Liebeck vs. McDonald's (1994): Outcome

Source: Aric Press with Ginny Carroll and Steven Waldman. "Are Lawyers Burning America?" Newsweek (March 20, 1995: 32).

[Jury attitudes:]
    Pre-trial: In August 1994 the case went to trial before a jury filled with citizens annoyed at having to listen to a case about spilled coffee. "I was just insulted," recalls Roxanne Bell, 38, a preschool teacher. "The whole thing sounded ridiculous to me."
    Post-trial: "Each statistic is somebody badly burned," says juror Betty Farnham. "That really made me angry." She also wasn't impressed by the tiny CAUTION: CONTENTS HOT label on the McDonald's cup. To read it, Farnham said she needed her glasses. She had started the case thinking the suit was frivolous. By the end, Farnham pushed for a total award of $ 9.6 million.

After deliberating for about four hours, the jury found for Liebeck. Her compensatory damages -- out of pocket plus pain and suffering -- were set at $ 200,000. To be fair, the jurors knocked off 20 percent because she had contributed to the accident. Then they hit Mcdonald's with a stern warning: $ 2.7 million in punitive damages. "It was our way of saying, 'Hey, open your eyes. People are getting burned'," recalls juror Bell. A month later, trial Judge Robert H. Scott reduced the award to $ 640,000, calculating punitive damages at three times compensatory. He, too, wanted to deliver a message to McDonald's that it "was appropriate to punish and deter" its corporate coffee policy. Scott, another self-described conservative Republican, insists the case was "not a runaway. I was there." After further post-trial skirmishing, the two sides settled out of court. Part of their deal includes keeping secret the final amount.

There was an immediate uproar. Jay Leno told jokes; editorialists harrumphed; tort reformers rubbed their hands. They had an example they could cite repeatedly of the courts gone crazy, especially when they only had to give the headline and none of the details. The American Tort Reform Association bought radio ads in the Washington area using the Liebeck case as its key example of an "outrageous" lawsuit. The case was chosen because "it points out a lot of the problems with the system," says Sherman Joyce. ATRA's president. "It demonstrates that the system needs reform."

Liebeck became the poster lady for the bitter "tort reform" effort no in Congress. (A tort is a personal injury usually caused by negligence.) Last fall the Republican "Contract With America" pledged major changes in the civil-justice system aimed at curbing the number of lawsuits and the size of damage awards. Last week the House of Representatives did just that, passing three pieces of legislation that would cap some jury verdicts, deter some court actions and force some losing litigants to pay the legal fees of their opponents. Most important, Congress set national limits on awards for punitive and medical-malpractice damages, until now the province of state courts. "This represents the first significant regulation of lawsuits and lawyers from the perspective of nonlawyers," says Rep. Christopher Cox of California. "If there's a Robin Hood aspect, it is to take from the lawyers and give to the average working American."

Additional source: Andrea Gerling. "How jury decided how much the coffee spill was worth." St. Louis Post-Dispatch: September 4, 1994, 11D.
http://hhp.ufl.edu/trsm/Classes/4723_Carroll/mcdonalds%20coffee%20case.pdf