The Ethics of Litigation

Last week I ran across one of those news stories that makes you wonder if somebody out there is just making this stuff up: a guy left his cell phone in a McDonalds, and is now suing the employees of the restaurant, the franchise owner, and the parent corporation because the naked pictures of his wife that were stored on the phone’s internal memory have been stolen and posted on the Internet. You can read the story here on MSNBC if you want to verify that I am not, in fact, making any of this up…

The lawsuit alleges that the reason the guy should be able to recover damages from McDonalds is that the employees at the restaurant promised they would secure the phone until he could return and collect it, and therefore one of them must have stolen the files and posted them online. The company won’t comment on pending litigation (and the employees would be insane to open their mouths about this), so there is no confirmation of that; we’re not clear on how long the phone was sitting around the dining area before anyone found it, how many other people might have had access to it, or even if any employee ever made any such promise. For all we know, the owner uploaded those pictures himself as a prelude to a lucrative lawsuit against a huge deep-pockets corporation…

But let’s leave the legal insanity of the case out of it for a moment; let’s not even comment on the mind-numbing stupidity of not only carrying around picture files of your spouse naked but then also leaving the device containing those files unattended in a public place. The business-related question here is, if you were the franchise owner (or senior management for McDonalds) what would you do about this issue, and how would you try to keep it from happening again? Because if this case recovers even the price of a Big Mac, you can better your last dime that dozens (or thousands) of other scam artists will try the same trick…

Of course, this is why so many businesses have signs posted that say “We are not responsible for any articles lost, stolen, sold on eBay or posted onto the Internet because you’re too stupid to know better,” and we can safely assume that if those actually help, every McDonalds that doesn’t already have one will be sporting one very soon now. In theory, you could also use closed-circuit TV cameras to record what goes on in the store, and in fact a lot of retail and food service companies do, but this won’t tell you if somebody left their phone behind as a scam or just forgot about it. It won’t even tell you whether one of your employees copied, saved or emailed the pictures unless you monitor the cameras every moment of the day – which we’ve established you can’t if you want to also run a business…

From an ethics standpoint, the question is really this: Do you, as the owner of a business (franchise) have any responsibility to prevent your customers from being damaged, humiliated or otherwise injured as the result of their own carelessness and lack of common sense? And if you do, how much responsibility for your customers’ welfare can you reasonably be expected to take on when all you did for those customers was sell them a cheap food item? Are you also responsible for ill-advised business decisions, stupid career choices, disastrous marriage proposals, or other lapses in judgment (or sanity) made while on your premises? And by the same token, should every customer in every public place have to live as if everyone else in the room was waiting for the chance to do them harm the moment their back is turned? What expectation of safety in the event of unwise behavior does the public have, and who has to take that responsibility?

It’s worth thinking about…