marlerAttorney Bill Marler has won more than $600 million for clients since he and his partners formed Marler Clark in 1998. Marler rose to fame—or notoriety, if you’re a food producer—in 1993, when he successfully litigated a series of suits against Jack in the Box on behalf of children who contracted E. coli from eating the fast food joint’s tainted beef. Undercooked hamburger patties contaminated with E. coli 0157:H7 (“the nasty form,” Marler points out) sickened more than seven hundred people in five states, killing four people and hospitalizing hundreds—mostly kids. Investigations revealed that Foodmaker, Inc., Jack in the Box’s parent company, had been warned about undercooking patties by health departments, but decided to continue the two-minute cook time for business reasons, and to maintain a better texture. Marler resolved cases for more than one hundred victims.

Bill Marler isn’t a lawyer with a focus on foodborne illnesses: he is the foodborne-illness lawyer. Marler Clark owns twenty-eight different websites, from Food Safety News to Listeria Blog. In a 2011 case involving Listeria in cantaloupe, Marler represented fifty of the sixty-six claimants. In a 2006 spinach-based E. coli outbreak, he represented 104 of 105. There are other lawyers out there who take on similar cases but, according to Marler, “there aren’t four lawyers in the world that have as much experience” in the field as the core attorneys of Marler Clark. “Twenty-two years into this,” Marler says, “I’ve taken tens of thousands of cases. Some outbreaks might have a hundred people, or some twenty. I can say I’ve been involved in every major foodborne-illness outbreak that’s occurred in the U.S. since 1993.”

See full article By Naomi Tomky March 24, 2015 with Illustration by Celeste Byers