Gagne With A Spoon

Posted on March 20, 2008

I didn’t “always want to be a lawyer”. I assume most doctors probably wanted to cure the sick from the time they were kids. Teachers surely had the desire to develop young minds from the time they were schoolchildren themselves. I think it is different for lawyers. Not many grew up with a burning desire to defend a corporation’s exclusive right to use a talking Chihuahua to sell Mexican fast food.

My own decision to go into law came after the following dialogue:

Father: “Son, I am proud of you. This year you receive your degree in Political Science. Ready to go out and take on the real world?”
Son: “I should say not.”
Father: “Well then, have you ever considered law school?”
Son: “How long does that take?”
Father: “Another three years of school.”
Son: “Uh. Okay.”

However inauspiciously I came to this craft, and however ill-informed (I was accepted into law school before ever stepping into a courtroom, even as an observer), as a young man I did have some vague notions about the legal system. Those notions were, at the time, pretty much what any layman could have learned by watching Lewis Stone play Judge Hardy in the old Mickey Rooney movies of the thirties and forties. That the legal system was fair, just, and humane, and that the results obtained would, in the final analysis, seem “right” to the average guy in the street. Everyone could understand that the law should protect those who behaved correctly.

Even after the passage of many years, many experiences and many cases, I still think the naïve notions of my youth are pretty good ones. I like be able to explain to clients, friends, acquaintances, and strangers that the results obtained through the legal system of this great State are reasonable, fair and just. It is pretty hard to do so these days. Judge Hardy, were he still alive, might well be scratching his head.

On February 28, 2006, the Michigan Court of Appeals decided the case of Gagne v Schulte (No. 264788). The decision was unpublished and there was no oral argument. The case was presumably handled on the Court’s “fast-track”, “rocket docket”, “express train to perdition”, or whatever euphemism is currently used to describe the superficial treatment received by many cases on appeal these days.

The decision itself is not very enlightening. An auto negligence case, the opinion is only five paragraphs long. There are a few sentences in paragraph one stating how the case came to be there. Three paragraphs of boilerplate follow, saying absolutely nothing specific about the facts. In the last paragraph, the Court affirms the dismissal of the case, stating that there was no evidence that Ms. Gagne’s (her name is never mentioned) injuries: “…affected her life so extensively that it altered the trajectory or course of her entire normal life.” Mr. Schulte was found to have no liability to Ms. Gagne.
A typically non-specific, innocuous decision in this day and age. One that would have gone entirely unnoticed (except by Ms. Gagne) if it were not for the dissent written by Judge Peter O’Connell, bless him. Judge O’Connell provides us with a great many facts about the case. It seems the accident happened because Mr. Schulte, while driving drunk, drove his truck across the center line into oncoming traffic, causing a head-on collision with Ms. Gagne. She suffered a concussion, with a loss of consciousness when she hit the windshield. Her torso bent the steering wheel and her knee slammed into the dashboard. She tore her ACL and medial meniscus. This injury required extensive reconstructive surgery which occurred ten months after the accident. The dissent describes in detail the operation, including the drilling of multiple “tunnels” in Ms. Gagne’s shin and thigh, which were then filled with donated tissue, filled with bone plugs and secured with screws. This was described by the surgeon as “a very big surgery”. As to the meniscus, the torn portion could not be repaired and had to be removed. It would not regenerate, according to the surgeon.

The dissent describes the treatment received before and after the surgery, and goes on to say that even seven months after the surgery (nearly a year and a half after the accident), the surgeon did not feel that her atrophied muscles had strengthened sufficiently to allow Ms. Gagne to return to work as a house cleaner. Ms. Gagne, age 21 at the time of the accident, was unable to return to the work she did at the time of the accident. Similarly, she remained restricted from a variety of her recreational activities including ice skating, rollerblading, gymnastics, and dancing, all of which Ms. Gagne enjoyed before the accident. The evidence did show that she had permanently lost a measure of stability in the knee. For the sake of brevity, I have summarized Judge O’Connell’s excellent account of Ms. Gagne’s injuries, treatment, and restrictions.

Notwithstanding all of this, the majority ruled that, as a matter of law, without even being given the opportunity to tell her story to a jury, Ms. Gagne had not met this State’s minimal standard of an injury serious enough to require the negligent party to answer in damages to the victim. The drunk driver has no responsibility to Ms. Gagne for the injuries his conduct caused.

Try explaining the sense of that to John Q. Public. When I talk about the Gagne case to those too unsophisticated to understand the judicial system (that is, the good citizens of this state), I get the kind of tilted-head looks one usually gets from the family dog when the master of the house does something the canine senses is particularly stupid. I guess they (the citizens, not the dogs) are not intelligent enough to understand that Ms. Gagne is not a victim. She is just a small part of the Michigan’s Courts paramount mission to eliminate frivolous lawsuits in this state. Frivolous suits like, apparently, Krysta Gagne’s.

In order to eliminate such suits, the courts have held that, although pain is real, because it can’t be objectively measured, it must be held to be irrelevant. Unless you subjectively complained of pain ten years before your auto accident. In that case, it is conclusive proof of a pre-existing condition.

Now, if a member of my family was hit by a drunk driver, had a serious surgery, could not ever return to the work he did before the accident, and had the kind of residuals that prevented him from doing a laundry list of recreational activities he previously enjoyed, I don’t think it would be of much consolation if I told him: “Thank God, according to the state of Michigan you weren’t badly hurt”. Imagine if we, as high powered attorneys, missed as little time as ninety days from our practices. Many of us would not have a business left to return to. Insignificant, according to our Courts.

Now there is an answer to all of this. Our financial responsibility laws, or more commonly known, our no-fault system. This protects Ms. Gagne fully, or I guess as fully as the Courts feel she deserves. However, let’s take a closer look. Our no-fault system requires us to purchase collision coverage on our own cars, if we are to have any at all. So, in this case it is not unreasonable to speculate that Ms. Gagne, as a very young person, with a comparatively low paying job, was driving an older car, where maintaining collision coverage would be an unwise investment. Our no-fault system could well have had Mr. Schulte fully compensated for the collision damage done to his car by his negligence, and left Ms. Gagne without transportation. Just speculating.

Now, our no-fault laws do specify a minimum limit of liability coverage we all must carry to protect ourselves if we our sued for the pain and suffering from an accident caused by our negligence. One would think that the state would set this minimum high enough so we are provided protection from most of the claims that meet the serious impairment threshold. Not all, but most. That would make sense. If Krysta Gagne’s injuries are not serious to meet the minimum standard, then our coverage would only come into play for really, really serious injuries. So, what has the legislature, in its wisdom, determined to be the minimum coverage the citizens of this state need to protect themselves (as a matter of law)? $20,000. That is not a typo. If Krysta Gagne’s injuries are not serious enough to have a jury even hear the evidence on the threshold issue, how far does $20,000 go to protect you or me from the kind of claims that do meet the threshold in the current environment. The no-fault act makes the negligent party responsible for wage loss after three years. How far will $20,000 go to protect us then?

So, who goes to bed feeling safer, in this State, after the Gagne decision, and after review of our no-fault law? Mr. Schulte, certainly. Insurance companies? Drunk drivers, generally? The average citizen of this State should not. Our streets are not safer because of this decision, and our insurance rates won’t go down because of it either.

I wish we could bring Judge Hardy back and have him talk to our judges and legislators. You know, the kind of talk he would have with Andy at near the end of every movie, when Andy just couldn’t figure out the right thing to do. A lot of common sense in those talks. A lot of humanity. We need both now. Badly.

DIVERSIFICATION

On a semi-related note, in the current environment, it is wise for a lawyer to consider diversification of his practice. In this regard, I have made a few attempts at writing questions for the up-coming bar exam. Don’t know how well that pays. Here is my first attempt, in the area of premises liability law.

Question: Please identify any viable causes of action in the following fact scenario under current Michigan Law.
A clerk in a grocery store is stocking shelves in an aisle displaying fruit juice. In opening a cardboard box, he slits a plastic bottle of apple juice, causing it to leak onto the floor. The clerk notices the leak, but is too busy to clean it up and later gets called to another aisle. He forgets about the leak and never comes back.
Thirty minutes later a customer, pushing a full cart, turns into the aisle. She looks up at an advertisement on an upper shelf, telling her about a two for one sale on apple juice. As she pushes her cart to the juice section, she slips and falls on the juice spill, falling backwards into a display of light bulbs, breaking many. As she hits the floor she sustains a badly fractured wrist, and severe lacerations from broken bulbs. She undergoes surgery for the fracture and loses her factory job as a result.
Answer: The store owner can sue the customer for the cost of the broken light bulbs.

Better not quit my day job.

*Although I do not know Ms. Gagne, for purposes of this article I assume she pronounces her last name Gag-nee (like the Greg Gagne of the Minnesota Twins, rather than Gon-yay, like the National League Cy Young award winner of 2004).

Mike Butler is an attorney with the firm of Bernstein and Bernstein (not Sam) in Southfield.

Michael Butler is an attorney in the Detroit area. He can be reached through http://www.Attorneybutler.net

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