Greed used to be considered a bad thing, a vice. How often have we heard that line from St. Paul's epistle about the love of money being the root of all evil? How many times have parents and teachers reminded us of Aesop's fable about the dog that lost the bone he had while trying to snag another one from his reflection in a stream?
There's always been a counter narrative of materialism and self-indulgence, of course, promulgated in particular by commercial interests through advertising and popular culture: the every-man-for-himself message of grabbing all the gusto you can, just doing it, and making everybody show you the money.
What was the mindset of Danna Morrison, who was reluctant to accept a $350,000 settlement in a pelvic mesh lawsuit because she thought she deserved much more if her case went to trial before a jury?
Her attorneys at the Georgia law firm of Blasingame, Burch, Garrard & Ashley did not share her optimism about going to court and urged her to settle, which she eventually did after much prodding. Having pocketed her six-figure check, she still wasn't happy, however, because she remained convinced that she could have gotten a seven-figure one by going to trial. Rather than being grateful to the attorneys who'd negotiated the settlement for her, she concluded that they'd cheated her and decided to sue them for depriving her of a much higher outcome.
Might she have lost her case and gotten nothing? Of course. That's also what the attorneys told her, and that's why she's suing them.
Morrison filed the malpractice lawsuit this past May in Marion County, Tennessee, but it was transferred to federal court in Tennessee and then subsumed in multidistrict pelvic mesh litigation in the Southern District of West Virginia.
Now Morrison will finally have her day in court – and maybe learn the hard way that it's often better to quit while you're ahead.