A Wildomar woman has sued Starbucks over burns she says she suffered when a lid came off a cup of coffee at a drive-through window in Riverside County.
Everything that follows is what the lawsuit alleges. None of it has been tested in court.
The claim
Leota Walker says the lid failed as she took the cup, and that the coffee spilled onto her stomach, inner thighs and groin, according to her lawsuit as reported by ABC7. She says the burns were second-degree and required hospitalization and surgery.
The suit is a negligence claim, and its theory is not really about one lid. It is about temperature. Walker's attorney, Daniel DeSantis, put it this way: "Starbucks has known for many, many years that they serve their beverages way too hot. Incidents like these continue to happen over and over and over again and Starbucks refuses to change its safety policies and procedures."
Starbucks declined to comment.
Why this kind of case is not frivolous
The reflex when a hot-coffee lawsuit appears is to reach for the McDonald's case as shorthand for litigation gone silly. That reflex is built on a version of the facts that is mostly wrong.
Stella Liebeck was 79 when she was burned in 1992, and the jury returned its verdict in 1994. Her injuries were third-degree burns over roughly six percent of her body, requiring skin grafts and eight days in hospital. Evidence at trial established that McDonald's served coffee at about 180 to 190 degrees Fahrenheit, hot enough to cause third-degree burns in a few seconds, and that the company had received hundreds of prior burn complaints. Liebeck initially asked the company to cover her medical costs. The jury found her partly at fault and reduced her award accordingly, the trial judge cut the punitive damages substantially, and the parties settled for a confidential and much smaller sum.
The relevant point for Walker's case is the legal question underneath: not whether coffee is hot, which it obviously is, but whether a specific serving temperature combined with specific packaging creates an unreasonable risk that the seller knew about.
What the suit will have to establish
Walker's side will need to show more than that she was burned. It will need evidence about the lid, about the temperature at which this store served the drink, and about what Starbucks knew regarding prior incidents. The company's defense in cases like this typically runs on two tracks: that customers understand coffee is hot and expect it that way, and that a spill is not the seller's doing.
ABC7 reported that a Los Angeles County jury awarded $50 million to a plaintiff in a comparable case against the company last year. That verdict does not establish anything about Walker's claim, but it does explain why her lawyers filed it.
The court and filing date were not specified in the reporting available, and the suit seeks unspecified damages for lost wages and for physical and emotional harm.
