The Rest of the McDonald's Story

Americans who are so hopped up on tort reform love to talk about one case: 79-year-old Stella Liebeck who spilled McDonald's coffee on herself and got a $2.9 million jury award. Sounds crazy, right? In fact, it sounds so crazy that the awards given out every year for the most frivolous lawsuits are called the Stella Awards.

I'm amazed at how many people take this case at face value, and I sound like a broken record every time it comes up, but there's more to the story. Take two minutes to read the details and you'll agree that the jury wasn't out of control and Stella isn't a litigious golddigger.

For years, McDonald's sold cheap coffee that turned sludgy and undrinkable when it cooled. So the company decided to heat it up to between 180 and 190 degrees rather than the 135 to 140 degrees that most people serve coffee.

Along comes Liebeck who spills the coffee on herself (not while driving as people like to believe), suffers third degree burns to her legs and genitals and was hospitalized for over a week. She had to have multiple skin grafts.

Her initial case asked only for reimbursement of medical treatment, but McDonald's declined and went to trial. McDonald's own quality assurance manager testified that any food served at 140 degrees or above is dangerous and that McDonald's coffee was not fit for consumption because it would burn the mouth and throat.

The jury saw documentation showing more than 700 other claims by people also burned by the excessively hot coffee. They awarded $2.7 million in punitive damages (later knocked down to $480,000) not because Stella was burned but because so many other people were and McDonald's refused to change their policy. (Pretty much the reason we have punitive damages.) And it worked: after the verdict, McDonald's dropped the temperature of their coffee to a more reasonable 150 degrees.

The moral of this story? Juries aren't wild crazy business bashers out to sock it to anyone with money. But that's what big business wants you to believe so they can sell you on tort reform. Yes, there are bogus cases out there, but that's no reason to give away one of your basic rights under the law: the ability to sue when you've been wrong.