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Details emerged this week of a 59-year-old woman is suing her company’s landlord after she was badly injured in a vicious attack - by a seagull.

Cathie Kelly says she lost her footing and fell heavily after losing her shoe in the feathered assailant’s attack.

The project officer, who works in Greenock, Renfrewshire, Scotland was left upset and injured by the bird’s dive-bombing and now suing the owner of the office building, claiming it did not take sufficient care for her safety.

She’s not the first to take legal recourse over something that on the surface seems quite trivial.

Coffee

In probably the most famous example of a seemingly trivial legal action is Liebeck v. McDonald’s Restaurants,also known as the McDonald’s coffee case and the hot coffee lawsuit

In 1992 Stella Liebeck, a 79-year-old woman from Albuquerque, New Mexico, bought a cup of coffee from a drive through McDonalds and as she removed the lid spilled the entire cup of coffee on her lap.

She was wearing cotton sweatpants; they absorbed the coffee and held it against her skin, scalding her thighs, buttocks, and groin.

Hospitalized for eight days while she underwent skin grafting, followed by two years of medical treatment she sued the fast food giant claiming it was too hot and more likely to cause serious injury than coffee served at any other establishment.

She won an astonishing £1.7million.

Pearson v. Chung

Better known as the “pants lawsuit”, was a civil case filed in 2005 by Roy L. Pearson, Jr., an administrative law judge in the District of Columbia in the United States.

It came as a result of a dispute with a dry cleaning company over a lost pair of trousers.

Pearson sued for £40million for inconvenience, mental anguish and fees for representing himself, as a result of their failure, in Pearson’s opinion, to live up to a “satisfaction guaranteed” sign that was displayed in the store.

Pearson lost the case but only after after four years of trying every legal avenue to win.

Nike

In January this year a 26-year-old pimp from Portland, Oreogan sued Nike for £60million claiming the shoe manufacturer is partially responsible for a brutal beating that helped net him a 100-year prison sentence.

Sirgiorgiro Clardy claims Nike should have placed a label in his Nike Air Jordan shoes warning consumers that they could be used as a dangerous weapon.

He was wearing a pair when he repeatedly stomped the face of a man who was trying to leave a Portland hotel without paying Clardy’s prostitute in June 2012.

In 2013 he was found him guilty of second-degree assault for using his Jordans to beat the man’s face to a pulp.

The man required stitches and plastic surgery on his nose.

His mammoth sentence also includes time for beating a 18-year-old woman he forced to work as a prostitute so badly she bled from her ears.

Susan Boyle

In August last year an American advertising executive is sued her boss for £3.9million over a claim he accused her of looking like Scottish singing star Susan Boyle.

Laura Ziv, 45, from New Jersey, said she was so upset by the comparison to the I Dreamed A Dream singer that she started legal proceedings.

She says he boss mocked her about her age and weight, saying on one occasion in front of a large group of people: “Fatty here is having a cupcake”.

He is also said to have told her she was “worthless, overpaid, and that her days her numbered”.

The constant attacks are alleged to have taken a toll on Ms Ziv’s health, and she began suffering from severe anxiety, headaches, insomnia, tremors, and increased blood pressure - something her doctors said was the cause of a near-fatal brain hemorrhage is April 2011.

Rock

In January a mystery rock which looked like a jelly filled doughnut was spotted in photographs taken on Mars by NASA’s Opportunity rover.

Scientists said the reason it hadn’t been there before was it was most likely something which had been moved by the rover.

However the explanation wasn’t enough for Rhawn Joseph, a neuropsychologist and author, who filed a lawsuit in a California court demanding NASA “thoroughly scientifically examine and investigate” the mystery object that seemingly appeared out of nowhere on the surface of Mars this month.

Joseph claimed the rock wasn’t moved into view by anything; it was already there and grew to its present size in 12 days adding that it was “inexplicable, recklessly negligent, and bizarre” that NASA did not take close-up photos from a variety of angles, and requested that “100 high-resolution photos and 24 microscopic in-focus images of the object’s exterior” be provided to him.

Scientists later decided that a rover wheel had rolled over a rock, broken off a bit of it, and sent the chip downhill to where it was seen days later.

The dark red “filling” could have formed geologically recently after erosion exposed the rock at the surface, scientists said, or it could have formed long ago deep within Mars.

Looks

This one is little vague as to it’s truth but here goes.

A Chinese man divorced his wife and sued her for giving birth to what he called an extremely ugly baby girl.

Apparently at first, he thought his wife had cheated on him because there was no way a good-looking guy like him could have or even produce an unattractive baby.

After his ex-wife proved that the baby was his through a DNA test, she let him in on a little secret – that she had undergone about £70,000 worth of cosmetic surgery in South Korea.

It was reported he sued her for not telling him about the plastic surgeries and making him think she was actually beautiful and apparently won the case and £80,000.

There have been no names attached to this and rumours it was made up but it such a good story if true.

Napkins

The firm behind the golden arches are in the firing line again.

A man is suing McDonald’s for £1million because he says he suffered emotional distress after only receiving one napkin with his order.

Webster Lucas, ordered a Quarter Pounder Deluxe in Pacoima, Calif., lin January this year, and confronted the manager to ask for more napkins.

When the manager allegedly refused, Lucas apparently he said that he should have gone somewhere else.

African American Lucas says that the manager then made a racist comment, mumbling “something about ‘you people’,”.