Toyota Class-Action Lawsuits "A Little Cottage Industry Of Its Own"

“At some point, Toyota may have to decide to settle out of court. It’s far more expensive to go to court and would prolong the pain for Toyota and many families.” ....or in other words, "We have no hard evidence to prove negligence on Toyota's part, but the lack of tort reform in the US allows us to to legally blackmail corporations for huge settlements." Lawyers are not in this because they care about the little guy.....been there, done that, paid my money, I lose, they always win.

Bertel had a comment in a thread in the last week or two that I'd like to see him reprint here. He talked about the much higher cost of liability insurance for products shipped to the US or Canada - if coverage was available at all - and the lower lawyer fees in most European countries on product liability cases. But then he mentioned the much greater pre-sale regulation in those countries. They don't have the product liability lawsuits in large part because they prevent bad products and practices from reaching the market in the first place. A great example is the infamous McDonald's coffee case. You don't see cases like that in Europe because it would be a criminal act for a restaurant to serve coffee at a temperature that would cause third-degree burns. In most European countries that would put a restaurant manager in jail the first time it happened. Here it took several hundred incidents before McDonald's ran into a civil case that went to trial and publicly exposed their practices. Bertel noted that companies are exempt from product liability if their product was tested before production by one of the government agencies like the TUV. Anyone screaming about tort reform ready to trade for that? The idea that a trial lawyer can pull a summons from his pocket and a large company will fork over cash is a fairy tale. A company like Toyota can spend ten million dollars on pre-trial motions and procedures in one case and it's a rounding error on their bottom line. How many lawyers can put five or ten million dollars of their own money to pay the pre-trial expenses? The most popular and effective way for a corporate defendant to beat a product liability case is to keep the case out of court as long as possible. The goal is to make the case so expensive to the plaintiff's lawyer that he or she either drops it or settles on terms that are favorable to the defendant. If the case gets to trial, it's an equally large myth that juries are just waiting to hand over seven and eight figure settlements to anyone at the plaintiffs table. The character of the plaintiff is on trial as much as the actions of the defendant. It's not just enough to show that a company put a faulty product on the market that caused injury or death. You have to show that they knew the product was bad and ignored warnings. Again, the McDonald's coffee case went so badly for McDonald's because there were hundreds of prior burn incidents reported to the company and they refused to change their practices because keeping the coffee at 190 degrees meant they didn't have to make a fresh pot as often. If a company actually manages to lose at trial and a big judgment is awarded to the plaintiff, there is a decade or so of appeals at their disposal, and appellate judges almost always cut punitive damages substantially. When you see a company consistently settle before trial, it's because they want to keep things out of the public record. Ford and Firestone used this strategy for years in the Explorer rollover cases. Settling early and requiring a confidentiality agreement as part of the settlement keeps everything learned in discovery off the record and out of the public eye, like recommending lower tire pressure to improve the ride even though it greatly increased the risk of tire failure.