THE BEGINNING OF THE WORLD

When I was a brand new lawyer, in the 1970's, personal injury cases would settle with the plaintiff signing a release. This was before computer generated documents, and so the release typically consisted of a one-page "fill in the blank" form. One would insert the plaintiff's name, the name of the person being released, the date and location of the accident. The plaintiff would then sign the release, the insurance company would issue it's check and that would be that.

But times have changed and life is no longer so simple. Now when a plaintiff settles a personal injury claim, he typically receives a ten or twenty page release, carefully prepared by an insurance company attorney who apparently has a lot of time on his hands. The release is broken up into different sections and subsections and even subsections to the subsections. Everything is organized using a sequence of carefully numbered paragraphs that all look very official.

But for me the most interesting change in this new generation of releases is that the plaintiff no longer simply discharges the defendant for injuries caused in a specific accident. Now there is typically an additional paragraph in which the plaintiff releases the defendant from any and all causes of action he might have against the defendant "from the beginning of the world."

Yes, that's right. The beginning of the world. Not wrongs committed within the last ten years or fifty years or one hundred years, but going back all the way to "the beginning of the world."

I don't know when the world began, but I suspect that none of my clients were alive back then, let alone the defendants that they are suing. Yet these new releases allow for the possibility that the plaintiff and the defendant walked with dinosaurs during the Mesozoic age. And not only that, but that the defendant did the plaintiff some wrong way back then, so that now a historic cause of action needs to be released in this, the 21st century.

Is this ridiculous? Absolutely.

No wonder lawyers are so disliked