Litigation

The Public Relations War Personal Injury Lawyers Must Fight

The Stella Awards are making the rounds on the Internet once again. It seems that the Stella Awards, honors given out to the most unbelievable lawsuits of the year, may highlight cases that are just that: unbelievable. The year's top prize continues to go to the same case, a woman who won almost two million dollars in a lawsuit against the maker of her RV which crashed while it was on cruise control. The catch in this case is that the owner decided to go to the back and fix herself a sandwich while the Winnebago on cruise control fended for itself. The story of this unbelievable case spread quickly over the internet years ago and was picked up not only by mass chain e-mailers but by respectable news outfits such as CNN and New York Daily News as well. Many people were understandably outraged at the state of the current legal system.

The only problem  is that this case of the cruise control to get the sandwich never actually happened, entertaining through it may be.  A little fact finding by one reporter revealed that Winnebago, the manufacturer who reportedly paid the almost two million dollar settlement and changed its owner's manual as a result, was never involved in any such case. It seems that reporters and readers were so mesmerized by such a crazy story that they didn't take the time to do a little digging and find out if the story was actually true.

There are also those cases which at first seem completely outlandish but on a closer look prove to have some real merit. The case of Stella Liebeck, the woman who was awarded almost three million dollars for a burn resulting from McDonald's coffee, is one such case. Taken at face value, it seems to be a ridiculous story. But it turns out that McDonald's coffee far exceeded the industry temperature norm and the company had already received hundreds of complaints without enacting any changes. These stories teach us that we as personal injury attorneys need to do a better job of educating the public. Consumers of media do not look for subtly for information. We all cannot know everything about everything so we bite on the simple story to capsulize what is often a far more complex story. For lawyers, the latest crazy pants lawsuit in the summary of our civil justice system. But it is not. We need to do more to get our own story out there, individually in our communities and through our national and local TLAs.

Full post as published by Trial Lawyer Resource Center on November 27, 2007 (boomark / email).