Business Brief Hits $30M ‘Civil Death Penalty’ for Goodyear Pretrial Foot-Dragging
Several business groups are asking the Nevada Supreme Court to reconsider a $30 million verdict against Goodyear issued after a judge struck its defenses in a rollover case because of pretrial foot-dragging.
In the July1 ruling, the Nevada high court in a 6-1 vote upheld the discovery sanction, issued by a trial judge who criticized the company’s pretrial “stalling, obstructing and objecting” and found its responses to interrogatories “nothing short of appalling.” The Nevada Supreme Court said the $30 million verdict was not excessive and the sanction was proper. The Las Vegas Review-Journal and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce blog Legal Newsline have stories.
The accident had left three people dead and one teen boy in a persistent vegetative state. The judge overseeing the case, Sally Loehrer, acted after the company had failed to produce a deposition witness to testify about the authenticity of some 74,000 documents offered in discovery, answered 34 interrogatories with unverified objections and made trade secret objections characterized as boilerplate by plaintiffs.
The National Association of Manufacturers, along with several other business and tort reform groups, are asking the state supreme court to reconsider its decision. Carter Wood, senior adviser for the manufacturing group, criticized the “civil death penalty” at PointofLaw.com. The blog post quotes from the brief.
“This court’s decision in Bahena v. Goodyear Tire was a shot heard around the United States business community,” the document said. “The ruling deprived a business of its most fundamental right in the American civil litigation system: the constitutional right to defend oneself in court.”
The business groups are represented by Victor Schwartz and Phil Goldberg of Shook, Hardy and Bacon.
