“Pants” lawsuit over

Here is the background: a customer has a suit dry-cleaned, he returns to find that the pants did not match the jacket, so he protested and the business owners tried to find the right pants but it turned out that they were lost. So the customer, who also happens to a judge and an attorney, decides to file a lawsuit against this small business because they had a sign in their window that said “Satisfaction Guaranteed”. This sounds reasonable if he was suing for the cost of the suit and if the business owner refused to refund that cost. But, of course, that isn’t the case. No, this subhuman attorney decides that he wants to sue this business for $54 million! And lawyers often wonder why people hate them so much!

The basis for this number is some classic attorney number-manipulation, adding up years of fraud and faulty advertising and all the customers that were supposedly ripped off by these people, blah blah blah. And the lawyer felt that HE should have been compensated the full amount. Well, the presiding judge ruled in favor of the dry cleaner. Case closed, well, except for the thousands of dollars that this couple had to spend to defend the suit. Unbelievable.

So, here’s what I think should happen. First, ALL court costs should be charged to the plaintiff….ALL. That way he refunds the costs of this frivolous suit to the defendants, and repays the taxpayers for the time and money devoted to this waste of time. Second, he should be fined 10% of his claim against the defendant…$5.4 million…to be put into a trust to support small businesses that suffer these kinds of frivolous attacks so that we don’t lose small businesses to moron attorneys like this.

I think this is fair, and it should apply to ANY civil law suit heard in this country. It sends a message to lawyers, if you sue someone you’d better be sure you have a legitimate gripe and you’d better ask for a fair amount, otherwise it could come back to bite you. It would protect small businesses and limit unreasonable, unnecessary and costly lawsuits, and it would punch the plaintiffs attorneys in the pocketbook…which can never be a bad thing.