How To Give Your Lawyer A Cardiac Arrest .... Brought To You By The Reading Phillies

Hi everyone!  Miss me?  Its been crazy the last few weeks as I have been working on a very large case that is going to trial next month in Oregon state court.  Unfortunately, this has occupied so much of my time that I was unavoidably forced to neglect my duties to The Legal Roller Coaster.  Well that stops here and now because I’ve just seen something that practically screams out for some attention.  And, given that this is my first post of the New Year, I thought it would be fun to start off with something a bit on the lighter side.  Ladies and Gentleman, I give you, “The Defense Lawyer’s Nightmare” a/k/a “The Worst Idea For A Promotional Event In History”  Seriously, you have to check this out – but please, PLEASE, don’t try anything you are about to see at your facility:

 

A Picture Ruins A Thousand Warnings: How Marketing Makes Liability More Likely

I saw a particularly troublesome example of the collision between marketing and operations yesterday when I read a newspaper article on the Internet concerning ride safety at a large amusement park.  In the interest of not drawing any negative attention, I’m going to use an alias for the park, Happy Funland, and I’m not going to link to the article, so you’ll have to trust me on what it said.  At the top of the article was a photograph of a roller coaster descending down a drop.  Sitting in the car were two people, both clearly wearing name tags of the facility, both obviously enjoying their ride screaming and smiling, and both with their hands flailing about up in the air.  Under the picture was a caption reading, to paraphrase, “Employees test riding the WonderCoaster at Happy Funland Amusement Park.”  As if this wasn’t bad enough was this paraphrased quote from a park official:

“Our staff is extremely knowledgeable in what is required to run our rides incredibly safely and safety is our top priority when it comes to operating any ride in the park.”

Really?  ‘Cause the picture of the employees violating the safety rules sure doesn’t indicate to me that at least these employees are “extremely knowledgeable in what is required to run” this ride “incredibly safely.”  Worse, if someone ever gets injured on this ride because they weren’t holding on, this is exactly the kind of thing that plaintiff’s lawyers will jump on and that makes my job defending the facility a whole lot tougher.  This one highly publicized picture or other similar shots in marketing brochures or television commercials can (and will) come back to bite you (in that place that’s supposed to remain in the seat the whole ride) in the event of a lawsuit.  “Do As I Say, Not As I Do” is simply not a ticket to guarding against legal liability or building a solid liability defense.