What a Lot of People Get Wrong About the Infamous 1994 McDonald’s Hot Coffee Lawsuit
As Conover put it, “This was an incredibly rare case where a working-class victim actually beat a huge team of corporate lawyers and made the world a better place.”
So how did the public’s view of this case get so warped? According to Conover, lawyers spent years running a disinformation campaign, which much of the media bought into, holding up the McDonald’s coffee lawsuit as an example of a supposed epidemic of frivolous lawsuits.
“The last several decades, large corporations afraid of being sued for making unsafe products created front groups like Citizens Against Lawsuit Abuse to turn public opinion against lawsuits,” University of Washington professor Michael McCann told Conover. But “the best social science evidence shows that the number of personal injury lawsuits in recent decades has declined, and the median payout is only $55,000.”
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