Law and Rights
Automotive News is reporting that "preliminary evidence shows that Toyota Motor Corp. hired a lawyer to destroy or hide incriminating safety documents from vehicle owners who sued the company according to the ruling from an arbitrator.
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Law and Rights
Toyota Hid Evidence ?
Automotive News is reporting that "preliminary evidence shows that Toyota Motor Corp. hired a lawyer to destroy or hide incriminating safety documents from vehicle owners who sued the company according to the ruling from an arbitrator.
The former Toyota attorney, Dimitrios Biller, gives safety advocates new cause for alarm over what Biller has already said was a practice of hiding the truth at Toyota in lawsuits filed by injured consumers and dangerous Toyota vehicles. We alerted folks about that before on this blog.
Critical for consumer advocates, the ruling means that Toyota can't claim the internal documents Biller has been talking about are covered by "attorney client privilege." And that means the evidence can't be kept hidden by Toyota any longer.
Biller resigned from Toyota and was paid a hefty $3.7 million severance package that reportedly including keeping his knowledge secret about what Toyota's litigation tactics and strategies had been. Part of that included the so-called "Books of Knowledge" that Toyota kept, which were reportedly a collection of sensitive electronic records about design, testing and performance of Toyota vehicles. Withholding the "Books" from consumer lawyers enabled Toyota to avoid paying much larger damage awards to consumers injured in Toyota accidents, their former attorney, Biller, has claimed.
It seems that some consumer advocates are not surprised at Toyota's secrets, and perhaps the real surprise is Biller's integrity and conscience.
Meanwhile, the sudden accelleration cases continue to trod forward in California's federal court system while Biller slugs it out with Toyota. The California consumer cases may be the beneficiary of Biller's evidence coming to light, much to the dislike of Toyota.
Frankly, Biller deserves huge applause for allowing his conscience to get the better of Toyota's dollars.
Burdge Law Office
www.USLemonLawyers.com
Because life's too short to drive a lemon.
Subscribe in a reader- Toyota Prius Recall Joins 2.8 Million Recalled Toyota Vehicles
This just in from The Detroit Bureau.com. After announcing its biggest single recall ever just last month, October 2012, Toyota now admits to more problems that will result in the recall of anotehr 2.8 million vehicles, including the Prius hybrid models....
- Toyota Paid $10 Million To Settle 4 Self Acceleration Deaths
Lots of folks heard about the state trooper in California who was killed, with family members, when his 2009 Lexus Es ran out of control, killing Saylor, his wife, brother in law and daughter. What no one heard about is the secret settlement that Toyota...
- Toyota: "we Did Nothing Wrong But We'll Pay $32.4 Million More If The Us Stops Investigating What We Didn't Do"
Toyota has agreed to pay the US another $32,400,000 to shut down the US federal government's safety investigation of its self-acceleration problems and its failure to report the defect to US safety investigators timely. That's on top of the $16.4...
- When Did Toyota Know Its Gas Pedals Were Bad?
AutoBlog.com has some serious and bad news about Toyota, the company whose quality and safety-commitment has not been seriously questioned in more years than most can recall. They quote the US Transportation Secretary, the same guy whose agency is in...
- Toyota Keeps Its Customers Longer Than Anyone Else
Quality counts. As 2006 came to a close, toyota scored another prize. Automotive News announced that Toyota leads the industry in keeping new vehicle buyer customers coming back to Toyota products, according to a study just released by JD Power and Associates....