By Mary Flood

Three wrongful death suits filed in the Houston area involving Toyota acceleration

The Harris Case: • Lawyers Ken and Judy Mingledorff filed suit in Harris County on behalf of the family of Trina Renee Harris, who died just before Christmas 2009 when she went to the store in her 2009 Toyota Corolla and accelerated, speeding through a stop sign and smashing into an East Hardy Toll Road cement divider.

The Simmons case: • Lawyer Rob Ammons filed suit in Brazoria County on behalf of the family of Gerald Lee Simmons, who died in 2008 when his 2005 Toyota Sienna XLE suddenly accelerated as he was driving his daughters to a school Halloween party. The car hit a curb, went through a fence and smashed into a shed.

The Berg case: • Lawyer Wayne D. Collins filed suit in Galveston County on behalf of the family of Janice and Kenneth Berg, who died in February 2009 when their 2009 Toyota Camry suddenly accelerated while going through an intersection and smashed into a utility pole in Clear Lake City.

Sources: The lawsuits

Standing at the bottom of the sunny Houston courthouse steps last week, lawyer Mark Lanier called a press conference largely to mark his legal turf and try for a stake in what's expected to be multibillion-dollar litigation against Toyota.

In the weeks since the Japanese car maker's January recall of millions of cars to fix a mechanical problem with the accelerators, lawyers in Texas and around the country have smelled Toyota's corporate blood in the water and mustered.

There have, in the past few weeks, been dozens of class action lawsuits filed on behalf of Toyota owners for lost car value and mental anguish. Dozens of other lawsuits have been filed by those who blame injury or death on acceleration problems, with three death cases filed in the Houston area alone. And lawsuits of behalf of shareholders and dealership are expected next.

“Lawyers are jockeying for a place in this. This is a mass tort. Toyota is in for billions of dollars and for a number of years,” Lanier said.

A federal multi-district litigation panel already lists 80 class action lawsuits filed just in federal courts and has set a March 25 hearing to start the process to pick a federal judge who will oversee Toyota lawsuits all over the country. That judge will appoint lawyers to a steering committee, usually based on the cases they have, their experience and the resources they can contribute.

“Those who stake a claim now will more likely get the leadership positions with the plaintiffs' steering committees that will be set up to handle consolidated discovery,” Lanier said. “Leading the charge best insures the charge going the direction one thinks best.”

He said he also wanted to “serve notice on Toyota and the financial community that this is a real action with the people and dollars to truly pursue it.”

Lanier, a nationally known plaintiffs lawyer, stood on the courthouse steps with lawyer Tammy Tran, who supplied 300 possible cases from the local Vietnamese community.

Though they had boxes of files and Lanier's firm is one of those with priority advertising on Google, Lanier and Tran have filed only one lawsuit against Toyota so far over unspecified injuries by an undergraduate student whose Camry hit a parked car.

But Lanier, who frequently is described as a top litigator by national media, has promised to put 30 lawyers on Toyota cases and to put $15 million toward developing the cases. He's previously been involved in asbestos cases, business litigation and won the first jury case against Merck, the drug manufacturer for Vioxx, with an initial verdict of $253 million.

$5 billion prediction

With offices in Houston, New York and Los Angeles, Lanier is known for his ability to charm juries, some attributing it to the fact he is also a preacher. Known for an annual kid-friendly Christmas party with talent like Miley Cyrus and Bon Jovi, just last month Lanier won a $56 million jury verdict in San Antonio against Caterpillar on behalf of an injured construction worker.

David Owen, a law professor who writes law books on these kinds of lawsuits, thinks the coming flood of cases won't take Toyota down.

“My prediction at this point is that it will cost Toyota $1 billion to $5 billion, including legal fees, and that's nothing to them,” said Owen who thinks the consumer class action complaints will get tossed out of court and the death and injury cases will be what costs the company money.

Owen, a professor at the University of South Carolina law school, said he's seen counts connecting Toyota accelerator problems to about 50 deaths, but some are in non-recalled cars and none have yet been proven in court.

And he notes, there's also some question of whether this isn't about just Toyotas, but other cars with similar accelerator and brake systems.

“This could be like the Ford Pinto cases,” he said. In those cases in the late 1970s and early 1980s the Pintos actually exploded in rear-end collisions less often than other small cars, but Pinto explosions had the most publicity.

He said big and small plaintiffs firms are trying to get on the bandwagon now “because they hate to let a good thing get away,” even if it later proves to be less lucrative business than expected.

Robert Hilliard, a Corpus Christi lawyer who filed the first class action on behalf of consumers in Texas and is in a consortium of about two dozen firm around the country handling these suits, said the lawyers involved are “the usual suspects,” meaning the firms that handled other big product liability cases like those over Vioxx, breast implants and Firestone tire blowouts.

Hilliard expects Toyota to be hit by a variety of lawsuits. He represents a Minneapolis family supporting the release of a man jailed four years ago after being convicted of killing their father with an accelerating Camry.

“We support letting him go. The insurance company that paid my clients after the death is now joining us in a suit against Toyota,” Hilliard said.

Electrical problem?

Hilliard, Lanier and other lawyers involved in the cases say the problem with Toyotas appears to be in the electrical system and Toyota recalling floor mats and then making mechanical corrections on some models won't solve it. The lawyers allege Toyota didn't build in a brake override redundancy like that in other cars and the company knows that's the problem.

A phone call to Toyota's public relations office was not returned for this story, though corporate representatives have generally not commented on pending litigation. Toyota has said the problem has been floor mats and a mechanical part and has denied allegations it's the electrical system that is to blame for uncontrolled acceleration.

Ken Mingledorff, who filed the first wrongful death accelerator case in Houston for a client who lost his wife when she sped through a stop sign and smashed into a concrete wall, said he's become suddenly popular with other lawyers.

“It's amazing how many friends I suddenly have in other lawyers wanting to join me in one way or another,” said Mingledorff. “It's kind of exciting to be in the forefront of major litigation against an international company like this.”