If you see Birmingham, Alabama lawyer Darrell L. Cartwright walking down the street, you might want to see if you can find some spare change in your pockets to give to him. He obviously must be hard up for money, because how else to explain the lawsuit he filed a couple of weeks ago?
On Monday, May 21, 2007, XM Satellite Radio suffered a satellite problem that caused partial or total service outages for parts of two days, lasting about 24 hours total. By late Tuesday, the problem was resolved, and XM announced that it would offer a two-day credit, worth about 87¢ — yes, 87¢ — to any customer who requested it. Problem solved. Everything right with the world, no?
No. You’ve forgotten about poor Mr. Cartwright. On Wednesday, May 23 — the day after XM promised a refund to all its customers — Mr. Cartwright found two neighbors of his who had subscribed to XM radio, slapped their names on a lawsuit, called it a class action suit, and demanded damages sustained by all its customers, in an unspecified amount of at least $5 million. (Via the Consumerist, which helpfully posted a copy of the complaint, which from the looks of things, took about 7 1/2 minutes of time to draft, typos and all: PDF.)
Now, you may wonder what benefit consumers get from this litigation, but to be fair, the lawsuit also demanded that the court issue an injunction to prohibit XM from suffering from technical problems in the future.
Sadly, it apparently isn’t sanctionable conduct, as the James Frey case we’ve discussed (Jun. 2, May 21, and earlier links therein) illustrates, for trial lawyers to file lawsuits demanding refunds that companies have already offered to their customers.
3 Comments
With all due respect to our host…
“The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers”.
— (Act IV, Scene II, Henry VI (Part 2) by William Shakespeare).
Horatio –
You doth take that quote out of context. If anything, Shakespeare is PRAISING lawyers. Taken in whole with the rest of that scene, this is basically Shakespeare’s acknowledgment that the first thing any potential tyrant must do to eliminate freedom is to “kill all the lawyers.”
David, are you sure this isn’t a friendly suit? It must cost a fortune in software and engineering staff to keep the XM operation running. Seems to me a sound business decision to cut those costs and just mandate by court order that the systems stay kept up at all times. I can’t imagine that the satellites and repeaters would have the audacity to defy an injunction.