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Subscribe by EmailAttorneys Brag of Shutting Down Company
The only employment connections here are (1) a bunch of folks lost their jobs; and (2) you can bet these class action attorneys would be equally happy to put a company out of business with employment lawsuits.
Of course, they prefer to settle class actions and grab multimillion dollar fees while recovering token amounts for class members.
A headline in the Class Action and Personal Injury Newsletter brags: Topps Bottoms Out: Lawsuits Pending from Massive Recall
Two days after a class action lawsuit was filed against them, Topps Meat Company announced that it was going out of business, brought to its knees by the tainted meat recall.
The company, based in New Jersey, found itself at the centre of controversy after an initially small recall of beef products suspected of being tainted with E. coli mushroomed into a huge claw back of meat.
Initially, about 300,000 pounds of beef and beef products distributed by Topps was recalled - however, that number soon mushroomed to 21.7 million pounds of ground beef, one of the largest meat recalls in recent memory.
The company manufactured frozen hamburgers and other meat products for supermarkets and mass merchandisers.
The Topps world fell in, within a month.
“In one week we have gone from the largest U.S. manufacturer of frozen hamburgers to a company that cannot overcome the economic reality of a recall this large,” said Anthony D’Urso, chief operating officer.
Topps has had been manufacturing and marketing beef products for 67 years.
The article doesn’t mention any previous incidents of proven consumer poisoning during that time. It does mention one earlier one-person lawsuit (no mention of how that ended), and an incident in which the “Agriculture Department notified Topps . . . that it had been advised the company had received ten bins of meat, thought to be tainted with E. coli.
So such a meat processor can simply receive allegedly tainted meat, unknowingly process it, and get the blame and “deserve” to be gleefully run out of business by trial lawyers? When the word is pretty well out that you should thoroughly cook burgers to avoid this type of infection? I think the trial lawyers wiped out contributory negligence as a defense in products cases long ago. So much for individual responsibility.
And how bad of a record is this, statistically? Well, run some numbers. 67 years. A company big enough that the amount of product currently in circulation and subject to recall is 21.7 million pounds. Hey, that’s a lot of hamburger!
One article mentions 25 sickened people (only three hospitalized). Assume quarter pound burgers; that’s 86.8 million (86,800,000) burgers. Twenty five known to be contaminated. That’s 1/3,472,000. My calculator blew its mind trying to figure such a small percentage, but I think it’s roughly .00003%.
Compare: National Weather service odds of being struck by lightning in a given year = 1/400,000. So for all practical purposes you’re ten times more likely to get struck by lightning than get sickened (not to say hospitalized) by eating one of these burgers (much less likelihood of both if you exercise prudent safety measures like staying out of thunderstorms and eating well done burgers — or none at all). And that’s ignoring all those years with no proven illnesses.
The article concludes proudly: “Topps is the first meat products producer to succumb, and cease operations, to a recall.”
Way to go, trial lawyers! Hey, I bet if you ate a burger in the last few months, you can become a class member. Surely proof of symptoms won’t be necessary.
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Sad story, but isn’t this a little like the way every third-rate terrorist organization claims credit when Abu Nidal or OBL pulled off a big hit? Depending on their financial condition going in, Topps might have been dead from the direct costs of the recall before the first suit was filed.
I can’t imagine that the margins in ground beef are particularly high, and recalling 21 million pounds of anything has to be awfully expensive.
This case does raise an interesting question though of whether the plaintiff’s bar actually made the choice to bankrupt and close the company more likely. First, while a recall like this would likely have meant that Topps would become a poster child for safety, many customers wouldn’t touch them with a ten-foot pole for years to come, knowing that if it happened again, their liability could have been much higher.
Second, imagine that you’re one of the principal owners, and you’ve got a decent chunk of your net worth outside of your ownership of the company. You know that you are going to spend the next 3-5 years digging out from under this mess, and as bad as it looks now, it might get worse before it’s over. You’re probably not going to make a lot of money and it’s definitely not going to be much fun.
Perhaps you look at the situation and say, you know, we really don’t need to recall 21m pounds of product, but if we did, it would wipe the company out, and ya know what Bob, I’m ready to move onto something else. My understanding in a case like this is that attaching liability to the officers personally would be a much higher hill to climb, so this might be a very clean way to stage an orderly retreat. After all, it was all done in an abundance of caution.