If I had a dollar for every time someone brought up the McDonald’s coffee case with me, I wouldn’t need to practice law. The 10,000-foot view goes like this: lady spills coffee on herself, sues McDonald’s, gets millions. For a lot of people, it’s the go-to example of everything wrong with America’s legal system: greedy people, sue-happy lawyers, and juries playing their part in the “lawsuit lottery.”
The case was so well known it made its way into the pop culture zeitgeist, parodied on shows like Seinfeld and used as fodder for late-night monologues.
I love a good lawyer joke as much as the next guy. The problem with the jokes about this case is that almost everything most people “know” about it is wrong, or at least based on an incomplete set of facts.
Full disclosure: I’m a plaintiff’s injury lawyer, and I see this case through the eyes of the lawyers who represented Ms. Liebeck. Honestly, I probably would have taken her case if she’d called me. But don’t trust me. Look at the facts, because I think they make my argument for me.
What actually happened
In February 1992, Stella Liebeck was 79 years old. She was a passenger in her grandson’s car, parked in a McDonald’s lot in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She wasn’t driving, and the car wasn’t moving. She put the coffee cup between her knees to take off the lid and add cream and sugar, and the coffee spilled all over her inner thighs and groin. The injury was almost immediate.
At the time, McDonald’s served its coffee at roughly 180 to 190 degrees, an extreme temperature. By comparison, coffee you make at home is probably somewhere between 135 and 140 degrees. Liquid that hot can cause third-degree burns in a matter of seconds.
And that’s exactly what happened. Within seconds of the spill, Ms. Liebeck suffered third-degree burns over about 6% of her body, including extremely sensitive areas like her thighs, groin, and buttocks. Lesser burns covered another 16%. Remember, she was 79. She spent eight days in the hospital, needed skin grafts, and went through roughly two years of treatment.
These weren’t “ouch, that’s hot” burns. They were the kind where surgeons take skin from other parts of your body, and the medical bills run into the thousands. (For more on how the law values that kind of harm, see my page on pain and suffering damages.)
She didn’t want millions. She wanted her bills paid.
Here’s the part that never makes the late-night monologue: Ms. Liebeck didn’t start by asking for millions of dollars. She asked McDonald’s to cover her medical expenses, which, in my view, is an extremely reasonable request.
McDonald’s response? They offered her $800.
EIGHT. HUNDRED. DOLLARS. That’s it. $800 for skin grafts. $800 for eight days in the hospital. $800 for two years of treatment.
Only after that offer did Ms. Liebeck hire a lawyer. Her lawyers filed suit, and McDonald’s had several opportunities to resolve the case well before trial. It turned down every one of them.
What the jury heard
When a defendant settles before trial, it can often keep damaging information out of the public record, negotiate confidentiality, and deny any wrongdoing. Not so in a courtroom. At trial, the jury heard evidence that was particularly damning for McDonald’s, both about how it treated Ms. Liebeck and about its business practices:
McDonald’s had received more than 700 reports of people burned by its coffee over the previous decade, including some burns as severe as Ms. Liebeck’s. The company did little to address them.
It knew the temperature was dangerous. A McDonald’s quality assurance manager testified that the company knew its coffee could cause serious burns at that temperature, and it had no plans to change it.
It made that choice on purpose. McDonald’s kept its coffee that hot to maintain flavor, and because customers often drank it later, on the road or at work.
In other words, the evidence showed this wasn’t a freak accident. It was a deliberate decision. The temperature of the coffee was a known risk that had already caused real harm to hundreds of people, and the company did little, if anything, to make its product safer because doing so would have hurt the bottom line. This is a classic “profits over people” case. (If that sounds familiar, I’ve written about how insurance companies use similar math.)
The verdict, and what happened to it
At the close of trial, the jury awarded Ms. Liebeck $200,000 in compensatory damages, then reduced it to $160,000 because it found her 20% at fault for spilling the coffee. That’s comparative fault working exactly the way it’s supposed to. (More on how comparative fault works, if you’re curious.)
The real headliner was the punitive damages award: $2.7 million. That number wasn’t pulled from thin air. It represented roughly two days of McDonald’s coffee sales. In other words, it was a verdict based on the evidence and specifically designed to address the harm. The point wasn’t to make Ms. Liebeck a millionaire. It was to get the attention of a company that had repeatedly put its customers’ safety at risk.
What’s more, Ms. Liebeck never saw anything close to the $2.86 million verdict. The judge cut the punitive award to $480,000, three times the compensatory damages, bringing the total to about $640,000. Then, as often happens, the parties reached a confidential settlement to avoid a lengthy appeal. The final number has never been made public, but it has consistently been reported as less than the $640,000 she was rightfully owed.
So despite what late-night hosts and tort reform advocates want you to believe, the “lady who got millions for spilling coffee” was actually a 79-year-old grandmother with skin grafts. She asked for her medical bills to be paid, got offered $800, and ended up with a reduced, confidential settlement after a judge trimmed the verdict.
The system worked. The jury heard the evidence, found her partly at fault, and punished a company for ignoring a known danger. Then the judge, the built-in check on excessive verdicts, stepped in and reduced the award.
So why does everyone think it was frivolous?
Because the story was useful. Trim this case down to its simplest form, “woman spills coffee on herself and gets millions,” and you can make people angry.
After the verdict, businesses and insurance companies that had long wanted to stack the deck against injured people used the story to fuel their push for so-called “tort reform”: laws that cap damages, limit punitive awards, and make it harder for injured people to get their day in court.
You can’t sell tort reform to the public without a villain, and they found one in Stella Liebeck. A greedy woman getting millions for spilling coffee was almost too perfect.
In many ways, it worked. More than thirty years later, this case is still cultural shorthand for “frivolous lawsuits.” Every year in Missouri, bills are introduced that would harm my clients and their ability to seek justice for their injuries, and Stella Liebeck is often part of the justification.
Why tort reform is silly
Here’s my problem with tort reform: it claims to solve a problem the system has already solved, and it creates new problems along the way, without any solutions for them.
Lawyers are the first barrier against frivolous cases. At my firm, and at most plaintiff’s firms I know, the firm funds the claim. We advance the costs of investigating and prosecuting the case, and we don’t make a penny until it’s resolved, whether by settlement or verdict. (Here’s how contingency fees work.)
I’m not going to waste my time, my money, or my client’s time on a case with no merit. There’s no incentive for me, my business, or my client to spend months or even years chasing compensation that isn’t there.
Juries already police bad cases. Juries are made up of people from the community. Individually, they vary in experience and intelligence, but collectively, they’re pretty damn smart. Juries may be the world’s greatest bullshit detectors. In Ms. Liebeck’s case, the jury believed she was partly to blame for her injuries, so it assigned her 20% of the fault. That wasn’t the exception. That’s the rule.
Every day, juries assess and apportion fault in injury cases. They aren’t the pushovers tort reformers make them out to be. They’re citizens who, more often than not, take their responsibility seriously and deliver verdicts based on the facts in front of them.
Judges already police big verdicts. Judges have legal tools to cut excessive awards and, in many courts, to increase inadequate ones. They’re called remittitur and additur, and they usually come up in post-trial motions, where either side can ask the court to adjust the verdict based on the evidence.
That’s exactly what happened in Ms. Liebeck’s case. The judge reduced the punitive award in line with the relevant case law. Blanket damage caps don’t add a safeguard. They replace the judgment of an experienced judge, looking at one specific case, with the legislature’s collective guess about the value of every case.
Caps hit the most seriously hurt people hardest. Damage caps don’t affect most cases. Many injury claims are routine car crashes and slip-and-falls that resolve for hundreds of thousands of dollars or less. The overwhelming majority of cases my office handles, and that most injury lawyers handle, resolve for well under a million dollars.
So damage caps really only affect the most catastrophically injured people: someone who’s paralyzed, someone maimed by a negligent surgery, or a grandparent whose burns require skin grafts. The only people caps reach are the ones who need their day in court the most.
Tort reform shifts the cost to taxpayers. When a cap lets the at-fault party off the hook, injured people are often left with nowhere to turn but government assistance.
Here’s how it’s supposed to work. A plaintiff presents the cost of a lifetime of care to a jury, and the jury can award damages that account for all of it. The plaintiff can then plan around the care they’ll reasonably need for the rest of their life. (There are plenty of options for how to do that, which I’ll cover in a later post.)
But when the at-fault party only has to pay up to a cap, the injured person has to make up the difference somewhere, and that somewhere is usually the government.
Let’s use an example. Say the plaintiff in our story is a 25-year-old man left quadriplegic by a negligent truck driver. The cost of his care over the rest of his life could easily run into the tens of millions of dollars: physical therapy, surgeries, home health care, accessible housing, and mobility equipment. That’s before you even get to the income he’ll likely never be able to earn.
An experienced lawyer can present evidence of those costs to a jury, and the jury can award them. The lawyer and client can then structure the recovery so his future care is essentially “prepaid.”
Now say the law caps total damages (what the trucking company can owe him) at $500,000.00. (I’m making up this cap for the sake of the hypothetical.) He’ll almost certainly have to turn to Social Security, Medicaid, or Medicare to cover the rest. Which means you, the reader, end up footing the bill for the trucking company’s negligence.
Tort reform advocates rarely mention this inescapable truth about their policies. They talk about saving businesses and consumers money, and they blame plaintiff’s lawyers like me. But they never tell the public about the knock-on effects of their proposals. And shifting the burden from the negligent party to taxpayers sounds a whole heck of a lot like corporate welfare disguised as “pro-business” policy.
Punitive damages are the point. Punitive damages are a special category. They aren’t meant to compensate the injured person. As the name suggests, they’re meant to punish conduct that goes well beyond ordinary carelessness. Every jurisdiction handles them differently. In Missouri, for example, you have to prove by clear and convincing evidence that the defendant’s conduct was bad enough to deserve punishment, like driving drunk.
The evidence in Ms. Liebeck’s case showed that McDonald’s made a business decision to serve its coffee at extreme temperatures with full knowledge of the risks. Basically, McDonald’s decided paying for the burns was cheaper than fixing the problem, and it refused to change. In the civil justice system, punitive damages are the only tool a jury has to demand change. By capping them, legislatures are blessing that kind of conduct in advance and giving companies an out when they cause severe harm to innocent people.
“Frivolous lawsuits” already have a remedy. Assuming arguendo that a lawyer does take on a frivolous case, that doesn’t mean the plaintiff gets a jury. The rules of civil procedure and the rules of professional conduct empower judges to deal with these claims case by case. A judge can dismiss a claim that doesn’t pass legal muster, sanction the lawyers who brought it, and impose monetary penalties on the plaintiff, the lawyer, or the firm.
And because the overwhelming majority of plaintiff’s lawyers, me included, work on contingency, there’s a built-in incentive not to take baseless cases: if we don’t win, we don’t get paid. I have plenty of work to do. I don’t need to fill my schedule trying to make a case out of a claim where none exists.
The other side of it
To be fair, I want to give tort reform advocates their flowers. They argue that large verdicts drive up insurance premiums and the cost of doing business. Prices for goods and services go up, and those costs get passed on to the public.
The argument is especially compelling in medical malpractice. Supporters argue that big verdicts push doctors toward defensive medicine, or out of high-risk specialties and states altogether, which ultimately hurts the health care system.
I believe those concerns are real and often come from a good place. But I don’t see much evidence that limiting verdicts meaningfully lowers premiums or the cost of doing business. Think about it: when was the last time your insurance company lowered your premium because your state passed tort reform? When was the last time your doctor cut your bill because their malpractice premiums went down? It probably hasn’t happened.
Ultimately, a careful look at the Liebeck case shows that the existing checks, juries and judges, worked exactly the way they should. Arbitrarily capping damages or limiting access to the courts only hurts the people who need the system most.
Final thoughts
The next time someone brings up “that lady who sued McDonald’s over hot coffee,” ask them if they knew about the skin grafts. Or the $800 offer. Or the 700 prior burn reports. Or that the judge cut the verdict.
The McDonald’s coffee case isn’t proof the system is broken. It’s proof the system works, and it’s the most successful PR campaign in legal history at convincing people otherwise.
If you or someone you know has been hurt and you want to talk it through, get in touch with me here.
This post is general commentary based on my own experience and isn’t legal advice. Every case is different, and how yours plays out will depend on its own facts. For actual injury questions: hurtinstl.com. New here? Learn more about me.
Cheers,
