I have seen the same ads and I know that lawyers DO advertise for clients. My point is they don’t HAVE to advertise for clients. There are plenty of lawyers that don’t advertise or participate in class action lawsuits against drug companies and such that do very, very well – including those that prosecute cases against schools, home owners, restaurant employees – their clients come to them.

In reading the rest of the replies it makes sense that, without knowing more information about the example of the child getting hurt on a slide, it is rather foolish and “knee-jerk” as someone else said, to just assume it’s a frivilous lawsuit. However, I believe we are all aware that there are too many frivilous lawsuits in general clogging up the courts.

As far as parents or teachers becoming scapegoats, I believe a case could be made for both of those as well – it’s just when teachers are made the scapegoat everyone knows about it. I’ve been to quite a few teacher blogs and I don’t think I’ve read one positive thing about parents. Maybe there are no good parents at those particular schools.

Oh.

I thought parents were the universal scapegoat.

Anyway, who is surprised by this? One of the major reasons 2/3 of all teachers in the U.S. quit within 5 years of starting said careers is because they get tired of being threatened with lawsuits by parents, students, and administrators on a regular basis. But then again, when teachers have been established as the ultimate scapegoats of the education system in this country, what do you expect?

“…I would guess that their insurance company has a pretty good idea of when they are better off settling.”

I doubt the Broward County School Board HAS a liability insurer. Who would be crazy enough to write a policy for them, given that they’re apparently never NOT being sued? What they do have, which I know many local government entities in some states lack, is qualified sovereign immunity: any judgment against them is capped at $150,000 unless the state legislature passes a claim bill for the excess. And the Florida Legislature passes only a handful of claim bills a year at most.

There are some further possibilities:

1) The slide was a known hazard, due to location over a hard surface, extreme height, improper installation (ie, able to tip over).

2) The slide was appropriate for older kids, but this kid had somehow been able to escape the little kids playground and mingle with the older kids.

3) There were coercive factors–kids daring one another to do stupid things–that the adults knew, or ought to have known about and intervened in.

FYI–the oft quoted figure for Broward County was beginning to sound like an urban myth, since it was being talked about just about everywhere except Florida, according to Google searches. I did, however, come upon the following link: http://www.centerjd.org/archives/issues-facts/HellHoleFictionFL.pdf. This is a publication from a lawyer’s group, apparently. But it is responding to a designation of South Florida as a legal “hell hole,” by a group supportive of (and funded by) big corporations seeking to put limits on class action suits. This would mean that if a population surrounding, say, a nuclear plant, and subject to real risks, wanted to band together as a group to attack the “no settle” policy of a corporation with a paid staff of attorneys (or parents whose children had died due to known contaminants in infant formula, or Pinto owners, etc) and endless time, they wouldn’t be able to, or would face severe limitations to doing so. This oft-quoted Broward County number of lawsuits apparently traces back to this group–and the web site of the guy who wrote the book (do you think that they are connected).

What is interesting to me, is the number of news organizations and columnists who have picked up this factoid–combined with the “no running” signs on the playgrounds–and with very little examination have commented on the litigious nature of our society and the unwillingness to accept risk. It is just possible that there were some real playground risks (such as hard surfaces, poorly situated equipment, location or other factors that contributed to poor supervision), that were unremedied despite numerous indications of the hazard (ie: “accidents”) and that the “no running” sign was nothing more than an attempt at CYA, that either took the place of, or augmented, real solutions.

I did run across a legal explanation of the guy who got hit by a volunteer. It’s not what you think–not about deep pockets. As I understand it, it really had to do with some poor wording of an insurance policy that DID cover the acts of volunteers–and a really old pedestrian who as a consequence of the accident will be bed-ridden and paralyzed for the rest of his life.

Will has written an unsupported polemic. I’d be interested to see the facts here, but he’s made an assertion, not an argument. The commenters here have treated it as such. Who he is has nothing to do with it.

So, I wonder if that 78% number is the usual nonsense we deal with or more serious actions in which lawyers are actually consulted. ‘Cuz kids and parents talk smack all the time.

What I sense in several of the posts is a “knee jerk” reaction to the author of the column, George Will, not the content of the column.