I would need to see the whole law and what rule 11B exactly says before answering.. please post a link to the law you have taken a quote from. I question it partly because it says.. if "after notice and reasonable opportunity to respond.. the court determines that..
What "after notice and reasonable opportunity to respond".. would occur if a jury decides that a lawsuit is frivolous? why would there need to be notice and reasonable opportunity to respond?
The jury doesn't get to decide if the lawsuit is "frivolous". Frivolty is determined by the judge. Frivolous means that even if all the factual allegations in the complaint are assumed to be true, it still doesn't state a cause for action. A judge can later cut off a suit on a motion for summary judgment (Rule......56 I want to say.
Celotex standard), which is based also on evidence already produced in discovery and argued in the motion, on a different standard, but which standard has to do with the probability of success at trial.
And the rule is publicly available. Just google "Fed. R. Civ. P. 11". There's a quote limit here. Swap 56 for 11 for the other one.
In addition to those rules, some states like MA have additional provisions for some types of lawsuits. For example, medical malpractice suits have to pass a panel of judges that makes somewhat similar rulings to the first two types mentioned, and are also able to knock out the truly pointless/harassing suits.
On top of all that, appellate courts can always knock down damages if the jury did something crazy. For example, the famed 83 million dollar McDonald's coffee lawsuit damages were knocked way down. Somewhere in the thousands, if old memory serves.
And finally, the fact of the matter is that
we as a group are responsible for what we call crazy damages. Juries drawn from the community rule for the plaintiff and then aware damages. This case sounds stupid, yes, but I'd imagine that in the big damage cases - someone's toddler is burned horribly, scarring it mentally and physically for life - a lot of people who rail against crazy damages would begin to have other thoughts if they sat there and were asked to say how much money a life of misery is
worth.
Then, there are punitive damages, which aren't about making a plaintiff rich - that's a side effect - or about that one plaintiff's pain. They're about making sure a big pocket entity stops behaving in that way. Say, by knowingly ignoring a design flaw in a car that tends to cause that model to explode and burn its occupants to death horribly when impacted from the rear at a given angle and/or actively suppressing that flaw so it can sell more cars before reality catches up.
I don't do civil law, but I know/remember enough to know that it really isn't quite the way people who complaint about it a ton would have it. If there's one thing you do, you could bump up the standard from preponderance of evidence (greater than 50%) to "Clear and convincing". Not sure how much that would do since it doesn't have a percentage nore does it really make any sense to assign a percentage. But given a sufficiently long explanation of how "clear and convincing" is more than "more likely than not" you'd see less questionable cases.
