You may have heard the story. An old woman went to a McAuto, ordered a coffee, put it on her lap and when she went to open the lid she spilled it. The burns allowed him to sue the giant and earn about 3 million dollars. Surprising, but the story was not exactly like that.
The events took place in February 1992, when Stella Liebeck, 79, attends a McAuto in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with her grandson. The woman orders a coffee and her grandson, who drives the car, parks it in the parking lot so Stella could add sugar and cream with the car stopped.
However, the old woman, who carried the coffee between her legs, had an unfortunate accident. As he removed the lid, the hot liquid spilled on his lap. The result was terrible. The coffee, estimated later at a temperature between 82 and 87 degrees, slid down his legs and groin. To add insult to injury, his cotton pants absorbed the extremely hot coffee and held it directly against his skin.
As a result, he suffered third degree burns over 6% of his body and other burns in an additional 10%. He spent eight days in the hospital to treat the wounds on his genitals, legs and buttocks.
During that time, he lost 20% of his body weight (which led him to weigh only 40 kilos) and had to endure a series of skin grafts next to a procedure where doctors removed the dead tissue from the wounds, which is known as debridement or surgical grooming (tremendously painful). The burns also left her with significant scars and partially disabled for two years.
The first time Liebeck contacted McDonald's to let them know what had happened, she asked to be covered by the full cost of her medical bills. Apparently he needed about $ 10,000. McDonald's thought from the outset that they really had nothing to do with the way the coffee was spilled, so they were not responsible. In any case, they offered him a payment of 800 dollars. Stella turned down her counteroffer and decided to hire a lawyer.
It was Reed Morgan (Texas), who quickly agreed to accept the Liebeck case. The truth is that, incredible as it may seem, it was not the first time that Morgan faced a lawsuit for the spill of a hot coffee from McDonald's. A few years earlier, she represented a Houston woman who also had third-degree burns from coffee. That case was settled out of court with the plaintiff receiving $ 27,000 in damages.
It turns out that if one observes the number of demands of that time, neither the case of the old woman nor the latter were unique. McDonald's had to deal with a large number of lawsuits against the temperature of its beverage. In fact, in the decade from 1980 to 1990, the giant received more than 600 customer claims that were burned with coffee, and paid more than half a million dollars to solve them. An important detail: many of the injuries reported in these cases were strikingly similar to those of Liebeck.
Morgan offered to settle the case before he went on trial for $ 300,000, but McDonald's legal team flatly refused. Both parties also attended mediation before the trial, and the mediator recommended the company pay Liebeck a $ 225,000 settlement. Once again, McDonald's refused.
At this point it is easy to ask the reason that led the giant to close in band, when in the past had accepted other deals. Some speculate that he wanted to hit the table, settle the matter once and for all to avoid having to keep dealing with these frivolous demands on hot coffee.
However, choose a case in which a fragile woman, an elderly woman for the large public who had burned gravely, as a target, was perhaps not the smartest plan. Whatever the motive, the trial began soon after.
A giant "heartless"
The McDonald's legal team argued that, first, Liebeck did not do well holding the coffee between her thighs, and she should have taken off her pants immediately after pouring the coffee. They also stated that they would have to lower the coffee temperature to unpleasant levels to completely eliminate the risk of such spillage burns.
The team said that at 87 degrees (the temperature at which McDonald's served coffee) took about three seconds to produce third degree burns, and that lowering the temperature to 70 degrees would be much safer. , then needing about 20 seconds to cause similar burns.
Then came the testimony of Mr. Appleton, a quality control manager at McDonald's. When the man was questioned by Morgan, he revealed that he knew that coffee was being served at dangerous temperatures. To the question of "Do you know that, in fact, coffee is a danger by selling it at 87 degrees?", The man replied: "At that high temperature coffee is a danger"
Appleton also said that customers could not drink coffee safely the first few minutes after receiving it, they had to wait for it to cool down a bit. Morgan went on with the following question:
I'm curious, because I have shown here recordings of about 700 people who have been burned by McDonald's coffee in the past. Obviously, for you 700 burned people is not a high enough number to reduce the heat. Do you have in mind a number of how many people would have to be burned to make it a concern and you go on to insist that the specialists do something and sell it at a lower temperature?
"No, I do not have a number in mind," the QA manager replied. Appleton also stated that the company had no intention of changing its coffee temperature policies, despite what happened to Liebeck and others before it, stating that "there are more serious problems in restaurants."
The giant brought to the stand a witness, an engineer, who noted that the number of injuries was statistically insignificant when compared to the annual sales of billions of cups of coffee.
Right here we have one of the keys. Although unequivocally true in all respects, being indifferent (albeit apparently) to customer injuries, it was really the key, the reason why McDonald's lost this otherwise frivolous claim.
This was evident, especially after the interviews that were made to some of the members of the jury after the trial. One of them came to say that if at first he saw it as a "fool" trial where he "did not understand very well if everything was due to a spill of coffee," as the days passed everyone changed their minds.
This happened, not so much because of what happened to Liebeck or the circumstances of the specific case but, as one of the jurors noted, by the seemingly "insensitivity and disregard for the safety of the people McDonald's exhibited in the case" . Another jury noted that "there was a person behind each number, and I do not think the company was attaching enough importance to that."
Finally, the jury spent a short time deciding that McDonald's was responsible for Liebeck's injuries. Initially she was awarded $ 200,000 for her injuries, but was reduced to $ 160,000 after ruling that the woman endured 20% of the responsibility for the incident.
In addition, they awarded punitive damages or damages used in order to send a message to the responsible party for an additional $ 2.7 million. Jurors reached this figure after determining that McDonald's was selling about $ 1.35 million in coffee each day, and the amount should be equivalent to two days of coffee sales for the company.
In any case and contrary to legend, Liebeck did not approach that amount of money, at least as far as the public record is concerned. The judge reduced punitive damages to $ 480,000, bringing the suit to a total of $ 640,000.
This story, in addition to becoming a little legend where a poor old woman won the giant with a millionaire demand, was curious for another reason. For the first time and without being a precedent in the "giants vs. the people" trials, he served McDonald's to have public opinion on his side.
And yes, perhaps most important of all is that thanks to Mrs. Liebeck, both McDonald's and most of the big companies went on to add big warning labels on their hot drinks. The irony is that the labels warn that those hot drinks are very hot. [Wikipedia, Huffingtsonpost, ConsumerLaw]