Personal Injury Law

Marler Blog re-launch is a good time to think about why the hell I do it

By Bill Marler, Esq.

After nearly 3,000 blog post and over 2,500,000 visitors (most since the Fall of 2006), I decided a redesign of the blog was in order. Although we are still working out a few 'bugs,' the look you see here is the near final product. Hopefully, you will find the resources helpful and the commentary, well, at least tolerable.

Which brings me to why do I spend so much time on this blog, Food Safety News and all the other 'bug' blogs. I think I summed it up best in Testimony I gave in 2008 before the House Energy and Commerce Committee:

Since 1993, I have had the privilege to represent thousands of Americans - some your constituents. In 2002, during the middle of yet another E. coli outbreak, during the middle of another visit to an ICU to watch a new client struggle for life attached to more tubes than you can imagine, I penned an Op-ed for the Denver Post. Here is part of it:

This summer, scores of Americans, most of them small children or senior citizens, have already or will become deathly ill after eating ground beef boldly labeled "USDA approved." The now infamous outbreak started with a few sick kids in Colorado and quickly spread coast-to-coast, eventually triggering the recall of 19 million pounds of ground beef tainted with E. coli O157:H7.

Because their parents trusted our government's food inspections, several kids suffered kidney failure and spent days or weeks hooked up to kidney dialysis machines. For some, the long-term prognosis is grim, with the risk of further kidney failure, dialysis, transplants or worse.... Most of those kids' parents have hired me to help them get compensation for hundreds of thousands in medical costs and the risks of future kidney failure. This may prompt some readers to consider me a blood-sucking ambulance chaser that exploits other people's personal tragedies.

If that is the case, here is my plea: Put me out of business. Please.

For this trial lawyer, E. coli has been a far too successful practice - and a heart-breaking one. I am tired of visiting with horribly sick kids who did not have to be sick in the first place. I am outraged with a food industry that allows E. coli and other poisons to reach consumers, and a President, Congress and federal regulatory system that do nothing about it. Stop making kids sick - and I will happily move on.

The press covered that day pretty fully, see 'Another Day in the Other Washington.'

Full post as published by Marler Blog on August 08, 2010 (boomark / email).