Afterwords on "Case dismissed!"

With regard to yesterday's "Case dismissed!" (whose anecdote could well have been written as a joke), I received the following remarks from a couple of my learned friends:

When I was practicing law I can assure you that I would never have taken this case. It is this kind of garbage that helps screw up our court system. The two biggest problems with our court system are, in order: (1) clients and (2) lawyers who will take anything to court that a client is willing to pay for. Lawyers are supposedly "officers of the court," but you would never know it by the behavior of some of them.
    Everyone screams about activist judges, but then we ask them to decide everything in our society.

What if judges stated awarding fees, expenses, etc. to the aggrieved side in a frivolous lawsuit, to be paid by the idiots? Following after the British legal situation.

That has been a topic of discussion ever since I can remember. Judges in most places actually have the power to award fees to people who are hit with truly frivolous lawsuits, if the judge finds that the lawsuit was filed solely to harass someone and with the knowledge that it had no merit. They are very reluctant to find this – it almost never happens.
    The argument against the idea is that it might discourage potentially meritorious suits because people are afraid of being hit with huge legal fees for the other side if they lose, particularly if the other side has high-powered and expensive legal representation. The Brits have a schedule of legal fees that they award, so they limit the potential liability for the other side’s legal fees. I think, however, that the Brits typically award legal fees to the winning party in all civil lawsuits, even if the suit is not found to be frivolous. (I am not certain of this.)