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Category Archives: Business Litigation
Jury verdicts in tort cases against companies can reach into the millions of dollars. Even where compensatory damages are in the thousands, juries have awarded punitive damages several times greater. Here are two cases from across the country in which companies faced expensive business torts verdicts. BMW Paint Case Leads to Multi-Million Dollar Verdict In Alabama in the early 1990s, a doctor went to a car dealership to purchase a new BMW. He was surprised when he took it a detailing expert about a year later when he learned that his car was never exactly new. Apparently, acid rain had damaged the car while it was in transit from Germany to Alabama, and the manufacturer had repainted almost the entire car. The dealership never informed the doctor of the repainting, and the doctor brought a fraud suit against BMW and the dealership for the difference in value between a new…
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Nearly all companies today employ someone to get the word out about the company on social media sites like Twitter or Facebook. These sites offer a direct and inexpensive way to reach millions of consumers across the world. Like many areas of intellectual property law, though, company social media efforts are still in a gray area when it comes to who owns what, and a lawsuit pitting one company against its former employee and his Tweets may decide some of these issues companies are struggling with. PhoneDog is a website that reviews mobile devices and mobile apps. Noah Kravitz worked for PhoneDog for four years, using his company’s Twitter account to accumulate a bevy of followers who enjoyed his perspective on mobile developments. Kravtiz left PhoneDog towards the end of 2010 and changed his Twitter handle from “@Phonedog_Noah” to “@NoahKravitz.” And with that simple handle change, Kravitz also took his…
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Hot Coffee and Tort Reform Most are familiar with the famous (or infamous, depending on how you look at it) 1994 case of the woman who suffered burns after a cup of hot coffee she purchased at a McDonald’s drive-through spilled in her lap. The jury verdict in the case outraged a lot of people, as the woman received $160,000 for medical damages and another $2.7 million in punitive damages. This hot coffee case was a catalyst for a political issue that remains important as we head into the 2012 presidential election – tort reform. Torts are any sort of civil wrong. Business torts cover lawsuits when one side acts negligently, fraudulently misrepresents something, interferes with a company’s contract, interferes with a company’s business prospects, or engages in unfair competition. Tort reform targets the sort of awards that we saw in the hot coffee case by instituting caps on awards…
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