How The GM Recall Lawsuits Started

Don't you sometimes wonder how these huge class action lawsuits start-specifically the current GM Recall Lawsuits?
Well, there's an article called GM Recall Doubled as Georgia Lawyer Pushed U.S. Regulators. 

Six days after General Motors recalled almost 800,000 Chevrolet Cobalts and Pontiac G5s for a defect that could cause surprise engine shutdowns, lawyer Lance Cooper, a solo practitioner in Georgia, sent government regulators a letter: There are more faulty GM models out there.

Six days later, on Feb. 25, the automaker more than doubled its recall to include other mid-2000s GM models, including Saturn Ions and Pontiac Solstices, saying their ignition switches could unexpectedly turn off if jostled by a driver or weighed down by a heavy ring of keys, cutting power to the engine and air bags.

To date, Cooper may have dug the deepest.

“He single-handedly set the stage for this recall,” said Sean Kane, an auto-safety analyst who credits Cooper for being the first to create a public record of what GM did with the ignition switch. Kane, the president of Rehoboth, Mass.- based Safety Research & Strategies, has worked with plaintiffs’ lawyers on suits involving sport-utility vehicle rollovers, tire recalls and unintended acceleration in some Toyota models. He consulted on Cooper’s suit against GM.

“But for the things he has done, this thing doesn’t happen,” Kane said.

Bringing a wrongful death lawsuit against GM, Cooper obtained more than 32,000 pages of related lawsuits and other documents from the company, deposed about a dozen of its engineers and gathered assessments of the ignition issue from dealers. According to some of the depositions, reviewed by Bloomberg News, the defect was known to some dealers, engineers and managers since at least 2004.

A tip of the hat to Lance Cooper, that solo practitioner out of Georgia just searching for the facts!