Recalls Put Toyota Under Lawyers' Microscope

Excerpted from The Legal Intelligencer

By Zack Needles
February 18, 2010

Pennsylvania plaintiffs firms are ready to scrutinize Toyota from several different angles following the company's recall woes, but admit they face a number of hurdles.

Toyota Motor Corp. has come under heavy fire since late January, when it announced a recall of more than 8 million vehicles worldwide for what the carmaker referred to in a press statement as "sticking accelerator pedals," followed by more than 400,000 hybrid vehicles worldwide in early February after customers complained of what the company has termed "inconsistent brake feel."

The announcements have sparked legal activity nationwide and Pennsylvania plaintiffs firms have already gotten involved in or are investigating everything from personal injury cases involving Toyota vehicles to consumer class actions involving Toyota owners, as well as shareholder-derivative litigation and lemon law claims ...

Tom Kline of Kline & Specter in Philadelphia, which is currently investigating three catastrophic injury cases involving Toyota vehicles, said one of the biggest obstacles thus far has been the carmaker's refusal to disclose information contained on each vehicle's Electronic Data Recorder, or EDR, which is the automobile equivalent of an airplane's black box recorder.

That data, Kline said, could provide clues as to exactly what happened internally leading up to each crash.

"It has raised the pre-litigation issue for us as to how to go about getting the data," Kline said. "It raises the issue of whether to go to Toyota pre-litigation or whether to file a writ with a demand for pre-complaint discovery or some other strategy depending upon the circumstances involved in the particular case" ...