In this lesson, we're going to talk about remedies or damages that may be associated with torts. First, we'll talk about what a tort is, and some of the theories of liability associated with torts. And then we'll talk about some of the types of remedies that a court may fashion to help make a plaintiff who was injured by a defendant hole through tort law. First what is a tort? A tort is a wrongful act that results in some kind of injury to another, and it's subject to civil legal liability. Now, there's some kind of injury that I allude to here is quite broad. It can be an injury to someone's person, to their property, to their reputation. It also can be interference with their contractual relations. It's a pretty broad umbrella of the type of injury that can result from the wrongful act that would be actionable by tort law. And also I should highlight here that tort law is a civil law, the legal exposure that you have for torts, it's really under the civil context, meaning that the remedies are largely monetary or money damages. And there may be equitable relief that a court confession to help remedy tort violations. Here's a list of some common examples of torts. Non exhaustive list towards was a pretty broad area, and any wrongful act that leads to an injury would constitute a tort. But some examples that you may be familiar with include negligence, personal injury, false imprisonment, assault and battery, infliction of emotional distress, defamation, invasion of privacy, conversion, trespass. And note like some of these things that are, torts could also be the subject of a criminal action. So, for example, assault and battery, why that's a tort because it's a wrongful act that could lead to the injury to someone's body in many places, it's also a crime. Now, liability theories, here's the theories by which someone could be held responsible for a tort. You have direct liability issues. This is, you as a defendant or directly responsible for the injury that a plane has suffered. That's direct liability. You also have vicarious liability. Vicarious liability essentially says while you didn't commit the tort based on your position, relative to the person who did commit the tort, we're going to hold you responsible for the tort. This is very important for you as a business owner, because employee, employer relationships fall within this vicarious liability theory. It essentially says that as an employer, we're going to hold you responsible for the actions of your employees, particularly when your employees are acting within the scope of your employment. That's the vicarious liability theory. And finally, the joint and several liability theory. This is the idea where you have multiple people contributing to the tort and it's very hard for the plaintiff to figure out who should I go after for liability? Am I obligated to go after all of them? Can I only go after one of the actors? And what this theory says is as a plaintiff, if there are multiple people that contributed to the tort. You can go after all of them collectively, or you can go after some subset of them, or any one of them individually and each would be responsible for all of the damages in the torque or collectively all of them will be responsible. The plaintiff only gets one recovery and they can either get that from the collection of the defendants who participated in the tort or they can get it from any subset of that, even down to just being one of the actress. So let's talk about damages. And this is the monetary relief that a planet can get as a result of a tort. It's also called compensatory damages because it's designed to compensate the plaintiff for the injury to their person or their property or to their reputation, that's the idea. It's of a plaintiff loses money as a result of a tort or has hospital bills, medical bills. Those are compensatory damages, but also under this idea of actual damages. Any reasonably foreseeable consequential damages are also available to the plaintiff. So, you have compensatory damages, which essentially it pays the bills, but you also have consequential damages. So, as a result of a tort if a plaintiff suffers emotional distress, and it would have been foreseeable that the plaintiff would have suffered emotional distress as a result of this tort, than any monetary damages around that emotional distress can also be recoverable by the plaintiff in a toward action. Torts also allow punitive damages. Now punitive damages, also called exemplary damages. They're designed to accomplish two things. One to punish the defendant for doing something really, really bad. So if it's a gracious conduct, punitive damages are available to punish the defendant for engaging in such egregious conduct. And the other motivation for punitive damage is to deter others from engaging in similarly bad conduct. And so what punitive damages are designed to do is to be an award on top of the compensatory and consequential damages that the plaintiff is entitled to in order to send this broader message to the defendant and to the public. Now compensatory damages are the actual damages that plaintiffs incurred as a result of the tort. Punitive damages are really what a jury decides is necessary to achieve these two goals. Now, the only limitations on punitive damages is the idea that they can't be arbitrary or grossly excessive. And there's a famous example of this. There was 82 year old woman who went to a drive through at McDonald's to get a cup of coffee. After she got a cup of coffee, she accidentally spilled the coffee on her lap and suffered third degree burns. Now the back story of this is typically a cup of coffee from a home coffee pot it's about 115° or so maybe upwards to 130°. This coffee at McDonald's, the temperature was 180° or so. McDonald's decided that hey, if we have the temperature hotter, it makes for better coffee. So they made the intentional decision to have their coffee much harder than what it would normally be from like a home coffee pot. But this 82 year old woman suffered 30 degree burns sued McDonald's. But as a result of this lawsuit, she was awarded about $160,000 in actual damages. So that's the compensatory damages that we talked about and the consequential damages. $160,000 that was meant to compensate her for the third degree burns, the medical bills that she racked up as a result of that. But in addition to the $160,000 in actual damages, the jury awarded her 2.7 million dollars in punitive damages to send a message to McDonald's about the conduct of offering coffee and such a very high temperature. $2.7 million, which is much more than the $160,000 that she received in compensatory damages. Now, later, the court reduced the punitive damages down to a few $100,000 because the court reason that 2.7 million was grossly excessive, particularly in light of the amount of actual damages that the plane had received. But the idea that I'm trying to highlight for you here is when you're involved in a litigation as a result of a tort, the jury has the ability to not only give the plaintiff actual damages, things that they've actually racked up. But they can also have some pretty sizable awards to punish conduct that either your company or employees extra company have engaged in. So the legal exposure there is pretty broad and it's fairly severe. So you want to be sure that you are very cognizant of the conduct that your employees are engaging in with respect to tort law. In addition to monetary damages, there's also equitable remedies that a court may be able to provide a plaintiff in a tort action. These are typically available when money by itself is not enough to satisfy the injury that the plane have suffered. These usually come in the form of injunctions where the court can prohibit certain conduct or the court can order the defendant to engage in certain conduct in order to make things right for the plaintiffs. So in summary torts can pose an enormous legal exposure for your company. If you remember the McDonald's case and punitive damages that are associated with that that sometimes can be a very, very large number. So there's huge exposure here when your employees are engaging in certain conduct that could lead to a tort action. The remedies for tort action may include actual damages, punitive damages and even equitable remedies that a court may fashion in order to satisfy the plaintiff's claims.
