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Toyota’s legal tussle regarding issues of unintended acceleration with some of its vehicles may soon be over depending on the results of “intensive” settlement discussions with members of the plaintiffs’ litigation team in consolidated cases centralized in U.S. District Court in California.
The judge overseeing the Toyota unintended acceleration MDL issued an order Dec. 12 ordering a halt to new lawsuits against Toyota after lawyers for the Japanese automaker asked for more time to try and settle already existing cases. The lawsuits involve claims of injuries and deaths resulting from the Toyota vehicles suddenly accelerating without warning.
Toyota has already offered more than $1 billion to settle class action lawsuits regarding the depreciation in value of vehicles that reportedly accelerated without driver input, but the remaining individual lawsuits involve wrongful death, personal injury and related complaints that go beyond the alleged loss in value due to used car buyers’ concerns regarding these issues.
Judge James V. Selna has postponed any bellwether trials in the Toyota unintended acceleration MDL, which were scheduled to begin in March 2014.
“Participation in the intensive settlement process is open to all plaintiffs,” Selna said in the order. “Cases that do not resolve during the initial settlement conference shall be set for a formal mediation.”
The initial conferences will begin in February 2014, with the plaintiffs who had been assigned to the first set of trials given initial priority in these unintended acceleration lawsuits.
The goal, then, would be for plaintiffs and Toyota to gauge the relative merits of similar cases based on those that were already agreed upon as representative, and hopefully limit the necessity of further litigation. Lawsuits not resolved at that stage will move toward mediation under the oversight of the special settlement master. The process is expected to move more quickly, perhaps as early as the first months of 2014.
According to the New York Times, a wrongful death lawsuit in Oklahoma may have spurred this step. After having had success in several previous trials, a jury decided in favor of plaintiffs who alleged that the electronic throttle system was responsible for a fatality – not loose floor mats and sticky pedals as Toyota had argued — and awarded the wrongful death plaintiffs several million dollars. The jury’s decision appears to have made the automaker think twice about bringing the remaining cases to trial. About 200 lawsuits remain.
The automaker recalled more than 10 million Toyota vehicles, including those made under the Lexus nameplate, beginning in 2009.
The plaintiffs’ litigation team includes Elizabeth Cabraser and Todd Walburg of Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein LLP and Mark Robinson of Robinson Calcagnie Robinson Shapiro Davis Inc.
The case is In re: Toyota Motor Corp. Unintended Acceleration Marketing, Sales Practices and Products Liability Litigation, MDL No. 2151, U.S. District Court, Central District of California.
UPDATE: On Nov. 15, 2017, nearly 500 lawsuits alleging defects caused death and injury from unintended acceleration in Toyota vehicles have been settled by the automotive giant.
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