Well, the thing to understand is that "innocent until proven guilty" and "beyond a reasonable doubt" only applies in a criminal case. Civil matters are generally resolved by a "preponderance of evidence".
In a criminal case the standards are so high because it's a person against the goverment. In a civil matter on the other hand it's one private person or group against another. A preponderance of evidence meaning whomever can prove a stronger case.
Also in civil matters you get into concepts like degree of liability. That is to say that someone can be responsible in part for something that happens, without being liable for everything that occured.
To use the Coffee as an example, I believe the initial ruling was overturned, but Mcdonalds was found partially liable as opposed to fully responsible. The idea being that while the coffee was unreasonably hot, the person was also irresponsible in the way they were carrying the beverage.
See the key point of Mcdonald's liability was that nobody expects coffee to be hot enough to burn someone to the point where they need skin grasps. A bit of a burn, some blisters, okay, that's hot water, but the amount of damage inflicted was crazy, as was the temperature of the coffee. When liquids are that hot, typically warning signs are posted, and nobody expects something that hot to be served to them as a drinkable beverage.
In a case of only partial responsibility, your not going to see any massive punitive settlements being awarded. In the Mcdonald's Coffee case the lady lost the huge cash settlement she initially received (or most of it) but I believe Mcdonalds still wound up paying for the medical bills which were extensive... to the tune of a couple hundred thousand dollars if I remember (it's been a long time).
One important thing to understand though is that ordinary people are not expected to have massive investigative abillities (though some might, or have the resources to hire those that do). The goverment on the other hand can afford to employ numerous specialists. This is why the standard of proof in a criminal matter is so high. When two private groups duke it out, one routine criticism of our system is that rich folks, or big businesses, can afford to hire experts, investigators, etc... to form a case much better than a regular (or poor) person accusing them. The goverment can't 'balance' cases like this because if it did, it would cease to be a neutral party (it would be abused).
Basically Civil Law, and Criminal Law, are entirely differant animals, with differant standards of proof, differant rules, and differant policies. I only covered civil law in brief many years ago, because I was studying Forensics. I know considerably more about criminal law when it's a person vs. The State, as opposed to civil law where it's a person against another person, with the state simply providing the court/infrastructure... unless
of course they are also requested to make the desicians as well. The rules for involving judges, juries, etc... can be a bit differant civilly.
