In 2006, one the company’s neighbors – who had filed 23 previous lawsuits in the county – sued Acra Cast, the Singer family business. Acra Cast, with about 15 employees, is a small foundry, which designs and creates precision metal castings ranging from sculptures to machine parts. The plaintiff alleged that emissions from the foundry had contaminated his cars, his carpet, and the siding of his house.

Singer’s business has always been in full compliance with all environmental regulations. As the case proceeded, Singer learned that the plaintiff did not even own some of the cars for which he wanted compensation, and he had disposed of the carpets and cleaned the house siding before any evidence could be collected. From the samples they could collect, Singer explains that he and his lawyers eventually discovered that the gritty material on the plaintiff’s car could not have been caused by the wax burned at Acra Cast. It contained metal shavings and paint globules, Singer says, and was likely the result of parking near an auto body shop.

Even so, the case dragged on for almost three years, and Acra Cast had to pay for the suit out of pocket. Knowing he had not caused this damage, Singer refused to settle out of court, and he was forced to spend thousands of dollars on legal fees before the case was eventually dismissed in 2009. These expenses, says Singer, burdened his business at a time of extreme hardship. The economy in Michigan and the fact that several of his clients have recently gone out of business meant that profit margins were dangerously narrow. He even had to lay off several of his employees.

“It’s one thing to run a business and to put up with the pain and the hard work associated with that,” Singer says. “It’s an entirely different subject to have someone come in, walk in off the street and – short of putting a gun to your head – try to steal money from you.”

The pool and its founder, Evelyn Graham, welcomed thousands of swimmers every summer for more than ten years. Mt. Laurel Pool provided a gathering place for families and neighbors and summer jobs for teenagers. One former lifeguard says, “When you’re younger, it is difficult to find a place of employment, and Evelyn gave us that opportunity to have a place to learn good work ethics.”

One summer, despite rules painted on the sidewalk and a warning from the lifeguard, a man ran and jumped into the pool, cutting his heel. “There was nothing we did wrong. He did it to himself,” the pool manager says. The lifeguard and manager cleaned and bandaged the cut, and the manager recalls that he said “It’s nothing. It’s just a little cut… No problem.”

But, later, Mt. Laurel Pool was sued. The man and his wife claimed $100,000 for the injury, and Graham’s lawyers recommended that she settle what she considered to be a wildly frivolous case. She was baffled, and, fearing copy cat lawsuits, she decided to close the pool.

In the end, it was the community that suffered most. Hazleton families no longer have a place to swim, and everyone from the ticket takers to the management lost their jobs. “They sue when they shouldn’t sue,” Wanuga says. “But then we have lawyers who thrive on it. They love it. They wish you would sue, too.”

 “I’m sure they have other motives in mind,” says a former lifeguard, “but they can’t possibly take into consideration what it’s doing to everybody else.”

Juskys was in the process of improving an apartment complex he had just acquired when he learned he was being sued. He had been making a variety of repairs to the building and the surrounding facilities, and he was posting regular repair notices on the tenants’ doors, as is required by law.

But one tenant claimed that these notices caused her emotional distress, and she sued Juskys for $500,000. The irony, Juskys says, is that the plaintiff had personally been requesting improvements and then sued him for notifying her that he was planning to make them.

“There’s no way to avoid it,” Juskys says. “At some point, if you’re into real estate, you’re going to get sued. We’re easy prey.” The lawsuit not only took away from Juskys’ ability to focus on his tenants and the properties he manages, it also prevented him from initiating new projects, hiring extra employees and creating jobs.

On the day of the trial, Juskys’ insurance company decided to settle the case, and he was required to pay thousands of dollars out of his own pocket.

Juskys now understands why businesses settle even the most frivolous of lawsuits. Small businesses like his can’t win, he says. Even if he had gone to trial and the jury had ruled in his favor, his only winnings would have been a legal bill, higher insurance rates, and lost time.

“You try to do everything right,” Juskys says, “and it’s just not good enough.”

But that did not stop Monroe Rubber and Gasket from being sued. “I didn’t quite understand why we were receiving these [lawsuits] based on what we do here,” said owner Mike Carter.

Over the past five years, asbestos class action and mass action lawsuits have become notorious for fraud and abuse. Judges and others have exposed scams by which plaintiffs’ lawyers conduct assembly line mass medical screenings, lump hundreds of healthy people into a class with only a few sick plaintiffs, and sometimes falsify medical diagnoses. A number of fraudulent medical screeners have even been banned from work on these cases.

Now that many companies responsible for asbestos are bankrupt, plaintiffs’ lawyers are filing lawsuits against businesses like Monroe Rubber and Gasket that neither produced nor were end-users of asbestos products.

Like in many asbestos suits, nearly all of the people claiming that they were injured by Monroe Rubber and Gasket are healthy. Plaintiffs’ lawyers often bundle claims from a few asbestosis/mesothelioma patients with many other healthy plaintiffs in order to leverage greater settlements.

Mike Kosik, the manager of Monroe Rubber and Gasket, said, “We’re all sympathetic to the people who actually have the disease. The ones that we don’t like are the ones that, ‘OK, I was around it. Put my name on the list. Get me whatever you can.’”

Carter’s business employs dozens of people, including several of his family members and close friends. If Monroe Rubber and Gasket continues to accrue legal costs, all of them will lose their jobs. “This could take us out of business,” said Carter. “It’s just kind of sad because I’ve got a group of people here that work with me. And it’s their livelihoods on the line.”

“If just one of these lawsuits do get through, we’ll all be without a job.”

Months later, the local sheriff came to the Swimms’ house to personally serve Scott with papers. “Scott thought he was going to go to jail. He did not understand what was happening,” said Scott’s mother, Susan. Scott was later deposed by three plaintiffs’ lawyers. The night before, he cried himself to sleep. “Scott was intimidated by that,” his mother said. “That was a scary, scary thing.”

The Swimms’ legal ordeal lasted almost a year. Scott’s grades suffered, and his teachers called Susan to let her know how differently Scott was behaving at school. Seeing how dramatically the suit was affecting their son, the Swimms “wanted the whole thing to stop… and I wanted Scott to be able to get his little smile back,” Susan said.

Since the cost of fighting a lawsuit, no matter its merits, is often more than a settlement, the Swimms’ insurance company decided to settle the suit.

Not only did the lawsuit take an emotional toll, it put a dent in the Swimms’ income as well. The many hours Robb spent handling the lawsuit took him away from his jobs, which both paid by the hour. At the time, Robb was working as a hotel concierge and scanning tickets on the ski mountain. Susan was attempting to start her own small business.

“My son’s age was no concern,” Robb said of the lawsuit. “My family’s situation was no concern. And I do believe the lawyers used Scott and his age as a pawn to get across a certain fear that ‘we’re going to hurt your child more if you don’t pay us.’”

“What we learned is that it wasn’t about justice. And it wasn’t about what really happened in the accident… it was all about money.”

“It would have been very easy for them to let us know that the mirror was a couple of inches too high, and we could have taken care of that right away,” Piazza explained.

The plaintiffs are alleging that the height of Piazza’s mirror inflicted damages each time they visited – for a total of 27 incidents in a three month period. “The multiple visits allow the plaintiffs and their lawyer to sue for damages per visit… Had I not lowered the mirror, they probably would have continued to come and log more visits,” Piazza said. “It’s very clear to me that they were instructed by someone who really knew the law on how many times to visit, [and] what to look for.”

The same plaintiffs and plaintiffs’ lawyers who are suing Piazza have also filed against at least two neighboring restaurants for similar claims. But these few plaintiffs are only examples of a much larger problem.

California is earning a reputation for serial plaintiffs who actively seek out opportunities to file disabilities lawsuits. More Americans with Disabilities Act suits have been filed in California than in any other state, according to an article about a particular “frequent filer” in the San Francisco Weekly. Some of these plaintiffs have filed hundreds or even thousands of disabilities-related claims, often averaging several thousand dollars in profits for each one. (For example stories, see the Orange County Register and the San Diego Union-Tribune.)

Many of these suits have shuttered family-owned restaurants and small businesses. Fortunately, Piazza will keep his doors open, despite the fact that the lawsuit is costing more than the restaurant in question made last year. Given the potential impact of a lawsuit alleging such a minor violation, Piazza worries not only for his restaurant but for “every other business in California that’s having to sustain itself against these lawsuits.”

“Now I’m in the middle of a lawsuit, a very costly lawsuit… [because] I had a mirror in my men’s restroom that was a couple of inches too high.”

Last year, Charles was working in a customer’s attic when he received a call from his service crew. He learned that a man crossed a yellow line and veered into oncoming traffic, hitting one of Chase Air’s two vans head on. The police determined that the accident was the other driver’s fault. But that didn’t stop the ticketed driver from hiring a lawyer to file a claim with Charles’ insurance, threatening to sue if they did not pay for the damages that, according to the police report, he himself caused.

Like they do with many other claims, the insurance company decided that, not withstanding the facts of the accident, it would be more costly to fight and win in court than simply to pay a settlement, so they gave the driver $10,000. Charles said, “The sad truth is that it’s cheaper for [the insurer] to settle as if they did something wrong when they didn’t do something wrong… Thus it’s perpetuated that opportunistic lawyers can continue to do these things. They’re made stronger when who’s made weaker? The American people – the hardworking people.”

In this case, Charles was right. After receiving the money from Charles’ insurance company, the driver and his lawyers next sued the young man who was driving the Chase Air truck. That case is still ongoing.

Speaking about the cost of lawsuits to American businesses, whether in the form of higher insurance costs, out of court settlements, or expensive legal fees, Charles said, “All these things factor into our ultimate price to our consumers, and everybody has to pay for it.”

According to Charles, not only do the costs of liability insurance and other legal fees drive up prices, but one lawsuit could easily put his small start-up company out of business. “Justice needs to be served, but not at the expense of innocent people – that wouldn’t be justice, would it?”

One Saturday during a pop fly drill, a player dove for a ball. The sun got in his eyes, the boy said, and, instead of landing in his glove, the ball hit him in the mouth. The players’ family sued Mike and the league.

“When I first heard about it,” says Marion Mayes, director of a nearby youth league in North Carolina, “I was kind of shocked because of the fact that that’s just normal play.”

The plaintiffs alleged that Mike had been negligent in conducting his drill. The lawsuit dragged on for years before going to trial. “It was very, very stressful,” Mike said.

At first, the plaintiffs named Mike as a defendant personally. After about a year, he was dropped from the case, but he was still subject to extensive depositions and trial preparations as the lawyers prepared to argue the plaintiffs’ claim that the league was responsible for Mike’s alleged negligence.

Finally, a jury decided that Mike was not negligent in conducting his pop fly drill that day.

Though he was eventually vindicated, the lawsuit still taints Mike’s memories of the many years he spent as a volunteer coach.

“What you don’t need is something like this discouraging people from the thought of going out and helping other children,” he says.

“When I went out there and I saw that this man had run over my daughter, I was angry,” said Lauren’s mother, Janet. “Immediately, it went into my head, it was an accident.”

Unfortunately, the cyclist, an adult neighbor, did not think so. He sued 11-year-old Lauren and, later, her family. “We were flabbergasted,” said Jon Ellis, Lauren’s father.

“In many instances, the name of the game from the plaintiff’s perspective is to settle,” Jon said of the tendency for individuals and small businesses to accept settlement offers — even when they have done nothing wrong — in order to avoid expensive legal fees and years of acrimonious litigation. “But we were adamant that we didn’t want that to happen.”

The Ellis’ case dragged on for four years filled with deliberations, trial preparations, media scrutiny, and legal fees. Finally, after three days of trial and two and a half hours of jury instructions, the jury only had to deliberate for fifteen minutes before deciding that Lauren had not been negligent in any way.

Though they won the case, years of fighting the suit certainly took its toll on the Ellis family, especially on Lauren. “I think it’s ridiculous that something like this could get all the way to court,” she said.

Of lawsuit abuse in America, Janet said, “There are many gaps that will allow these suits to proceed and can be very, very damaging.”

Because the geese were protected under the Migratory Species Act, Howard and Kelly were informed that it would have been illegal to disturb the geese. So they put up tape around the planter, posted signs, and waited for the geese to hatch their goslings and move on.

Unbeknownst to Howard and Kelly, the male goose had flapped his wings, honked, and snapped at a woman walking to the fabric store next door to Watercrafters. Startled, she fell on the sidewalk.

Two years later, Howard and Kelly were served with papers announcing that the woman was suing Watercrafters for $750,000, alleging that the goose was Watercrafters’ responsibility.

“We really didn’t have anything to do with the goose other than it was in front of our store,” said Howard.

After extensive preparations, Watercrafters was forced to go to trial. Fortunately, the jury determined that Watercrafters had not been negligent. “It’s possible that, if this lawsuit had come away with a large verdict, it could have caused us to close our doors.”

Howard says that the costs of lawsuit abuse to small businesses are not just financial. They include “the time taken away from your business — the way you run your business. You start to second guess how you do business because you’re worried about the next lawsuit, and that’s not the way to run a company.”