Can we be sued? 1

[petermeachem]

Not sure if this is the correct forum, but here goes anyway.

Can we be sued for results of advice we have given here or does the fact that no money passes mean there is no contract, and therefore no case.

I'm in England, where things are slightly different, but dragging people off to court seems to be a popular pastime in the States.

I am asking because there is a guy in the Access forum that I am worried about. He is a volunteer in a Hospital, and is fiddling about with a database which contains patients records and treatment plans. His knowledge of Access is clearly limited. My reply was that he should not even be thinking of doing that sort of work. Someone else said much the same, but is still helping him. Suppose because of his (the question asker) ineptitude, and poor understanding both of Access and our replies, he screws up the database so the unfortunate patients get the wrong medication, or too much, or at the wrong time? What is our legal position?
Peter Meachem
peter@accuflight.com

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[sleipnir214]

If in the U.K. it is the case that if you bring a suit and lose, you pay the defendant's fees, then the U.K. has got its act a lot straighter than ours.



And yeah, it's been since the 30's since we made the quarter finals. And that one really wasn't as big a deal as this one -- there weren't enough teams for a round of 16 back then, so every regional winner went straight to the quarters. ______________________________________________________________________
Perfection in engineering does not happen when there is nothing more to add.
Rather it happens when there is nothing more to take away.

 

[BeckahC]

Actually, my Lease (for my apartment) even states as part of the legal agreement that should anything occur or should anything be brought to court by either party (Landlord or tenants) then the losing party pays legal fees for both!

I think that is an excellent idea! It would certainly cut back on what could be considered "drive-through lawsuits" If or when I ever sue anyone it would be for a large infringement and for a large compensation - none of that small enough to settle out of court cr*p.

I was once in a horrible car accident - fortunately my then-fiance (my hubby now) and I weren't badly injured, but my car was totaled! The other car had jumped a red light and slammed right into us - seemingly doing more than the speed limit too - they were driving the car belonging to one of their fathers and were not even wearing seatbelts... It was Chrismas eve that year and around 1am. We had been visiting friends and neither of us had drunk anything but soda... The passenger of the car that hit us sued me! It went through Arbitration out of court and didn't happen until nearly a year later! I'm sorry - was I mistaken to think that if you don't wear your seatbelt, break the law and harm 2 other people and their property that gave your friend who was with you the permission to sue the victims because of injuries!?!?!?! Well she lost, but I had to take a day off work to testify and sit through that cr*ap! (PS - she brought pictures that proved my point!)

This is what the legal system has become... doctors afraid to treat patients without a signed release form... confidentiality clauses on work agreements when you get hired for a new job, some specifically mentioning law suits!

If you have more or better lawyers then you are more likely to win, whether you are right or wrong!

This is very frustrating! BeckahC

 

[LesleyW]

Yes, I think that "in the U.K. it is the case that if you bring a suit and lose, you pay the defendant's fees", however this does lead to situations where individuals cannot afford to sue big companies because they can afford to drag out legal cases as long as possible - they don't care as they have the money. Leads to many situations where even though you are clearly wronged, as an individual (or even as a small group of people, or a small company) you cannot afford to sue.

Frivolous lawsuits are a different matter than losing a case - you could have a perfectly reasonable claim but not be able to prove it, or it could be a close call. Just becuase you lose a case does not mean your suit was frivolous!

Football on the brain (funnily enough), that's soccer I mean for you Statesiders. If someone tackles you in an unfair manner, they may get a yellow card and you get a free kick. However if you "take a dive", which means to overplay an injury caused to you by a defender, you may get a yellow card and the other side a free kick. However, this does not mean that every time players from opposite sides clash, a yellow card is awarded. Quite right too.

 

[BeckahC]

Leslie,
I really like your analogy, and I see your point, too. I would never want things to get to a point where the "big guy" always wins... but there are truely some terible suits that should never happen, but happen because people are so free to file them...

I am secure in the knowlege that if my Landlord, for instance, decides to sue me for no apparant reason, providing I win, I do not have any legal fees to pay, he does. That is the type of protection I think people should have... but you are right in saying it might be too easy for big business to try and take advantage of that...

The problem, I guess, is when you try to give power to people, such as Judges or arbitrators, to decide what is an appropriate case and what is not... at least, to a certain extent... BeckahC

 

[sleipnir214]

Paying the other's fees is not the reason the cases drag on so long in the U.K. That same tactic is used in the U.S., where such is not the case.

I have a friend who drives a school bus. One day while taking the kids home from school, he and his charges witnessed an accident. The bus was not involved. The bus was stopped at a red light when two other cars hit each other in a rear-end collision.

Within the next ten days, 11 parents had sued my friend's insurance company, claiming their little darlings had been injured in the accident on the bus that day. Of course, the insurance company is crawling up my friend's butt because he did not report the accident to them. It wasn't until the insurance company understood that the accident in question had taken place between two other vehicles 10 meters way that they went after the parents.

In this case, the parents' cases were dismissed, the judge declared the suits frivolous, and censured 6 or 7 plaintiff's attorneys. The attorneys appealed to the state bar association and were cleared -- they claimed they had best pursued the claims presented by their clients.

The judge would have had the parents pay for the insurance company's legal fees, except they did not have any -- the lawers for the defense were in-house counsel. The parents did have to pay for all those niggling copying and filing fees, though.

The real loser in this whole thing? The insurance company raised by friend's rates because of the incident. He eventually appealed to the state board of insurers for intevention, and the board did. But only after my friend had to pay the higher rates for 7 months.



The question, though, is still:
If having the plaintiff pay all fees if he loses doesn't work (as is the case in the U.K.), what will?

______________________________________________________________________
Perfection in engineering does not happen when there is nothing more to add.
Rather it happens when there is nothing more to take away.

 

[petermeachem]

The USA is viewed from here (UK) as being sue-happy. I don't know if this is so, but there is some concern that this may be yet another USA export. A company advertised here heavily on the not win no fee basis explaining that you could drag people off to court on the flimsiest of excuses. Slight bump in car. Pretend you have whiplash. They have fortunately gone bust. LesleyW's point about not being able to sue large companies here is I think general and not particular. They are always going to win cos they have more money. Sad fact of life.

World Cup news

Italy out! We've just come back from a holiday in Italy. There must be national mourning. It is very important. World cup and related programmes were on the televison almost the whole time. Peter Meachem
peter@accuflight.com

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[CajunCenturion]

Peter,
I think that you're correct in that the USA is sue-happy. I personnally think the reason for that is that the cost of defending oneself is extremely high, and its often cheaper to settle for a small amount, then spend a high amount of money to prove your innocence. That being set, the lawyers know that it going to cost someone (hypothetically) $20,000 to defend themselves (lawyer fees, lost revenue, etc), then you can sue them for $50,000, and agree to settle for $10,000. The defendant has in some way "saved" 10,000, and the plaintiff won $10,000. This will continue until tort reform occurs in the USA, and the loser has pay for the defense cost. Then people would be willing to spend the 20K to defend themselves, knowing that when they win, they'll get the 20K back. The other effect is that people will be less likely to bring the suit, unless they've got a legitmate case, because the cost of losing would be too high.

And BTW, I am rooting for you guys to beat Brazil, and of course for us to beat the Germans. Tough road for both of us, but who knows, maybe (and its possible) for use to face each other in the WC finals.
Good Luck
--------------
As a circle of light increases so does the circumference of darkness around it. - Albert Einstein

 

[petermeachem]

Cajun, let's hope so. I don't think there will much work done in England on Friday morning. Even my son (13) has been told by his school he can come in late. I've never seen so many England flags before. In fact I've never seen any before. That's England flags, red cross on white background and not the Union Jack. They're on buildings cars, T shirts, all over the place.

You should manage Germany OK I should think. After all we beat them 5-1 recently... Peter Meachem
peter@accuflight.com

 

[CajunCenturion]

Right Peter, I actually understand the difference between England and Great Britain. I won't be in the office first thing Friday either.
Good Luck
--------------
As a circle of light increases so does the circumference of darkness around it. - Albert Einstein

 

[petermeachem]

What I meant was that you used to only see union jacks. England got a bit left out when the scots were devolved hence the england flags. Or so someone said on the radio. Peter Meachem
peter@accuflight.com

 

[BeckahC]

I didn't realize there were different flags (Yes I'm from the US, but that's no excuse, a portion of my family lives in England! (On that part of my family I am only 2nd generation American)) I am very curious to see who wins BeckahC

 

[petermeachem]

If you closely at the Union Jack, you'll see it is actually 3 flags stuck together. The English bit is the red vertical and horizontal lines on a white background, the Scottish bit is white diagonal cross on blue and the rest is St Patricks apparently. This page

http://www.jdawiseman.com/papers/union-jack/union-jack.html

is written by someone who clearly has far to much time on his hands. I'm very glad I don't know him.

The World Cup in footballing countries is quite important. Winning it is a bit like winning all the Olympic Golds. We last (and first) won it in 1966 and they Still show clips on the telly and interview people.

Have we done on the sueing thing! Peter Meachem
peter@accuflight.com

 

[sleipnir214]

Vexillologists tend toward obsessive. I'd bet that if I were sewing together a Union Jack, I'd probably already know the Pantone settings for all the colors.


Though the link from that page to the World Flag Database (

http://www.flags.net)

is interesting. ______________________________________________________________________
Perfection in engineering does not happen when there is nothing more to add.
Rather it happens when there is nothing more to take away.

 

[sleipnir214]

Well, Peter, it looks like mutual commiserations are in order. Both England and the U.S. lost.

I knew the chances were slim at best, but it would have been fun if the U.S. played England in the final. ______________________________________________________________________
Perfection in engineering does not happen when there is nothing more to add.
Rather it happens when there is nothing more to take away.

 

[petermeachem]

I didn't see the US game but we didn't play well. It was amazingly quiet round here. No traffic at all, then at 9.30, the roads were full. I was listening to the radio whilst taking my daughter to school at half eight (meanies wouldn't let the children stay home to watch, they watched at school instead), and they decided to interview commuters at Wimbledon station (v busy London rail station). They couldn't as it was completely deserted!

Peter Meachem
peter@accuflight.com

 

[sleipnir214]

I hate to be the one to help practicality rear its ugly head, but I have a question that is more of a direct offshoot of the original one:

I'm in the United States. Someone in England applies advice I posted to Tek-Tips, and said advice causes an HMC ("Halt, Melt, and Catch fire&quot error in his business-operation-critical server. That person decides that somebody's got to pay for this outrage committed against his server, and wants redress for the overtime his sysadmin used rebuilding and restoring the server, lost income to the business, etc.

The question is now not, "Can he sue?", but "Where does he sue?" In the World Court at den Haag? In an English court? In a U.S. Federal court? In my state court?


In this age of software-controlled refrigerators, software failures can be not merely annoying, but life threatening.
There was a case in the U.S. in the 80's of a software error in an X-Ray machine killing two cancer patients undergoing radiotherapy. The error gave them a dose 100 times greater than they should have received.

Now, I doubt that any advice I would post to Tek-Tips would be implemented in the software that controls a radiotherapy machine. But my advice might be used in a perl script to collate test results on software. A problem might not be caught and corrected because a regular expression search in the script doesn't flag a line of test data that should have received attention.

And you might think that something like that wouldn't happen. But when Corning made the main reflector for the Hubble, they made it exactly to spec. Unfortunately, the specs given them were wrong, and Hubble's vision was blurry until a Shuttle repair mission installed a correcting lens in the telescope. ______________________________________________________________________
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[FXWizard]

The sue-happy mentality is not limited to the US -- it's made its way to Canada.

Some years ago my wife was involved in a vehicle accident where a motorcyclist ran a red light and hit our car; my wife and her passenger were injured (not badly, thank goodness) and the motorcyclist ended up in hospital with a couple of broken limbs and a bit of road rash. There were plenty of witnesses to verify that he was in the wrong and he was assessed as being 100% at fault; in addition, he was written up for the traffic violation which pushed his points over the limit and his license was pulled.

He then turned around and sued us -- my wife because she was the driver and me because I was the registered owner of the car, even though I wasn't in it at the time.

Fortunately the legal work was handled through our insurance company and we didn't have to pay anything, but the (IMO) real tragedy was that they made an out-of-court settlement to him...even though he was completely at fault it was cheaper to pay him out than to let the case go to trial.

Don't even get me started on how hard it was to keep my mouth shut during discovery when he started talking about how he just wanted to get on with his life and go to school and get his teaching degree so he could work with underprivileged children in South America...retch.

 

[Wullie]

Hi all,

This is quite a long thread so my point may have been mentioned before..

You cannot be sued for information that you provide on TT as you are covered by the Tecumseh Group disclaimer.

Tecumseh Group, Inc. shall not be responsible for any errors or omissions contained at their web sites, and reserves the right to make changes without notice. Accordingly, all Tecumseh Group, Inc. and third party information is provided "as-is."

Because they have included the "third party" it covers all of us and they have clearly stated that ALL info is provided "as is" so no warranty is implied.

Hope this helps

Wullie

sales@freshlookdesign.co.uk

http://www.freshlookdesign.co.uk

http://www.searchit-now.co.uk

 

[petermeachem]

I really don't know the answer. All I know for sure is that my liability insurance does not apply in the US.

Are there any lawyers out there. Or anyone who knows one who could tell us the position. Peter Meachem
peter@accuflight.com

 

[petermeachem]

Wullie, I'm not convinced that a simple disclaimer is good enough to protect you. There are various people mumbling about sueing Microsoft even though the Eula probably says something to the effect that if the software is crap, it isn't out fault (never actually read it mind). Peter Meachem
peter@accuflight.com