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Comic Strip of the Day

CSotD: Alleged caution

Published: November 29, 2011 1 minute 4 comments

Nonseq

Lawyer jokes are too easy, but that doesn't mean you should avoid them entirely. Otherwise, we'd miss things like today's Non Sequitur.

I don't dislike lawyers in private life. They are, for the most part, intelligent and well-informed, with a quick wit necessary to the profession which is then further honed on years of noting irregularities, lapses in logic and general inconsistency, the very building blocks of humor.

Professionally, however, their caution is not just a killjoy but a detriment to any sort of normalcy. They become like the Royal Wizard in Thurber's "Many Moons," who proposed to drape the palace gardens in black velvet like a circus tent so that the Princess Lenore would not be able to see the moon.

"Black velvet curtains would keep out the air," the king angrily reminded him. "The Princess Lenore would not be able to breathe and she would be ill again."

A small price to pay for preventing accidental lunar sightings, an attorney would argue.

You should never have asked him, a sane person would say.

My favorite example of "for God's sake, don't show it to the lawyers" is the disclaimer on boxes of Q-Tips that warn you not to stick them in your ear.

This is on a par with the illogic noted by Lazlo Toth of the caution on the side of the box of powdered Mr. Bubble, which told you to keep it in a dry place. At Toth noted in his letter to the company, keeping bubble bath in a dry place rather defeats the purpose of bubble bath.

But Toth (Don Novello, aka Father Guido Sarducci) was being a wise ass. The advice of the Q-Tip attorneys is apparently offered quite seriously and is not about storage but about use.

If people took that lawyerly advice to heart, sales of Q-Tips would plunge from about 600 billion a year to somewhere around 37.

(Disclaimer: I have no idea how many Q-Tips or Q-Tip-like cotton swabs are sold annually, nor are my projections of potential sales under the circumstances given based on any actual consumer studies. Close cover before striking. See below for details.)

I wish I'd been around the big table when the corporate attorney was explaining the need for the disclaimer, and marketing sat there squirming.

On the one hand, they must surely have realized that nobody in the world was going to pay the slightest attention to this idiotic disclaimer, but, on the other, they also surely realized that to say so out loud would defeat its purpose, because, five years down the road, the attorney representing some moron who drove the thing through his eardrum with a mallett would pull up the records of the meeting and force them to admit that they knew the warning was inadequate.

So they must have sat there thinking, "Let it go. It's just lawyer-talk. Just stick it on the side of the package and shut the hell up."

It's a little more harmful when you have a swimming hole that kids have enjoyed for a million summers, and some idiot at a town council meeting asks, "Do you suppose that's safe?" The town's attorney perks up and a generations-long tradition ends, because, once someone has asked the question aloud, the liability bomb begins to tick.

For an old newsroom warhorse like myself, the liability bomb ticks in the area of libel, and the way to keep it from going off is to use the word "allegedly" like ketchup, either (reporter's preference) judiciously as needed or (editor's version) to completely suffocate anything that threatens to have any flavor of its own.

Dude, once someone has been convicted, you don't have to use the word "allegedly" anymore. And, while people are arrested for allegedly breaking into a store, they are not charged with alleged burglary.

You think our prisons are crowded now, imagine what they'd be like if people could be convicted of alleged crimes.

The temporary nature of the disclaimer explaining, of course, the untenable position of the recently deceased counselor in today's cartoon. There ain't no "alleged" once you get here.

And, while I know it is traditional for St. Peter to have a big, fat book of everyone in the world, I can't help but feel somehow this chap standing before him might have his own volume. And that might allegedly be it.

 

  

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Comments 4

  1. First, love your personal disclaimer.
    I am an attorney on the defense side of the bar and have lots of personal favorites. The reason all lawn mowers have a warning not to put fingers under the deck is because someone picked up a lawn mower to try to use it to trim a hedge. Somehow the law suit against the mower manufacturer was successful.
    The McDonalds coffee lawsuit, though, has an interesting history. Yes, a woman successfully sued McDonalds when she was scalded by hot coffee. But it ended up that in discovery, a memo from a McDonalds food engineer was uncovered. That memo warned McDonals it was turning up the heat on its coffee too high. It ends up the hotter the coffee, cheaper coffee beans can be used. The bitterness of bad but very hot coffee cannot be detected. The memo warned the coffee was now so hot, someone could be scalded.
    Finally, everytime I start to rant about the plaintiff bar, I always remind myself that if were not for plaintiff lawyers, we would still be enjoying Joe Camel. It was the lawyers that finally brought down big tobacco rather than the government officials/politicians whose duty it is to protect the citizenry from unscrupulous business practices.

  2. I’d love to know to what extent McDonald’s itself was involved in turning a somewhat gruesome case of genuine harm resulting from irresponsibile corporate greed into a standard reference point for “stupid greedy lawsuits.” If Krispy Kreme can set up all those “traffic will be disrupted” feature stories for store openings, how hard is it to feed “stupid old lady didn’t know coffee was hot” jokes to late night comics?

  3. You might not find my response to your question very welcome. I blame the press. Of course McDonalds spun the case as lawyers out of control. They were not going to say, “Yep, we got caught!” The only reason I know what *really* happened is I found a court document explaining what I wrote to you. Why did not the press find this? This is what the Fourth Estate is supposed to do.
    And I am not entirely blaming reporters. From what I can tell, even print reporters have so little time to get out a story, that kind of digging is a pipe-dream luxury now. Finally, if a reporter did find it, I suspect the corporate news company would bury it.
    BTW, your defense of Pat Robertson has been bouncing around my head the last few days. I completely agree that he was unfairly denounced for a perfectly legitimate question. But, as open minded as I want/try to be, I am not certain I would have had the wherewithal to publically defend him. Kudos to you for calling it as you see it.

  4. Actually, I’m more apt to blame “stupid” and “lazy” than “overworked” for the poor job the press did on that. I would suggest that the information was easier to get from defender’s lawyer than plaintiff’s, because McDonald’s could quickly connect a reporter to the right person.
    The story wouldn’t get buried by corporate, but there are editors who don’t put stuff on the wire if it doesn’t fit their personal narrative. So an editor who gets his or her worldview from Jay Leno might not find the story interesting enough to pass along, while a more activist consumerist editor would. And the results reveal the general trend.
    Like my Pat Robertson defense, any responsible reports on the coffee lawsuit would sink under the weight of the prevailing narrative.

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