Thinking Like a Lawyer by Colin Seale

Author:Colin Seale
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sourcebooks

FIGURE 11

Blank Investigation Table

Witnesses Evidence Questions

Here is where it gets interesting. When an attorney for a party to a case makes these discovery requests and sends them out to the other party, the attorney rarely gets exactly what is asked for. Instead the opposing party provides just enough information from requesting documents, physical evidence, and interviewing witnesses to generate even more questions than the attorney started with. In this “Too Hot to Handle” example, I am modeling this common practice by limiting the amount of information I reveal at this step. Here is what I am revealing at this time:

• The coffee Stella received was between 180°F–190°F. At that temperature, coffee can cause third-degree burns within seconds of touching the skin.

• This coffee was about 20 degrees hotter than other restaurants’ coffee and 30 degrees hotter than coffee made at home.

• McDonald’s had about 700 complaints about the temperature of its coffee over the past 10 years before Stella’s accident. These complaints specifically involved customers who suffered third-degree burns from coffee spills.

• The coffee caused Stella to suffer third-degree burns over 16% of her body, including her inner thighs and genitals. She was hospitalized for 8 days, required skin grafts (in which skin is taken from one part of the body and transplanted to another part), spent 2 years recovering, and was permanently disfigured. While she was injured, Stella lost more than 20 pounds, which dropped her weight to 83 pounds.

Looking at the first two points about the temperature, what additional questions do you have? The question “why?” might come to mind. Why in the world would McDonald’s brew its coffee at temperatures so hot it would cause immediate burns? Why would it be substantially hotter than coffee at other restaurants? If we are representing McDonald’s, maybe we’re wondering if there are some valid reasons for this coffee being so hot. Maybe there is a valid, customer service-related reason. What if this incident occurred in Chicago in February? It would make sense that McDonald’s might want coffee served at the drive-through to be hotter than normal because the second an employee sticks an arm out the window to pass off the coffee, the coffee is already exposed to very cold air.

The fact that 700 people had similar complaints of third-degree burns in the prior decade probably leads to another set of questions. We want to figure out what, if anything, McDonald’s did in response to these complaints. We want to know how these complaints were dispersed geographically. Were these burns all from one McDonald’s restaurant, from a small set of restaurants, or from McDonald’s restaurants across the country? We would also want to investigate the timeline of these burns. It would be notable if a huge spike in complaints happened in the past 2 years after almost no complaints in the preceding 8 years. Last, but certainly not least, can denominators get some love here? Seven hundred might sound like a large number. But what if McDonald’s served 700 trillion

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.