April Settlements bring May Justice – Aronberg & Aronberg

While it’s true that the original saying is April showers bring May flowers, the same logic can be applied to the implications and ramifications of legal decisions in personal injury cases of all sorts.  In this blog post, we’d like to make you aware of three settlements that may pertain to you or your family members. We’ve got news to bring you regarding Bayer, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and Five Guys Burgers & Fries.  No, this won’t be a contest of what college kids consume more of, but it might give all consumers—including college kids—pause before further consumption.

Let’s begin with Bayer, the multinational pharmaceutical and chemical corporation based in Germany.  It’s probably most well-known for its aspirin which line the shelves of pharmacies and kitchen cabinets everywhere.  In this case, however, the product in the spotlight was Yasmin, Bayer’s own group of birth-control pills.  On the unluckiest day (especially for Bayer), Friday, April 13^th, the company was forced into agreeing to pay upwards of $110 million in a settlement with the first 500 lawsuits that claimed that Yasmin birth-control pills caused blood clots.  Earlier this year, in February, Bayer said that outside of the U.S., the corporation had settled 170 Yasmin/Yaz cases.  According to Bayer’s annual report, as of February, there were over 11,000 lawsuits pending in the United States all in relation to Yasmin/Yaz causing injury or death.  United States health regulators said that information on the heightened risks of blood clots will be added to the labels on popular birth-control pills including Bayer’s Yaz and Yasmin.

Let’s stray from birth control for a bit and talk about fried chicken.  This past week, fast food corporation Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) was ordered to shell-out $8.3 million to a girl who suffered brain damage and was paralyzed as a result of eating a “Twister wrap.”  The girl was seven when she suffered salmonella encephalopathy, a brain injury that is linked to food poisoning that also left her with a blood infection as well as septic shock (back in October of 2005). Several of the girl’s family members fell ill and claimed that the girl’s injuries included cognitive, motor and speech impairment as well as quadriplegia—and were caused by contamination in the chicken wrap.

In other fast-food news, we have news on a class action lawsuit against the ever-increasingly popular Five Guys Burgers and Fries.  A preliminary settlement has been reached in a consumer fraud lawsuit against the restaurant chain for the sale of gift cards which did not adhere to New Jersey’s Gift Card Act.  The lawsuits have accurately claimed that the cards contained dormancy fee provisions and/or expiration provisions that violated state laws.  Anyone who’s ever received a gift card as a gift knows that it’s no “gift” to be charged fees for using a gift card or to be forced to use the card within a certain amount of time at the risk of losing the card’s value.  Five Guys is paying for their abuse of customers which clearly violated a state law designed to protect consumers.

As more and more settlements come to light, justice becomes more prevalent.  The days of corporate greed without accountability are over and a new era of legal justice has been ushered in.  Eighty years ago, people would work 70 hours a week and if they got sick doing so, it was their fault for sticking around.  Nowadays, there are laws that protect people and there are people who defend them.

To speak with some of those people, contact one of the attorneys at Aronberg & Aronberg at 561-266-9191 or email us at daronberg@build.simple.biz.

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