Sue everyone and let the courts settle it

[KC-97HORN]

Jesus, I always thought that was an old adage but this takes the cake.

The Rhode Island night club fire in 2003, where 100 people died. The lawyers are about to settle a lawsuit against the NEWS STATION who filmed the beginning of the fire, due to them "impeding the victims from being able to escape"
The Link

Now you have to remember this video, it shows the camera guy being at the front of the concert, seeing the fire, and everyone hauling *** to get out. With there being a ******* bottleneck at the front doors due to everyone going that way instead of the alternate exits.

The camera guy was still recording the fire, but its ******* obvious that they arent holding anyone up, they are moving as fast as they can to the doors (albeit backwards), and right as they get out- pure panic sets in as people realize that the doors arent allowing enough people out and the fire is spreading rapidly.

$30 million dollars the news station is getting ready to shell out in response to the lawsuit. $30 million bucks for them to do their job and get sued for it.

 

[Bottom Line]

The lawyers earned the John Edwards big thumbs up award! What a great country!

BL

 

[TxStHorn]

We don't know all the facts, other than what we've seen in the media reports. So let's be careful of having a knee-jerk reaction.

If the news station truly believed they had no liability or exposure, I can promise you, they would not be settling for such a sum.

The most they would be doing is offering to settle for nuisance value - or better yet, if they really believed there was no claim - they would move for summary judgment to have the case against them dismissed before trial because there was insufficient evidence to support the claim.

So think about it. They did not do this. And this is a hell of a lot of money to be coughing up when summary judgment would dismiss the claim.

 

[softlynow]

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[TahoeHorn]

Boston Globe

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[Basil Your Face]

There are a lot of lawyers on this site that defend lawsuits that seem specious at first glance but I doubt the defenders will argue much of a defense in this case.

 

[BattleshipTexas]

We had a case once where a really old chimney pipe of some kind fell and hurt someone. But no one knew who made the chimney pipe. So the plaintiff sued every chimney pipe manufacturer in the country, about 100, and said prove it isn't yours. Most were not in business back in the 50s when it was installed. They had to go through summary judgment to get out. That's what ours did, don't know how it wound up.

 

[Bookman]

Battleship,

Wouldn't that fall under the 10 year statute of repose?

 

[dognduckhorn]

I see a couple of things here that might drive a high dollar settlement, although I will confess up front that I don't know diddly about Rhode Island tort law so this could very well be just a mind jerk on my part.

One is that you are dealing with innocent Plaintiffs. In a lot of lawsuits there is some percentage of exposure risk that you can take off when contemplating settlement vs. trial because you can defend on some theory of contributory negligence on the part of the Plaintiffs (i.e they are drunk off their ***, or they failed to take steps to get themselves out of there when the danger became apparent) It probably wouldn't be enough to prevent a judgment, but juries do consider that sort of thing when they are filling in blanks for damages. Hard to make a case for that sort of thing, when any eyewitnesses who could establish that are burnt to a crisp or you can't do a toxicology test on a (forgive the image) lump of charcoal. I mean no disrespect to the deceased, but this is the kind of cold logic that a defense attorney has to apply to evaluate his case.

The second point, and this is the one that my ignorance of Rhode Island law probably makes worthless, is the concept of joint and several liability. What that means is that once a judgment is rendered, all of the defendants are jointly liable to satisfy it, and the deep pockets have to cover for the shallower pockets in the defendant pool. In a really nasty lawsuit, this is where the defendants turn on each other trying to put more blame on some than others and point the finger somewhere besides themselves. That scenario is especially sweet for the plaintiffs, because all they really need to do is prove their damages and let the defendants go cannibalistic on each other.

With 100 dead people, there are bound to be a few people who, but for this incident, were capable, if they lived, of inventing the cure for cancer, not to mention being good mothers and fathers for the kids who now have no parent. There is a lot of exposure here in theory which might make a $30 million settlement look like a Walmart special.

 

[zzzz]

The ironic thing: "gathering footage for a segment on safety in public places."