Maryland Injury Lawyer Blog

The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that plaintiff's attorney Marc Bern filed a lawsuit against Random House in U.S. District Court in Manhattan alleging that his clients purchased James Frey's now famous "A Million Little Pieces." Plaintiff's attorney stated that the claim was based on "failed to conduct a reasonable investigation or inquiry regarding the truthfulness or accuracy" of the material. Bern said he will seek a mere $50 million in damages, presumably for the "pain and suffering" of reading a book that they thought was non-fiction.

My feeling is that this claim is worth about fifty cents on its best day and lawsuits like these do personal injury victims and their attorneys a disservice. They feed into a popular anger over lawsuits, leading people to believe that recoveries of this kind for this type of "tort" are commonplace when, of course, they are not. Stores of million dollar recoveries in cases that simply never happened fuel this frustration. My favorite is the man who, assuming his Winnebago would drive itself, set the cruise control at 90 mph, left his seat and went to make a cup of coffee, and then sued and recovered millions because he was not warned that cruise control did not mean the vehicle would drive itself. Of course, the other great "myth" is the McDonald's coffee case, which has been so distorted that the actual facts of the case have been long lost. For the real facts of that case, click here.

The point is that our personal injury lawyers are fighting every day to recover fair compensation for accident victims. To do this, directly or indirectly, we have to ask jurors for financial compensation for a victim's injuries. It is (near) impossible to accomplish this task if a jury does not believe not only in the client but in his or her lawyer. Lawyers asking for $50 million in damages because his "clients" read a book they thought was non-fiction, does not help personal injury lawyer's credibility with a jury.