You know I respect your opinion, but you havent explained why it wasnt frivolous.
The injury happened. We can all disagree as to the AMOUNT of the damages, but the underlying event took place. A frivolous lawsuit would involve a slip-and-fall that did not happen, or that was exaggerated.
I don't think anyone is saying that the little girl was not, in fact, burned by the chicken nugget, thus the lawsuit is not frivolous. A doctor diagnosed second degree burns. That is meaningful.
I will caveat this with a couple of points.
(A) As a basic point, I've always had an issue with the whole argument "but there was no written warning on the packaging", which is just a joke IN THIS SITUATION.
First, it was a drive-through scenario, and one cannot possibly envision a world in which people read warnings on packaging being handed to them through a drive-through window.
Second, the person injured was a little girl, I believe she was 4 at the time. There's no way a written warning on the packaging would have impacted HER understanding or assumption of risk. I wish we could just be honest and say that if a piece of food is SO **** HOT that it does not cool down (a) while being put into a box, (b) while being put into a bag, (c) while being passed out of a drive-through window, and then (d) being passed to the back seat of a car...then you have a bad situation. That chicken nugget caused second degree burns. Something is not right here.
We've all watched cooking shows. You're supposed to REST your steak before cutting and eating it. Maybe McDonald's needs to figure out how to rest the McNuggets. I'm not saying they can't be hot AT ONE TIME, but maybe there should be more time in between "fryer" and "child's lap". The McNugget is not suddenly going to contract listeria in that one minute of cooldown.
(B) As a settlement point, McDonald's offered 156K, the lawsuit asked for $15M, the verdict was for $800K, and the family's lawyer still views it as a win. Maybe, just maybe, we need to figure out an arbitration system or some other methodology that is something other than "ridiculously low offer and ridiculously high claim". We've got to have a better system for what is likely a common situation, which is "damage or injury caused by drive-through misadventure".
That is all.