Apparently you can sue for just about anything
 

A Texas woman is suing Continental Airlines and three other carriers over mental trauma she says was caused by a turbulent flight, the Houston Chronicle reported.

Colleen O'Neal alleges that the October 2009 flight from College Station, Texas, to Houston -- a usually short flight that ended up taking more than two hours -- encountered extreme turbulence that caused her to fear for her life.

O'Neal experienced post-traumatic stress disorder and now fears flying, which has had a detrimental impact on her career, according to the suit filed Tuesday in Harris County district court.

Also named in the suit are regional carrier Pinnacle Airlines, which operated the flight; Pinnacle's owner, Colgan Air; and United Airlines, which recently merged with Continental.

Spokespeople for United and Pinnacle declined to comment.

i doubt the court finds frivolous litigation amusing.

That's why you need tort reform.

She probably called this douchnozzle.

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I have a similar, deathly fear of turbulence. But the thought of filing a lawsuit because of it never entered my mind. I hope she ends up on the no-fly list. Then everyone wins.

unfortunately u can't sue the FBI for totaling your F50

I expect it was Jim Adler

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/ppn0yVocbdE" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

<embed flashVars="" src="http://www.metacafe.com/fplayer/5415520/jim_adler_houston_texas_personal_injury_lawyer_lau nches_new_mob.swf" width="440" height="248" wmode="transparent" allowFullScreen="true" allowScriptAccess="always" name="Metacafe_5415520" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"></embed><div style="font-size:12px;"><a href="http://www.metacafe.com/watch/5415520/jim_adler_houston_texas_personal_injury_lawyer_lau nches_new_mob/">Jim Adler, Houston Texas Personal Injury Lawyer Launches New Mob</a> - <a href="http://www.metacafe.com/">The funniest videos clips are here</a></div>

She probably should have hired this guy

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The best part is the Spanish Version!

I REALLY hate the way insurance is pronounced here in TX.

I have no idea what a surance is much less how one can be in it.

They ought to put a bounty on those ****ing lawyers! POS a-holes!

Only in America.

Well, perhaps not.

But still.. :D

In Canada if you lose you have to pay all court costs, including the defendants legal fees, missed work time, etc.
Since most lawyers work on only getting paid if they win and are also liable if the lose, no lawyer here will file a frivolous lawsuit.

Unfortunately, in many states here, the lawyers have niche industries to extract money from businesses.

Reported on the news this morning. A Restaurant owner installed a mirror in the bathroom 2 inches too high. This meant that a handicapped person could not use it. A lawyer found a person to go to the place and create violation. He went back 27 times, so that it is a higher level of violation. To my understanding, until the lawsuit was filed, no one had informed the business owner of the problem.

The cost SO FAR to defend against the suit is more money than the business owner made in profit last year.

Also reported another lawyer went around Bakersfield, CA with a handicapped person, looking for violations. He sent letter of intent to sue to 200 businesses. They could settle out of court for $10,000. 90-95% of them just paid the $10K.

Again, a law intended to help people is used to extract money from productive in society and give it to the unproductive.

I like that rule. I hope this chick can never fly again.

I was sued for assault 20 years ago. Said I hit him with an envelope, yup, an envelope.

Judge heard his side, he had no med bills, never saw doc, judge dismissed before I even had to start defense. Still cost me 15k in legal fees back then. Today it would probably be 50k+.

Judge even said if we countered with frivolous lawsuit, we'd win... but it wasn't worth the expense & aggravation.

Being able to sue for anything and being able to win are two different things. That said, I agree that there are a lot of ridiculous lawsuits in the news.

Class actions suits bug me.

A couple of years ago I owned Tyco stock. It went down. I sold it eventually and lost about $6000. Recently, I got notice of a class action suit against various members of management. This week the settlement paperwork arrived. I'll be awarded an amount equal to less than 1% of my loss, or <$60. The two stockholders who initiated the suit will get $2500 each. The lawyers will get $1,050,000.00.

Class action suits exist solely for the lawyers, not the plaintiffs.

You can sue for anything, but recovering is something else. Tort reform is a good idea, but it needs to be done so that it eliminates the frivolous suits without barring claims that really should be made, especially by people who can't afford to pay significant fees to gain access to the judicial system. Think it over. I have a lot. It's harder to devise a system that fairly excludes frivolous cases without barring good cases than it seems like. Trying to devise a more fair system is certainly a conversation worth having. I like the idea of fee shifting and making the attorneys share equally with their client.

Final thought: these claims are being brought by individual people - not lawyers. They're just hiring lawyers to represent them. Be mad at mankind for being so dense that some members of the human race think that suing over turbulance or the positioning of mirrors is a good idea. People that thick would sue whether they could hire a lawyer or not.

Ironically, the people that pronounce insurance as IN-surance, are the least likely to have insurance

Here is my favorite lawsuit.

Alton attorney accidentally sues himself
3/11/2005 9:57 AM By Steve Korris

Alton attorney accidentally sues himself | Madison/St. Clair Record

Yesterday I had Taco Bell for lunch.
Today I took a crap and stopped up the toilet.
Tomorrow I'm suing Taco Bell.

By the logic on this board, they would blame the lawyer for your decision to sue Taco Bell.

I'm preparing a lawsuit against several members here for repeatedly starting frivolous threads.

If a lawyer took that case, heck yes I'd blame him/her. Lawyers that take crappy cases are at least partially to blame. Without lawyers, crappy cases would either never get filed or would not last too long.

A lawyer will wind-up in a welfare line in a hurry taking cases that have no merit. I know that it's a fantasy here, (and elsewhere), that any scrub w/ a law degree can just sue anyone for anything and then sit back and count the $$. Total BS but it plays well at the rural diner or wherever people here get their info...

Oh, I don't know. My insurance co. went wobbly and paid off the lady who claims I hit her in a crosswalk, even after her lawyer dropped her case. Seems to me, the lawyer could have gotten 1/3 of her settlement by having his paralegal send off a single letter. Insurance companies who are quick to settle are just as much to blame.

So what are you saying? That lawyers don't file frivolous cases?

Cases settle for one reason only - the defendant makes a business decsion that it's cheaper to settle than to see the whole process to the end. Might be that they're gonna get killed by a jury award, but it's often just a matter of being cheaper to write a check and be done with it than to make another lawyer rich by fighting it.

What if they lose? My point is that there are frivolous cases and that the lawyers that file them are part of the problem. I am not saying all cases are frivolous or that lawyers are solely to blame.

No. Lawyers file frivolous cases all the time. Most are tossed-out post-haste. I am involved in a non-frivolous lawsuit right now and believe me, defendants have rights that you could not dream about if you do not know the system. Like completely ignoring service, failing to appear at any hearing, having a default judgement entered against them and then having it set-aside so that the whole thing can start all over again. All of what I describe above does not require paying any lawyer one cent with the exception of getting the default set aside.

Facts are kryptonite to a lot of people here. They treat them like the clap. It's so much easier to just get your (mis)education on the internet or (?)...

If a suit is decided to be frivolous by a judge, (happens all the time), the plaintif in many cases can be liable for ALL costs incurred by the defendant. Suck on that one for a while before filing any BS lawsuits.

Do guns kill people or do people kill people with guns? Lawyers don't create the claim (except in class action cases where they really do). People make the claims. Lawyers represent them. You can disagree with what lawyers do, but their job is to represent people.

As in Rick's case, people bring their cases with or without lawyers. And if I recall correctly from Rick's "I hit a pedestrian" thread, he did hit a pregnant woman in a cross walk who was fortunatly uninjured. Whatever the insurance company gave her to close out her claim was cheap insurance against a catastrophic claim some day in the future when she decided something abut the accident caused little Charlie's ADD.

I agree that insurance companies and corporations should defend claims more vigorously, but there' often larger issues that they're worried about where settlement makes sense to them but not to someone looking at it from the outside. The cost to defend claims is always a consideration. It's one reason I like the fee shifting proposal discussed above following the Canadian model. The problem there is deciding who won the case. If you sue for a million dollars and get $500,000, are you a winner or loser? If you demand a million but are willing to settle for $500,000 but the other side won't pay a penny and you end up with $400,000, who's the winner? Whatever way you look at it, tort reform is a serious issue but doing it right is complicated.

If Jane Doe comes to you with a "claim" that you recognize as frivolous, will you represent her? Don't lawyers have some kind of ethical obligation not to pursue frivolous claims? "Frivolous" is the key word here - usual definition.

"Frivolous" is a legal term of art. It means something different to the people on this board than it means to the courts. That's part of the problem with the debate. It's not about whether frivolous suits should be allowed, it's how to define frivolous.

Of course a lawyer has an obligation not to take on a frivolous case and he has a duty to withdraw from representation as soon as he realizes that he has a case that is no longer supported by the law or facts. No lawyer deliberately takes a frivolous suit, except for the real crazies. There are crazy lawyers out there just like their are crazy anything else. They need to be eliminated. I agree that it's too hard to do but that's a different issue.

Any lawyer who files a frivolous suit is sanctioned fees and costs and the lawyer is responsible to pay them. The problem is that the standard for frivolous is very high (or low) in the US. So when you're complaining about lawyers or people bringing frivolous suits, you're really arguing about what the standard for frivolous should be, not what it is.

While I agree that people ask the lawyer to represent them, that does not mean the lawyer has no responsibility in bringing the suit. The lawyer is supposed to separate the wheat from the chaff. Too many are just out for a buck and will throw anything against the wall and see if it sticks.

An analogy from my profession is the Jackson case. Jackson wanted the propofol, he would have fired Dr Murray had he refused to give it and would have found someone else. Despite this, Murray had an obligation to say no to Jackson and now he is facing manslaughter charges.

I wonder if frivolous suits would drop if lawyers were held to the same standard.

The way the system is, it would cost more to bring on a frivolous lawsuit than you can recover. Long story, been there, Judge actually told me if I came back with a frivolous suit I would win, in front of the plaintiff. When you do the math, it just isn't worth the money and time.

I know, We've easily spent a GT3 RS in legal fees (defense) in the last 10 years, without having a judgement against us. Just glad it's over.

I also don't buy the argument that if the defendant (or insurance co) settles then the suit was warranted. Once the suit is filed it just is a game of chicken between the lawyers. Lawsuits are more about who blinks first and is willing to spend the $$$ than who is right or wrong.

Insurance cos will often just settle for a small amount vs spend more $$$ to fight the case, frivolous or not.

15 y/o I sold my last house to a newly minted lawyer. In the disclosure I identified a dozen deficiencies in the house like "sliding door doesn't lock, use stick" and a bunch of other stuff. The home inspector identified the exact same stuff. He sued me for "sliding door doesn't look, use stick" and all the other stuff I identified. Including stuff I gave him money back for in escrow. I said I'd never settle, $35,000 worth of legal bills later, I settled for $5,000 to make him go away. I was looking at $100K in lawyer bills and another $100K in "expert witness" fees to pay during depositions to his buddies. I went to a judge for a summary judgement and the judge told us those were matters of "fact" for the jury to decide, not matters of "law" that he could rule on, like did the plaintiff miss a legal filing date. I will never sell a house to a lawyer again. Oh, and we had lived in the HOA for 10 years, the POS threatened to sue us because we stuffed the mailboxes of the 450 houses in the HOA with a copy of the legal summons on what he was suing us for with a statement about whether they really wanted his kids over at their house to swim in their pools?

actually, your plumber should sue Taco Smell

My favorite lawsuit is a guy who tried to sue "Satan and His Staff."

The Judge (or his clerks) had a lot of fun with it and the opinion is published. Any guesses on the outcome and why?