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The plaintiff was a convicted drug dealer and ex-con, yet the jury believed him and not Simon's firm. That is an excellent indication that there was pretty hot documentary evidence damning Simon's firm.

Yes indeed jurys are intelligent, fair, impartial and immune from knee-jerk emotional arguments based on the headlines of the day. That's why we all know that O.J. Simpson was not guilty --- because there are no stupid juries. So there just had to be more to it. Like when the greedy malicious McDonald executives conspired to scald people with coffee. < / sarcasm >

No there wasn't any "damning" evidence that hasn't come out. The Simon family was tried for being a "big business" and the plaintiffs lawyers said as much in their closing arguments. Fortunately it is NOT against the law to be a large successful business. I predict that this whole thing is going to be tossed out long before the November election.

Lots of strange things happen in jury trials. A judge in my court reduced a jury verdict by several million dollars in a wrongful death case because the jury was so mad at the defendant. The idiot was making faces at the victim's family when they were on the witness stand. His own attorney (insurance defense counsel) yanked him out of the courtroom and told him not to come back upon realizing what was happening.

Simon's case involved a commercial fraud dispute. IMO what most likely happened was the appearance of a "smoking gun" in the documentary evidence. That is usually the case when the punitive damages are so high. Juries do not like being lied to.

What puzzles me here, though, is why it wasn't settled if there was such documentary evidence. That smells like the defense attorneys. or the defendants, or both, got emotionally involved and failed to evaluate the risks. Simon's campaign incompetence indicates such cluelessness that I suspect, from the amazing punitive damages, his whole family is like that.

As for McDonald's coffee, I had one of those cases cross my desk. Worse, it involved a McDonald's in a Wal-Mart in my town whose layout I was personally familiar with. What happened in that case (rather ghastly third degree burns) was that the coffee stand seperate from, and out of sight of, the cash register where the staff was.

Normal coffee procedure in fast-food restaurants is for the coffee warming pot to be separate from the percalator. Coffee comes out of the percalator at about 190-205F and drops into a pot where the staff is. They let it cool for a few minutes, then take it to a warming stand in the customer area. Coffe in the warming pots is supposed to be served at 165-180F.

In this place the percalator was in the customer area and dropped directly into the warming pot. Customers could serve themselves coffee which was 25-30F higher in temperature than normal coffee, and the staff wouldn't know it. All the expert testimony was that this was a screwup beneath the standard of care for fast food restaurant coffee operations, and had been for thirty years.

We denied a summary judgment motion on that basis, the case settled, and the coffee stand in that McDonald's was moved into the kitchen.