The ambulance chasers lose at last

 

I was pleased to read that a manifestly unjust court verdict has finally been overturned by the Texas Supreme Court.

The Texas Supreme Court has ruled in favor of Werner Enterprises, reversing a $100 million jury verdict against the motor carrier upheld by an appellate court in a 2014 fatal crash in which a pickup truck lost control on a slick interstate, traveled across the highway median and collided with a Werner tractor traveling on the opposite stretch of road.

. . .

“This awful accident happened because an out-of-control vehicle suddenly skidded across a wide median and struck the defendant’s truck, before he had time to react, as he drove below the speed limit in his proper lane of traffic,” the court wrote. “That singular and robustly explanatory fact fully explains why the accident happened and who is responsible for the resulting injuries. Because no further explanation is reasonably necessary to substantially explain the origins of this accident or to assign responsibility for the plaintiffs’ injuries, the rule of ‘proximate causation’ does not permit a fact finder to search for other, subordinate actors in the causal chain and assign liability to them.”

The high court said that nothing the Werner driver, Shiraz Ali, did or didn’t do contributed to the pickup truck hitting ice, losing control, veering into the median and entering oncoming traffic on an interstate highway.

However Ali was driving, the presence of his 18-wheeler in its proper lane of traffic on the other side of Interstate 20 at the precise moment the pickup truck lost control is just the kind of “happenstance of place and time” that cannot reasonably be considered a substantial factor in causing injuries to the plaintiffs.

There's more at the link.

I've long been angered by the "sue-at-all-costs" approach by so-called "ambulance-chasers":  lawyers who'll hunt down anyone who might conceivably have any case of any kind against another after an accident, then sue on their behalf for often ridiculous sums in damages, hoping that the defendant will settle rather than go to the trouble and expense of an often long-drawn-out trial.  They're an entire sub-culture in the legal "industry".  During our recent travels, both my wife and I commented on the huge number of billboards in economically depressed areas through which we traveled, advertising the services of lawyers to sue anybody whom they could persuade you had "wronged" or "harmed" or "damaged" you.  It appeared to be the major economic activity in those areas, if one judged only by the billboards alongside the roads.

This case is a classic example.  The truck was doing everything legally, traveling in its lane at a lawful speed, and nowhere near traffic coming the other way:  yet the ambulance-chasers tried (and, at first, succeeded) to paint it, its driver and its owner as guilty parties, responsible for the accident and subsequent injuries and expenses.  That they succeeded in a lower court is a black mark against that court, which really should have known better.  Fortunately, in this case, a higher court was able to put a stop to that nonsense:  but how many times does that happen?  How many times can the defendant not afford to take the case to an appeal, and is therefore forced to bear the costs of a settlement?

Shakespeare's prescription for lawyers might have been in jest, but it sometimes seems more than appropriate in the light of how they conduct themselves . . .

Peter