What's Dangerous?

A recent news story got us thinking. It involved a New Jersey resident who was awarded over $520,000 from a local Dunkin Donuts in a case involving a number of injuries she received as a result of tripping over a spike in an adjacent parking lot. Some of those injuries included being burned by the hot coffee she was carrying.

Now, many of you reading this might not be old enough to remember the famed case of Liebeck v. McDonald's Restaurant, otherwise known as the 1994 "hot coffee" lawsuit. At the time, the case was widely disparaged in the media as an example of personal injury and product liability cases presumably run amok. However, what most people didn't realize was that the elderly woman in the case had, in fact, been seriously injured by contact with McDonald's then extremely-hot coffee. She required skin grafts and was in treatment for two years.

Whatever your opinion about that particular incident, it's a good reminder that our perceptions of danger don't always match the realities in any particular case. If you're a motorcycle accident lawyer, you know that seemingly very minor road hazards can have potentially tragic results...yet few of us actually frightened by the thought of a pothole. Similarly, coffee is such a part of many people's daily lives that the thought of being harmed by it seems ridiculous but, when kept at a high enough temperature, it really can be a serious hazard.

What it boils down to is that sometimes injuries are as much a product of someone's failure of the imagination as any other cause. If you or someone close to you has been harmed by something that didn't seem terribly dangerous, and another party is responsible, Cameron Yadidi Brock and his first-rate legal team are here for you.