As a person who is currently working in the legal sector and has studied law for the past five years, I am, as most of my colleagues, well aware of the overly- publicised notion of the constantly growing and evolving ‘claim culture’.
For those unfamiliar with the matter, the above term alludes to the fact that many people nowadays pursue ludicrous claims and many law firms take on and win those; this (‘unfairly’) generates a fair amount of revenue for both the client and the law firm.
To illustrate the above, I shall adopt an example of an actual claim which my lecturer in Tort Law discussed on a number of occasions.
Mrs. X decided to go on a holiday; she chose the Bahamas as her destination.
Once she got there, she got under a coconut tree, fell asleep and was soon woken up by a coconut hitting her head.
She suffered a mild concussion as well as a three- day constant headache.
She put in a claim, alleging that the Travel Agents failed to inform her of the danger of a coconut falling on her head and causing her injuries.
She won the case and obtained compensation for pain and suffering.
As you could probably imagine, the above example is quite extreme and merely serves to illustrate what is meant by the term ‘claim culture’.
Then again, the woman in question might have not known that coconuts come from COCONUT trees; after all, my uncle, who has been living in the USA for fifteen years now, once told me that he walked into a convenience store to get a chainsaw only to find a caption on the chainsaw which read (in big bold red letters, too):
!!! DO NOT EAT !!!
Leaving the niceties aside, however, as a lawyer I strongly believe that people must be compensated when they have been wronged through no fault of their own.
Blame, Claim and Act on Your Name- that’s the strategy that Mr Don Barrett has adopted before ( see << http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19953716 >> ).
For those of you who are not familiar with Mr Barrett’s work, let us just say that he was one of the first lawyers to bring claims against tobacco companies, get them to admit that they knew how addictive cigarettes were and make them pay the medical costs of the victims.
Now, he is once more going after the big fishes- the ‘big food’ companies.
His case is straightforward and rather simple: producers and distributors must not use deceptive labelling techniques which might potentially induce the consumer in purchasing the product.
He has been criticised on a number of occasions mainly by people who claim that the consumer must always have a choice and that, as grown- ups, we should suffer the consequences of the choices which we have made ourselves.
Such a shallow attack is, of course, completely out of place; after all, a consumer can only make a choice under an INFORMED opinion.
How can an opinion be informed if the consumer cannot understand what the ingredients of what he is buying are?
An example that Mr. Barrett has himself alluded to is a product which purports to contain ‘evapourated cane’.
How exactly would a mother of a diabetic child know that that meant sugar…?
Over 2/3 of the people in the USA are overweight or obese; examples such as the above tend to, at least partially, explain why that is.
Mr. Barrett has currently brought some twenty- four claims against food companies; succeeding in those will have major consequences on the ‘big food’ sector.
Products which are sold through misleading or false labelling/ advertising carry no value under law. Consequently, the damages will equal the overall value of the sales of such products and might amount to hundreds of millions of dollars (even billions in some cases).
To conclude, speaking on behalf of every legal fibre of my body, I wish Mr Barrett the best of luck in his upcoming legal battle and sincerely hope that his UK counterparts will soon follow his example on a larger scale.
Jus est ars boni et aequi
Write that down.
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