So it turns out that crafty lawyers can make a buck off of just about anything these days. According to a recent listing, they may even be able to get you a settlement if you or a loved one were injured while playing the mobile hit, Pokemon Go.
At this point, it feels like I'm working off of a rejected script from Better Call Saul, but this is actually a legitimate posting from Craigslist concerning folks who were "injured playing Pokemon Go."
The advertisement is for the Law Office of Thomas Larmore, based out of Las Vegas, Nevada. The listing even reads like one of those daytime injury lawyer commercials, beginning by painting a picture of what a "fun idea" playing Pokemon Go is, running around and collecting "imaginary monsters around the real world."
The listing claims that, though Pokemon Go only recently released, the injuries are already rolling in. From hitting your head on a tree to twisting your ankle in a hole or getting hit by a car, supposedly there are a lot of ways chasing Pikachu in Pokemon Go can go really, really wrong. We already knew that, actually, as a couple of deaths have now been tied to folks playing the game, a bunch of teens got lost in an actual mine, and folks have walked off of cliffs or run their vehicles into trees or cop cars. Sure, all of those incidents are 100 percent the fault of the person who was playing the game while they should have been paying attention to something else, but, hey, maybe the law will see things differently.
The advertisement is for folks who were either injured while playing Pokemon Go or injured by people who were playing Pokemon Go, so Larmore seems to have all of his bases covered, just in case.
In short, Larmore feels compensation may be due from "the people who came up with this idea but didn't really think it through to its logical conclusion." They state that the game encourages people to travel through a "world full of hazards" with their eyes practically glued to their smartphone screen. They then go on to call Niantic (the developer) negligent and claim that the fact that it leads to injury is actually a product defect that creates strict liability. Most of those words are in all caps, so you know they're super important.
Again, we're no lawyers, but we're pretty sure this is akin to saying that the inventor of the automobile is directly responsible for all deaths tied to their device and not, you know, human error 90 percent of the time. We're kind of curious if Larmore has ever actually booted up Pokemon Go, as the game offers a warning to be aware of your surroundings every time you turn it on and offers various other warnings on a regular basis.
In the words of My Cousin Vinny, we're not so sure this case holds water.
