Lawsuit Mania
Saturday, January 01, 2000
We are making a terrible mistake. We’re being conned. We think our new fashion of protesting/reporting/suing organisations is the new democracy – the little guy standing up to the big guy.
But we are shooting ourselves in the foot. By engaging lawyers and bureaucracies to fight for us, we are going to exterminate small organisations who haven’t got the professional/financial/legal clout to defend themselves.
We are creating more positions for lawyers and bureaucrats. To avoid being sued, everyone will have to conform to a tight little regime defined by lawyers and regulators.
Our society will be taken over by mega-organisations that can employ their own lawyers and play the litigation game – with taxpayers money, ratepayers money, and corporate petty cash. These organisations are more faceless and unaccountable than the small easy targets. We will end up worse off than we started!
If we don’t want to end up strait-jacketed and dominated by very Big Brothers, we must refrain from using this legal “process” on small organisations. Leave some variety, some choice, some freedom, in our lives.
Unless there is a genuine old-fashioned crime being committed, express your grievances personally, and if you still can’t get on with someone, graciously change to someone new – without using the “process” as an instrument of personal reprisal.
Philip O'Carroll