The Importance and Purpose of Lawsuits (Video)

Hi, my name is Gil Gilmore with the Gilmore Law firm, and I’ve been asked today about lawsuits. We noticed that there’s a negative. The public has sometimes negative, position on lawsuits, and I think that’s because of the extreme cases that we hear. For instance, the McDonald’s hot coffee case. Everybody’s heard about that. Everybody thinks that’s a ridiculous case.

But I’d like to talk just a minute about the good that lawsuits have done. Everybody seems to think that there’s some governmental entity out there that makes corporate America put safety ahead of profits, and it really is juries in lawsuits that make corporate America behave. Some examples I’d like to talk. Ryder, give you are for instance, you everybody should remember the Ford Pinto cars years ago.

They had the gas tanks in the rear of the car outside the frame. Ford knew this was a problem. The Ford decided to take that Pinto to the market anyway, as you know, probably you read in the papers. So it’s all the news where every time one of these Ford Pinto would get hit in the rear, became a bomb and would kill everybody in the Pinto and the car, they hit them.

Same thing happened with General Motors pickup trucks. They put sidesaddle, gas tanks outside the frame. And if the pickup was ever T-boned, it became a bomb. And the only thing that made sense for it in General Motors, correct these problems is lawsuits. I went before juries and juries, gave large verdicts and made corporate America, I thought, and general Motors make these vehicles say, the type today, vehicles are safer than they’ve ever been since, you think 20, 25 years ago, very few, very few airbags were in cars.

Now. They had airbags all over the cars. And the cars are safer than ever. And the reason that that’s the way it is is because of lawsuits. This firm, it goes it goes beyond automobiles. This firm was involved 20 years ago. And race discrimination cases where the automobile finance companies were charging African-Americans and Hispanics more interest, and they were charging Caucasian Americans.

It had the same credit score. We saw lawsuits against all the major finance companies nationwide, and we corrected the problem. Now, the the the interest rates paid by Hispanics, African-Americans and Caucasians are the same. Go by to go to dram shop cases, dram shop cases. Are there anybody that self liquor in the state of Alabama is required to have insurance because the bars were selling alcohol to matters and selling alcohol to drugs, and they would get out on their own on the road and injuring innocent people.

Now they have to have insurance in order to sell alcohol to protect innocent people. So, well, I understand people think lawsuits are bad and there are too many of them. But you got to understand how good lawsuits are in certain situations and to make product safer and make this the roads we ride on safer for the consumer and the American public.

This is Gil Gilmore, my little rant today. If we can help you call us to go a law firm, I can.