Defective Product Alert: Baby Wipes Containing Antibiotic Resistant Bacteria

To all Washington State parents of babies: There has been a recall of baby wipes. The wipes contain a bacteria that is resistant to common antibiotics.  If you purchased baby wipes at Walgreens, Sam’s Club, Family Dollar, Fred’s or Diaper.com, check to see if you have any of the following brands that are subject to the recall:   Cuties, Diapers.com, Femtex, Fred’s, Kidgets, Member’s Mark, Simply Right, Sunny Smiles, Tender Touch, and Well Beginnings.  For more questions call Nutek Disposables at 1-855-646-4351.  For more info, you can read about it here .

Here at Washington Product Liability Blog, we seek to inform folks about a faulty product before it does harm. We’ve seen how things turn out after a faulty product causes harm when the injured parties come to us, the Washington State product liability lawyers at SGB, for help. We’d much prefer to see the injuries never occur in the first place.

Premier Product Liability Attorney Teams up with SGB

I bring exciting news to the world of Washington Product Liability law.  It concerns my law firm, Schroeder Goldmark & Bender. We are already a premiere defective product law firm.  Whether it is a catastrophic injury or a mass tort, SGB is a leader in product liability litigation. But our deep bench of outstanding product liability lawyers just got deeper with the addition of product liability trial lawyer Peter O’Neil.   When it comes to product liability cases, Peter O’Neil is a veritable titan; he has a national reputation.

The car industry knows him best.  They have seen Peter successfully litigate one automobile defect case after another: General Motors, Ford, Chrysler, Hyundai, Toyota, and Nissan and the list goes on. All have had to deal with Peter O’Neil. Peter has succeeded in other product cases as well, ranging from defective heating pads and dangerously designed tractors to dangerous drugs.  Whoever he is up against knows that they are facing an elite Washington product liability lawyer.

Peter posses qualities that have led him to excel: intellectual curiosity, courage, and tenacity.  His intellectual curiosity is what causes him to probe the cause of a catastrophic product failure.  He crawls under cars, tests like parts, and works until he has figured out a particular defect.  He then has the courage to take on the mightiest of defendants.  I actually think he relishes the challenge and the opportunity to bring a big corporation to its knees.  Lastly, Peter is tenacious; he won’t stop until he gets the result he’s after.

I had the chance to work with Peter last year on an automobile defect case that we successfully settled.  It was a real joy to be front and center watching a product liability master at his craft.  I’m excited to be teaming up with him on additional products cases.  Our entire products team is jazzed.

Welcome, Peter.  We’re so happy to have you.

Product Liability Lawyers: Keeping Consumers Safe

I wanted to share with our readership an important publication concerning product safety, put out by the American Association for Justice, via its “driven to safety” outfit.    

AAJ is often vilified by Corporate America.  From this, the  general public is misled into thinking that our court system is clogged with frivolous injury lawsuits that raise insurance rates and harm consumers. Not so. The research doesn’t support any of the allegations. I’ll save that debate for another day.  But I do want to make just a quick point about what I believe is overlooked in the discussion. First, there are numerous barriers one must overcome before ever filing a lawsuit –– plaintiffs attorneys regularly must say no to injured clients, oftentimes because the costs or the risk are disproportionately high compared to the damage the person has suffered. Rarely do we hear about an allegation that other kinds of cases –– of which there are many –– are clogging our courts. The media simply doesn’t point to any of the following as being unnecessarily entangled in the court system: disputes among business partners;  divorce litigation;  commercial litigation involving one business suing another; patent litigation; and the list goes on and on. It’s principally “tort” litigation that gets the bad wrap.  Those in support of corporate interests are able to use their influence and their power to direct the spotlight on these alleged ills of tort litigation. This is unfortunate.  As the GM recall demonstrates,  it was the very tort litigation system that unraveled the efforts by GM to keep critical information from the public. It’s about time we disabused those who swallow all the misinformation and propaganda surrounding tort law.  The GM case is but one example of something we can be proud of: our tort system

Actos Bellwether Trial: $9 Billion Verdict for Plaintiffs

A jury in Lafayette, Louisiana, handed down the seventh-largest award in US history against Takeda Pharmaceutical, Asia’s largest drugmaker, and Eli Lilly & Co according to Bloomberg. The federal court jury found the companies hid the cancer risks of their Actos diabetes medicine and ordered them to pay a combined $9 billion in punitive damages. The verdict will most likely be reduced because the US Supreme Court has said punitive verdicts, imposed for bad conduct, must be proportional to the actual damages that underlie them. Takeda and Lilly have announced they will appeal. Plaintiff Terrence Allen blamed the drug for his bladder cancer. His lawyer, Mark Lanier, said that he hoped the Takeda executives in Japan heard what the jury had to say loudly and clearly.

It was learned during the trial that Takeda officials intentionally destroyed documents about the development, marketing and sales of Actos. Because Takeda failed to properly protect the documents, US District Judge Rebecca Doherty penalized the company by instructing jurors they could infer that the files may have reinforced Allen’s claims that the company wrongfully hid the medication’s health risk.

Though a long court battle is still ahead, today the verdict sends a message to global corporations that they must put health and safety ahead of profits or American juries will hold them accountable. 

Dangerous Product Update: GM Faces Tough Questions Over Its Small Car Ignition Defect

Dubbed a “major embarrassment” to General Motors by The New York Times, Mary T. Barra, GM’s new chief executive, apologized for the tardy recall in February of Chevy Cobalt and Pontiac G5 vehicles due to faulty ignition switches. Several other models, including Saturn Ion and Saturn Sky, are involved in the recall. An apology provides little solace to the families of more than 300 persons who have died in these vehicles when the air bags failed to deploy. GM initially reported that 12 deaths might be linked to the faulty switch that can move from “run” to “off” while the vehicle is in motion. A bump of a key ring, a heavy key ring, or a rough road can jostle the ignition switch out of “run” position, which causes a sudden loss of power where the driver loses function of power steering and the airbags are disabled.

 As early as 2004, GM knew it had a problem with the Cobalt. In 2005, a 16 year old girl was fatally injured in a Cobalt where the airbags did not deploy when the car crashed into a tree. This was apparently the first death related to the defect, and GM knew about it. Not only was GM aware of deaths related to this defect, NHTSA, the federal safety regulators who are supposed to protect the consumer, is also culpable. NHTSA investigators took a close look at the cause of at least two Cobalt crashes that raised the possibility of defect, but failed to open a broader investigation. The deadly defect was swept under the carpet while lives continued to be lost in fatal car crashes.

 It was not until 2013, nearly 10 years after its first awareness of the defect, that GM hired an outside engineering firm which pointed to the ignition problem cited in a service bulletin sent to dealers in 2005. Unable to muster a vigorous defense, GM offered a second apology. Too little too late.