Missing the Point – Yet Again

Two stories hit one of the news aggregation cites I frequent today in the “nutty lawsuits” category, which I think demonstrate why you should not take legal advice from people without law degrees – including bloggers without law degrees. I’m not going to comment on the validity of these cases (that would be the practicing law without a license I keep warning you about), but I think there are business lessons to be had in both of these instances, even if they’re not exactly the ones the authors or the people who tagged these stories as “humor” intended you to have…

First, we have the case from Alberta, Canada by way of the National Post website, about a woman who recently won a worker’s compensation case because her job caused a flare-up of an old repetitive motion injury. The job duty in question was scooping ice cream, which is an unfortunately thing to have problems with when you are employed by an ice cream shop to scoop ice cream for a living. Certainly, the people who aggregated this story thought it was an amusing case of someone trying to scam a living off of her employer without actually having to do any work. But anyone who has actually tried doing this for a living could have told them otherwise – and so could a lawyer…

Scooping a few helpings of ice cream for the family may be trivial, but having to scoop several hundred servings a day isn’t, especially when we’re talking commercial-grade ice cream, which is stored at a very low temperature to prevent spoilage. If you’ve every had to put a package of ice cream into a pot of hot water in order to get the scoop into the rock-hard surface you already know what I’m talking about; now imagine having to do this several hundred times in an 8-hour shift. Even a healthy person could easily injure herself that way, and keep in mind that she didn’t have a pot of hot water or any other way to soften the product before trying to scoop it. More to the point, perhaps, making someone who already has an old rotator cuff injury work such a shift is asinine. I’m not sure what somebody who can’t scoop would do for an ice cream shop, but there has to be some other duty you could assign such a worker, whether it’s running the register, heating up the fudge topping, or just sweeping up…

The other case comes to us from San Rafael, California, where two men are suing a restaurant because they claim they were injured and their clothing was damaged when two escargot they were eating “exploded” on them, spewing melted butter on their polo shirts and faces. The restaurant’s insurance company is refusing to pay them anything, on the grounds that having butter spill onto isn’t particularly harmful and the two diners have not produced any evidence of actually being injured or damaged in any way. Undeterred, the two butter-splashed customers are brining a case in small-claims court, where they are making a big show of representing themselves (attorneys are not allowed in small claims court in California even if they wanted one) and boasting about how they are going to “put the restaurant owner on the stand” (they can’t, and no small claims judge is going to listen to their explanations of why they should be allowed to in this case anyway). The owner is treating the whole thing as a frivolous lawsuit, and everyone in the community seems to feel that he’s right, but there’s no guarantee the court will see it that way – and even if it does, this will still be an annoying drain on his time…

You and I weren’t there when the snails exploded, so we don’t really know how the restaurant handled the incident. But if they can prove that they attempted to make things right at the time (paying for the dry-cleaning bill, offering a replacement dish) they probably can have the court case thrown out. My point here is that even if the case is ruled to be frivolous, it’s still a potentially costly waste of time and resources for the business owner, and has the potential to make the plaintiffs a laughing stock of the local community, particularly if their actions cost them their neighbors’ good opinions. It could also backfire on them, if (for example) they have businesses of their own which are suddenly struck by waves of frivolous lawsuits…

My point here being that these stories may sound humorous when you read about them in the news, but from a business standpoint, they’re not really very funny…