Articles Posted in Product Liability

Yesterday General Motors announced four additional recalls to address the following safety issues:

• A defective front safety lap belt in 1,339,355 Buick Enclave, Chevrolet Traverse, GMC Acadia medium crossovers from the 2009-2014 model years and Saturn Outlooks from 2009-201
• A defective shift cable in 1,074,932 of the previous generation 4-speed automatic transmission Chevrolet Malibu from the 2004-2008 model years and Pontiac G6 from the 2005-2008 model years

The defective ignition switch in some GM cars was a widely known issue among GM engineers and executives in 2012 and long before that General Motors had received multiple warning about the defect said David Friedman, the acting administrator of the National Traffic Safety Administration of the Transportation Department Today in a joint news conference with Transportation Secretary Anthony Fox. As part of the settlement GM agreed to pay a record $35 million civil penalty and to take part in unprecedented oversight requirements.

Read more in the New York Time

Read the press release from the US Department of Transportation

In a previous product liability blog we discussed the unusual use of the “responsible corporate officer” doctrine (Park doctrine) by the CPSC in the Buckyballs recall. Last Monday The CPSC announced that they had reached a settlement agreement with Craig Zucker from Brooklyn, NY, to recall the small Buckyballs and Buckycubes. The settlement calls for Craig Zucker to fund a Recall Trust that will be controlled by the CPSC. The Recall Trust will be used to provide a refund to consumers who return the magnetic sets.

Buckyballs are made of rare-earth magnets. They are described as toys for adults but they pose a swallowing hazard for children and teens. If a child swallows more than one magnet, the powerful balls can pull together inside his or her digestive system, potentially causing internal injuries that the CPSC has described as similar to “a gun shot wound to the gut with no sign of entry or exit.”

Read more in the Huffington Post

The GM restructuring plan approved by Judge Gerber in New York in 2009 protects the automaker from product liability lawsuits related to incidents that happened before July 10th 2009, the date when the restructuring agreement went into effect.

Yesterday GM filed a motion with the Federal Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York asking Judge Robert Gerber (picture), the United States Bankruptcy Court Judge from the Southern District of New York, who presided over the General Motors bankruptcy of June 2009, to explicitly enforce this plan by dismissing 54 cases.

The move may save GM a lot of money but it also carries some risks. A coalition of 8 class-action plaintiffs countered with a lawsuit in the same court seeking to void that part of the restructuring agreement and accusing General Motors of committing bankruptcy fraud by not disclosing potential liabilities from the faulty switch.

The optional PS500 Power Supply Unit used with the Evita V500 and Babylog VN500 ventilators is defective and is being recalled by Dräger. The defective device may not indicate a low battery charge until the battery is totally depleted. When the battery is depleted, mechanical ventilation will stop and manual ventilation will be required until the device is connected to the main power. The company investigated the defective product after it received complaints that found that the batteries installed in the PS500 depleted much earlier than expected, although the battery indicator showed a significantly charged battery. No patient injuries have been reported so far.

For more info read the FDA press release and visit our product liability and defective products page

Documents related to the product liability lawsuits against J&J’s transvaginal mesh show that Vincente Lucent, a well-known urogynocologist who was paid $800,000 over 10 years by J&J, may have influenced the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists into changing the language of the product guidelines in their bulletin and have the word “experimental” removed.

Other documents related to the product liability lawsuits also indicate that that J&J tried to influence research papers by giving $750,000 to a Swedish University that was conducting a clinical trial of a transvaginal mesh procedure. The company tried to convince the professor who was doing the trial to sign a contract that would give J&J control of the trial but the professor refused.

Read more in the Wall Street Journal

As GM is facing multiple product liability lawsuits related to the defective ignition switch and the late recall of several of its models, the Center for Auto Safety, a private watchdog group in Washington just published a review that questions the efficiency of the NHTSA in detecting the problem.
According to the review , “the examination of NHTSA’s Fatal Analysis Reporting System (FARS) reveals 303 deaths of front seat occupants in the recalled 2005-07 Cobalts and 2003-07 Ions where the airbag failed to deploy in non-rear impact crashes”.

Read more in the New York Times