Personal Injury Law

Ford Class Action Denied

A Maryland District Court has denied a class action on behalf of Maryland residents who own certain model years of Ford Explorers, Mercury Mountaineers and Ford Windstars.

This is not a personal injury lawsuit; plaintiffs' lawyers claimed front seats in the class vehicles are defective because they are prone to collapse rearward in moderate speed rear-impact collisions. In fact, the proposed class action would exclude everyone who has actually suffered an injury.

Plaintiffs' suggested class is individuals who own vehicles that cannot withstand 20,000 inch-pounds of torque without deforming backwards. (Admittedly, I don't fully understand this but let's proceed on pretending that I do.) Judge Benson Everett Legg denied Plaintiffs' request for a class, disagreeing with Plaintiffs' lawyers' assertion that the complexities of twenty-three different seating system configurations can be resolved through a standard as simple as one safety benchmark. The opinion acknowledges that design changes that make a car safer in one accident might make the car less safe in another. In other words, the court's message to the Plaintiffs' lawyers was "it is a little more complicated than that."

Judge Legg also made an interesting point on a collateral estoppel issue that personal injury victims might face in bringing a product liability claim after an accident caused by this alleged defect:

Additionally, around the country, consumers have brought personal injury suits involving the seatback rigidity issue, winning some and losing others. If the instant case were to proceed as a class action and the jury returned a verdict for Ford, a class member who was subsequently injured in a class vehicle would be collaterally estopped from claiming that the vehicle?s seats were defective because they lacked sufficient rigidity. Such a class member, who has relatively relatively little to gain from the instant class action, might be precluded thereafter from prosecuting a substantial personal injury claim.

In other words, if you are in the class and Ford wins the consumer class action lawsuit, you might later be estopped from bringing a product liability claim for your injuries because the issue of whether the product was defective was already litigated between the parties. Very interesting point. Judge Legg leaves open the issue of certifying a more narrowly defined class. But this problem will still exist no matter how narrowly the class is defined.

I get the idea of these types of claim, I really do. Ford is required to make safer vehicles because someone is minding the store when they make a defective product. This improves public safety. Still, I am uneasy with the idea of a class action to fix a defect for everyone but the people that actually get hurt. It sounds like the only ones who really profit in that case are the lawyers. Is this necessarily a bad thing in the big picture? No. But it does not exactly give you a warm and fuzzy feeling either.

You can find the full opinion here.

Full post as published by Maryland Injury Lawyer Blog on March 25, 2010 (boomark / email).