoff of the D.C. Superior Court ruled Mr. Pearson wasn't entitled to relief and ordered him to pay the defendants' costs. Christopher Manning, the lawyer for Soo and Jin Nam Chung and their son, owners of the shop, said he will request that the judge order Mr. Pearson to pay the Chungs' legal bills.

Mr. Pearson, who represents himself, has 30 days to appeal. He couldn't be reached to comment.

Mr. Pearson said that Custom Cleaners misled him and other customers by displaying a "Satisfaction Guaranteed" sign. He had demanded the Chungs pay him $1,150 to compensate him for the lost pants, according to court testimony. After the Chungs didn't respond, Mr. Pearson sued them. The Chungs had recently offered Mr. Pearson as much as $12,000 to settle the case, according to Mr. Manning.

Applying a formula prescribed by the city's consumer-protection laws, Mr. Pearson asked for $67 million in damages, a number he later reduced to $54 million.

The alteration work on Mr. Pearson's Hickey Freeman suit pants -- he needed the waist let out -- cost $10.50.
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According to an article by Marc Fisher in Washington Post,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/12/AR2007061201667.html

Marc Fisher/Washington Post said:
Before trial began yesterday in the case of the D.C. judge who sued his neighborhood dry cleaners after they lost his pants, the most extraordinary fact was Roy Pearson's demand for $65 million in damages.

That was before Pearson, an administrative law judge, broke down while testifying about the emotional pain of having the cleaners give him the wrong pants.
Click to expand...
 
John, this case is going to be an azwesome subject for discussion here once its finsihed.

Until then, trying to make sense of it in connection with the goals of our legal system is foolish, IMHO

WildialreadyknowwhatsgoingtohappenAlaska
 
John, this case is going to be an azwesome subject for discussion here once its finsihed.

Until then, trying to make sense of it in connection with the goals of our legal system is foolish, IMHO

WildialreadyknowwhatsgoingtohappenAlaska
Click to expand...

The defendants won the case and the plaintiff has to pay the defendants court fees. Its still not known if the plaintiff has to pay the defendants attorney's fees.
 
lockdance.gif


10....9.....8......7........
 
no lock. Not yet. Tort reform and frivolous lawsuits are so very important in regards to rights and stuff. The fact that my gun manuals are about 2/3 warning labels proves it. In human factors engineering, you learn about things like signal-to-noise ratios. Too many red lights, and you'll just stop caring. The Apple people even made a funny commercial about it, talking about all those warnings and pop-ups you get in Vista.

by the way, I'm not an Apple fan. I'm open source. but that's OT.

What bothers me, (since I'm local to this case and we get to hear a lot of it), how does a lowly judge make enough money to afford a closetful of high-priced suits?
 
Frivolous law suits

This action took a full TWO years to conclude. This is a prime example of how frivolous law suits can kill the firearmes industry the legal fees even though the dry cleaners won, will bankrupt mom and pop
 
This lawsuit is an abomination and nothing more than an attempt at legalized extortion dressed in a three-piece suit.
 
Common sense break here.

Why wasn't the case dismissed at the outset? Why didn't the judge instruct the bailiff to bitch slap the plaintiff when the case was filed? The case should have never wasted anyone's time much less the scarce resources of the courts.

This is the kind of nonsense that causes the judicial system to lose credibility with Joe and Martha Sixpack. :mad:
 
Why wasn't the case dismissed at the outset? Why didn't the judge instruct the bailiff to bitch slap the plaintiff when the case was filed? The case should have never wasted anyone's time much less the scarce resources of the courts.

This is the kind of nonsense that causes the judicial system to lose credibility with Joe and Martha Sixpack
Click to expand...

Maybe the judge wanted his 15 minutes of fame?

I agree the case should have been reviewed and the the guy should have been told that he might want to talk to the defendant him about taking the replacment cost of the suit and to get the heck out of his court.
 
Actually I have had this conversation with a roomful of jurists (judges)... I posed to them, "What happened to the rule of the reasonable man?"
Under that doctrine <in my youth> a judge could dismiss any suit he felt was unreasonable...
The concensus was that the Supremes had shot that down by changing the definition of 'reasonable' so frequently that a lower court judge could not tell which way the wind was blowing any more - and lower court judges HATE being reversed... So, being human they simply took the position that, "We'll let the jury decide that."... That way it is the jury being reversed not the jurist...
One of the judges was a real wag... His reply was, "Who's reasonable man? Yours or that whacko over there?" <motioning to a fellow judge>

denny
 
That's GREAT!
I'm so happy to hear that Pearson has lost.
What a real piece of garbage this guy must be!:mad:
He all but ruined this hard working family and for what?
from what I heard, Pearson was in all kinds of debt and personal problems so this was a disgustingly transparent attempt to extort money from these people.
What a bum!
 
"Why wasn't the case dismissed at the outset?"

"I agree it should have been reviewed"

What makes you think the original judge didn't review it. In fact, he DID review it and couldn't dismiss it.

Why?

Because as the first judge said, the suit complied with all requirements of the law as written.

It couldn't be dismissed.

The grounds for the lawsuit, and the relief requested in the suit, are really two separate issues.

Just because the requested relief is excessive doesn't mean that the whole lawsuit is bad.
 
The only thing that made this case newsworthy is how extraordinary it was. The media isn't going to cover what is actually important, because it's boring. Drawing conclusions about any field of endeavor based on rare and aberrant examples is completely disingenuous.

I suspect in the long run it will be the judge who loses more than just this case. But why not reserve judgment until the entire process is complete. However, don't expect the mainstream media to report it. This is precisely why many still refer to the McDonald's coffee case as an example of a broken legal system. Those willing to take just a few minutes to learn the true facts would realize that there was nothing frivolous about it.

The media reports on that which will cause an emotional response in its viewers - it's entertainment. Just think of how many examples of erroneous facts you have noticed when the subject is firearms. Does anyone think this is the only subject that the media misrepresents?

One of the detriments of an open court system is that there will be those who choose to use the system in an abusive manner. However, the benefits of open access to the courts are immense and have been instrumental in maintaining the freedoms we continue to enjoy and clearly outweighs the perceived inequities. Additionally, the abuse of the legal system does have eventual negative consequences for the cretins who pursue such actions.
 
unanswered question I have is

how does one get so emotional as to cry over a pants? Are judges and lawyers more in touch with their feelings than rest of us? I've never heard of anybody crying over a pants before this.


Factors of Capitalism

BTW, capitalism doesn't work well when transaction cost is high (taxes, regulation, and product litigation all raise the transaction cost).

For capitalism to work, following factors are necessary: rule of law, relative lack of bribery, strong property rights, low transaction cost, stable currency, market transparency, and communication infrastructure so as to enable trade b/w different geographical location.

If there is relative lack of trust, there needs to be highly formalized enforceable contract and all sorts of safeguard. This also raises transaction cost. This is why there need to be some respect for ethical behavior (honesty) in the culture.

In highly transparent market such as institutional swap market, if the participant ever defaults, the punishment is that nobody ever deals with that institution again. This is far more efficient than the litigation model that is so prevalent today.


Keeping Corporations in check

What keeps corporation and companies ultimately in check is reputation. Loss of reputation results in loss of future sales revenue. A slight hint of dishonesty or litigation quite often results in lost future sales and lower stock price. Loss of revenue from future sales actually dwarfs government fines. A hint of SEC investigation frequently results in lower share prices.

Before accounting fraud was exposed at Enron, short sellers were already driving down the stock prices of Enron.

Lott in the book Freedomnomics covers this in a very readable manner.


Asbestos industry

Suppose there was no class action suit against asbestos companies and current product liability law didn't exist. Once it became known that asbestos was carcinogenic, asbestos companies would have shifted their resources to making other products because consumers would have no longer bought carcinogenic product. This would have being a much better solution than for asbestos companies to have being driven to bankruptcy by litigation and resultant layoff for workers in that industry.

Most probably, new companies and industry would have being created to detect and replace products made of asbestos (when it was in quantity adequate to cause harm). This new industry would have sprung in response to consumer demand to replace asbestos, not demand placed by litigation.

If this happened, then each user of asbestos product could decide for him/herself if it needs to be replaced or not.


Pinto(unsafe car)

I don't believe product safety should be regulated by government or enforced through litigation.

There is a market for unsafe cars(many poorly maintained and beaten up cars are driven by lower income groups) and safe cars(Volvo). When minimum product safety is mandated, the choice is made for ALL the consumers. This raises the price of all the products.

This goes for guns and other products as well.

Shooter A might want or can afford only a very basic gun for self-defense, something like a modern polymer equivalent of a Tokarev, w/o any safety and which is dangerous to carry with a loaded chamber but it cost only $50.

Shooter B want and can afford an HK USP which cost over $500.

If someone wants and can afford to pay extra for a bullseye powder with a special warning not to ingest it, so much power for him. If someone wants to pay extra for a cleaning solution with a warning not to put it in one's eyes or ingest it, good for him so long as he/she is willing to pay for it.

Ultimately, product safety is a feature and like any feature, best arbiter of what is valuable is best decided by market, not by litigation attorneys and judges.


--John
 
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Judge Pearson sued for $67M based on city's consumer-protection laws

According to rest of WSJ article, Judge Pearson arrived at $67M in damages based on city's consumer-protection laws (later reduced to $54M). Judge Pearson rejected $12K out-of-court settlement.
 
Judge Pearson is why people say stuff like "Waddya call 10,000 lawyers at the bottom of the ocean?......A good start!"

A good judge would have called Pearson into chambers, yelled at him so loud it was heard in the courtroom, and dismissed the case. I don't have a law degree and I figured that out so I don't think it's unreasonable to expect lawyers and judges to know this stuff too.

If some lawyer can turn a $10.50 alteration on a pair of pants worth (at most) $1,000 into $54 million in damages I motion that we simply go back to lawless anarchy.
 
The system worked. I'd prefer that a judge not have the authority to dismiss a case. You could get JUDGE PEARSON on your case!

Pearson obviously has a substantial mental illness and I hope he gets the treatment he needs. He should be taken off the bench immediately.

What concerns me is that, although the system worked, if the dry cleaner owners get their legal fees awarded to them - I'd bet Pearson won't pay. After dragging him through the court for payment, they'll find that he's spent every last dime and can't pay them back.

I'm not sure (short of having a provision for escrow) you could do about this.
 
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