Playground Bullies continued..

Interesting debate going on in the comments coming off my earlier post about the overblown hysteria surrounding playground litigation. A poster suggests that the skate park in his town shut down after a lawsuit filed by parents of a kid injured while trying to do a handstand on his skateboard.

First, I'd be interested to see whether this was really the basis of the lawsuit. If so, it's totally baseless and the town is way overreacting. But here's my other reaction: isn't this is what insurance is for? Maybe I'm just naive, but I thought that municipalities had insurance to pay for legitimate claims and also defense costs as a way of KEEPING THINGS OPEN. (Oh, and for the record, at least in D.C., defense by city lawyers really is something of a bargain, as most make less than $70,000 a year. Of course, they lose all the time, which probably makes them more expensive than their salaries suggest, but still...)

I really think that a lot of these alleged crises are the result of insurance company shenanigans. We see this a lot in media law, where newspapers have libel insurance so that they can be protected from the costs of legitimate lawsuits, but also so that they can take some calculated risks in running legitimate and serious and true stories that need to be told, often about people who are highly litigious.But lately, libel insurers have been putting the kibosh on stories that are not libelous just because the subject might file a baseless lawsuit, even though the insurance premiums that the paper has paid more than cover the defense costs.

I'm not just a conspiracy theorist in this regard. It's standard practice in the insurance industry, as any D.C. car owner can attest. I can't tell you how many times I've heard this story: Your car gets broken into by a homeless person or sideswiped on a city street. You file a claim with your insurer to fix the minor damage, and they promptly cancel your policy. I suspect that something like this is at work with these threats of playground and skateboard park closings. While I certainly believe that municipal officials wildly overreact to threats of lawsuits, I suspect that they are often reacting more to unethical threats from insurance companies to either jack up premiums to exorbitant rates or to cancel their policies all together...

Comments

[Jim Collins]

Why should a City playground even have to worry about Liability Insurance? What ever happened to assumed risk? If the injury was caused by faulty equipment or by equipment in disrepair, then I agree that a lawsuit may be necessary.

Your statements about insurance companies made me think of something. Has anybody ever thought that there is collusion between the insurance companies and the trial lawyers? It seems to me that you can's do anything these days unless you are insured out the a$$.