ZeroHedge article with their typical bait title.
Some of the comments expand further on why this happened (no surprise, the insurance company being a POS to their paying customer):
Geico let the lawsuit go on through judgment without defending its insured as required by the contract for which the insured paid premiums. Poor guy had a multi-million dollar judgment entered against him. Another judge later found that Geico should have defended its insured. Geico said, okay, let's start over then and retry the original case. Court said no, you should have defended your insured from the get-go.
That's why it is Geico's fault. If you're ever sued for something stupid and your insurance company that you've been paying for years to defend you from such lawsuits tells you to pound sand due to some technicality, you would get it.
She didn't hold it between her legs, asshole, it fell when they handed it to her and the lid wasn't on it.
She DID hold it between her legs, asshole, and it DID have a lid on it until she removed it, and it did NOT fall when they handed it to her.
After her grandson pulled the car away from the window and fully stopped by a curb in the parking lot, Ms. Liebeck tried to remove the cup's lid to add sugar and cream. Lacking a flat surface inside the small car, she placed the coffee between her legs to free up both her hands for prying off the lid. As the lid came off, the Styrofoam cup tipped, spilling all the coffee into her lap, where it was rapidly soaked up by her sweatpants. 22 Ms. Liebeck screamed in pain, but Mr. Tiano did not understand, later relating that it at first seemed to be "no big deal." "When it happened, I thought, well, you know, we spilled a cup of coffee; it's basically our fault. You know it was our clumsiness that spilled the coffee." After all, spilling coffee or some other hot liquid on oneself is a common occurrence; "It was just a scald," he said repeatedly in his deposition. The grandson then proceeded to drive out of the parking lot, until a minute later when his grandmother became quite nauseous, and he suspected she was in shock.
Well, asshole, you are right. This will teach me to listen to pundits 15 years ago.
Or at all.
You also had the facts wrong