"SteveLehto" (stevelehto)
07/13/2017 at 08:00 • Filed to: None
6
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"SteveLehto" (stevelehto)
07/13/2017 at 08:00 • Filed to: None | 6
| 15 |
Ever wonder what inspires someone to become an attorney? For me, an occasion where I was ripped off by a transmission shop had a lot to do with it. I sued them and won. And then went to law school.
I told !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! a few years ago but figured that some people who missed it or don’t like reading all those word-things might want to hear the story straight from the source.
The thumbnail though, is this: The shifter linkage in my Chevy Monza fell apart and I foolishly called a trans shop that offered free towing and free estimates. They tore my trans apart, damaged it, lied to me about it, and then spent WEEKS trying to fix problems of their own making.
After I got the car back I sued them and won. And filed a complaint with the state’s attorney general which was one of the inspirations for “Operation Shifty.” Let’s just say they were a LOT happier before they met me. But I can’t take all the credit for that - some of it obviously goes to the undercover agents who went in and nailed them.
Here’s the audio:
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And the video:
And the pic at the top is me on the hood of
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. I found the pic recently and it may be the only one I have of me with it.
Follow me on Twitter: !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!!
Hear my podcast on iTunes: !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!!
Steve Lehto has been practicing law for 25 years, almost exclusively in consumer protection and !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! He wrote !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! and !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!!
This website may supply general information about the law but it is for informational purposes only. This does not create an attorney-client relationship and is not meant to constitute legal advice, so the good news is we’re not billing you by the hour for reading this. The bad news is that you shouldn’t act upon any of the information without consulting a qualified professional attorney who will, probably, bill you by the hour.
Berang
> SteveLehto
07/13/2017 at 08:05 |
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Complete, tangent, but is there any legal situation where you may actually obtain a defendant’s pants as compensation?
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SteveLehto
> Berang
07/13/2017 at 08:09 |
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If you are referring to suing “the pants off” someone, note that the phrase does not connote change in ownership. They maintain title to the pants but the defendant is merely de-pantsed.
Quadradeuce
> SteveLehto
07/13/2017 at 08:55 |
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Question:. How do you go about finding a transmission shop that’s not crooked? Even your average shade tree mechanic knows little about transmissions, especially autos. The shop holds all of the cards. I can’t even fathom the amount of fraud that goes on in the transmission repair world.
Thankfully I’ve never had a transmission issue in my 20 years of driving. If GM is good for one thing, it’s been drivetrains.
TheRealBicycleBuck
> SteveLehto
07/13/2017 at 09:33 |
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My first car was an ‘83 Mazda B-2000 which my mom had purchased new and handed down to me. Within the first year of driving it, the truck decided I was driving too fast and figured the best course of action was refusing to stay in fifth gear. If I didn’t keep my hand on the shifter, it would pop into neutral.
I took offence at the truck’s decision. After all, who was in charge here? Off to the dealer it went.
They were prompt about taking the truck apart and finding the problem. A bolt inside the transmission had come loose and knocked a few teeth off of fifth gear. Since the truck was still under warranty, the repair cost was covered. Yay!
A week later we went to retrieve the truck. It was a cold January morning, so I thought the smoke coming from the tailpipe was normal condensation. Running rough? To be expected on such a cold day!
Being young and foolish, I didn’t bother to take a closer look. I was just excited to have my truck back! It wasn’t until we left the lot and stopped at the next light that I realized something was really wrong. The smokescreen was so thick I couldn’t see my mom in her car behind me. After briefly imagining myself as the title character in a Bond film, I made my way back to the dealer.
The service advisor came out to talk to us about what might be wrong. We found a small laundry list of problems. First on the list - why is is smoking? Would it have anything to do with the extra 33 miles on the odometer? Who went joyriding in my truck and what did they do to it? Why was all the paint missing from the front of the hood? Why does the engine bay look like a quart of oil was dumped everywhere?
The smoke was from a blown head gasket. The 33 miles? They never accounted for that. They “discovered” that the mechanic didn’t take the hood off before extracting then engine and transmission and the paint was missing because they scraped the front of the hood with the cherry picker. No explanation was given for why they didn’t drop the transmission from beneath the truck.
Looking back, I suspect that they did a full engine & transmission swap, trading my relatively pristine drivetrain for one with significantly more miles. When the weather warmed, the little truck overheated twice. The dealer wouldn’t touch it and voided the warranty saying that it was my fault. The first time it happened, the shop we took it to machined the warped head and put it back together. The second time happened just a week later and was traced back to a bad thermostat. That time it needed a new head.
Looking back, I’m pretty sure the cooling system was fouled by oil that the dealer didn’t bother to clean out after they fixed the head gasket the first time. Really, the poor little truck never ran the same. I drove it for several more years until it was put out of its misery in a wreck.
Now that I think about it, I’m sure I should have taken the dealer to court.
jimz
> SteveLehto
07/13/2017 at 09:48 |
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note to self- don’t open up a transmission repair shop on Crooks Rd.
Roadster Man
> SteveLehto
07/13/2017 at 10:03 |
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What if it was a contract and the plaintiff won the case, demanded specific performance, and specific performance was to gain title to the other guy’s pants?
Kiltedpadre
> Quadradeuce
07/13/2017 at 10:17 |
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If you have a regular mechanic you trust they should be able to tell you what shops they have worked with in the past.
The cartalk.com website is still active. It has a section where people post recommendations and reviews of mechanics.
Urambo Tauro
> SteveLehto
07/13/2017 at 10:28 |
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Thanks for re-sharing this story; I did miss it the first time around. Boy, that shop really dug themselves a hole!
thejustache
> Quadradeuce
07/13/2017 at 11:10 |
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My outback xt started popping out of second gear a couple months back and I limped it to the local transmission shop I’d heard pretty good things about. 2 days later I got a call from the owner who basically said “I’m sorry, but I’m not going to touch your car. We don’t really do manuals anymore and it’s a turbo so I feel like it’s going to be a pain to work on. I don’t really have any suggestions for where you should take it either.”
My first reaction was “what? A transmission shop that refuses to work on a transmission? It’s a standard subaru 5speed, nothing complex about it turbo or not.” I ended up calling around and found a small local mechanic that specializes in Subarus who found me a cheap used gearbox with a warranty and managed to get it in over the weekend for a surprisingly low price. My thought now is “I still don’t get how a transmission shop can not know how to work on a transmission, but I’m glad they were up front rather than messing around and charging me a few thousand dollars.” I guess in the end I’ll call that a win?
ateamfan42
> SteveLehto
07/13/2017 at 12:13 |
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“You only need 3.”
Haha! That’s a hoot. Don’t you think if you only needed three, the car manufacturer would have saved the money and not put on 4?
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ateamfan42
> thejustache
07/13/2017 at 12:20 |
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A transmission shop that refuses to work on a transmission?
Isn’t that baffling? Years ago I had a pickup with a rear differential that disintegrated, and had to find a place to fix it. I found a place that advertised as “The Drive-Train Specialists”, and figured that would be the one. When I called, they said, “no we don’t work on differentials”. What parts of the drivetrain do you do, then?
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SteveLehto
> Roadster Man
07/13/2017 at 23:49 |
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That is one possibility. The other is to file the Extraordinary Writ of Adverse Pants. If granted, title is then vested in the prevailing party.
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SteveLehto
> ateamfan42
07/13/2017 at 23:50 |
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Technically, if you make it tight enough, you only need one. It just has to be REALLY tight.
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Roadster Man
> SteveLehto
07/14/2017 at 08:58 |
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Agreed, often called the “Writ of Habeas Pantsus,” that presents another possibility to gain title to someone’s pants, but it appears to have fallen out of favor with the courts after my caselaw research.
But wait.... If my uncle bequested his pants to me in his Will, and I see the Executor walking around town wearing my uncle’s pants, I would be able to sue the Executor/Executrix of my uncle’s Estate to give me my rightfully inherited pants! That would essentially “sue the pants off” the Executor of my uncle’s Estate, however he was wrongly using the corpus of the Estate for his own purposes, so I’d make sure to get that Executor fired as well!
Dammit I can think of more but I really need to get back to work.
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SteveLehto
> Roadster Man
07/14/2017 at 10:20 |
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Remember Caveat Pantsus: If the pants are on fire, you may not want possession of them - merely to hold title and take possession at a later date if and when the pants are extinguished.