I was trying to find a parking spot in our overcrowded garage yesterday when I got an abject lesson in what certain folks think us lawyers do. I was behind an elderly lady who was going far too slow for my tastes. Nevertheless, rounding a corner in the garage, this woman broke suddenly to allow a roughly 30-year-old woman, who was walking, to get out of the middle of the driving lane. After getting out of the way, the younger woman yelled back to the elderly woman in front of me: "YOU WANT A LAWSUIT? YOU WANT A LAWSUIT?"

Honestly, I had to smile at how little this younger woman seemed to know about her rights and the other lady’s potential liabilities. Who knows what a jury would have said about the liability issues, or sorted out the issue of comparative fault, but the young woman certainly seemed to think that she had the case as good as won.

This strange little vignette of Americana got me thinking. We do a lot of public speaking to health agencies about their potential liability for negligent inspections; we also represent lots of people who are foodpoisoning victims; but how much does the average person actually know about liability, much less liability in food cases? So at the risk of boring people stiff, I thought i’d take some time to explain the law we face in our "tort" cases.Continue Reading Law School 101: the wireless paper chase

It never ceases to amaze me, particularly after the last few years and all the high-profile outbreaks that have occurred, that people still pass off "foodpoisoning" as a couple of days of diarrhea–i.e. that the victim is no worse for the wear.  There is so much that is wrong with this statement that it would be pointless to even begin assailing it with mere facts.  Instead, as I’ve done recently with Jacob Aggas, Kelly Cobb, and Regan Erickson, I’ll tell the story of somebody who, after his Salmonella infection, would disagree wholeheartedly with the notion that "foodpoisoning" is just a couple days of diarrhea.  In fact, don’t stop reading this just because you think you’ve seen, or heard about, every varient of a Salmonella illness.  I assure you that you’ve never seen one quite like this before. 

At the request of our former client, I have changed the names and locations in this narrative:

Our client, Ron, was infected with Salmonella during a sporting banquet in Indiana. His illness began on July 27, 2004. At first, he suffered from predominantly gastrointestinal symptoms that were, in light of what was to come, relatively mild.

By August 1, Ron was in the emergency room at a nearby hospital The attending physician there noted repetitive diarrhea and, though the vomiting had subsided, that Ron continued to feel “somewhat nauseous and gaggy.” Ron was re-hydrated with a liter of normal saline, and twenty-five milligrams of Phenergan, an anti-nausea medication, were introduced intravenously. He was discharged several hours later with a prescription for Ciprofloxacin, an antibiotic.

Ron’s course over the next two months is one that defies clever adjectival description: He felt generally ill pretty much all of the time. He did manage to return to work after a couple of day’s absence, but he struggled to be as productive as usual, was frequently irritable, and seemed constantly besieged by abdominal discomfort. It was during this time that Ron learned that his stool sample had cultured positive for Salmonella, group D.

The same state of ill health persisted throughout August and September. “Then,” as Ron recalls, “came the first weekend in October,” and “any thoughts I had that the first bout in July was the sickest I’d ever been faded quickly.”
 Continue Reading Foodborne Illness is Just a Few Days of Diarrhea Right?

Please don’t let the title mislead you.  I am certainly not implying there is a lighter side to any individual’s foodborne illness–as anyone who has ever experienced an E. coli infection or the like can tell you–but it is much less common for someone’s illness to be brought about by a nefarious act.  Unless, of

Relax, this is not a first account of Lindsay Lohan, um, "losing control" during another jail stint. It’s far less irrelevant than that.  What Upton Sinclair started with his brief, though sordid descriptions of Chicago’s stockyards in The Jungle, Hollywood has finally chosen to finish with an expose on the often-ugly underbelly of our country’s food supply.  I don’t know

The Marler Clark network of food poisoning informational Web sites, which first appeared online in 1998, recently received a makeover. The sites, which were originally put online to provide Internet users with basic information about the illnesses caused by such foodborne pathogens as E. coli O157:H7, Salmonella, and Hepatitis A, have increased in breadth over the