LOS ANGELES - U.S. District Judge Andre Birotte, Jr. was unpersuaded by Ford Motor Co.'s move to compel arbitration in one of hundreds of cases remaining in multi district litigation involving allegedly defective DPS6 transmissions in Fiesta and Focus vehicles.
In the case of Darice and Edward Wirth, who had leased a 2014 Fiesta, Birotte held that "Framed either as a question of whether Ford has standing to invoke the Arbitration Provision, or as a question of whether Plaintiffs agreed to arbitrate their dispute with Ford, the answer is the same: no."
Birotte further held that if Ford had wanted to arbitrate the Wirth "lemon law" case, "it should have sought that relief promptly" instead of litigating common issues on 30 other cases in the MDL for more than two years.
The July 2 ruling comes nearly five months after Ford moved to arbitrate Wirth.
In the meantime, Ford awaits ruling from Birotte on its move for a new trial or judgment in its favor in a case tried in December, claiming plaintiffs' counsel engaged in "pervasive misconduct" that resulted in a $23,155 verdict for plaintiffs Yvonne and Salvador Quintero.
On May 8, Birotte entered judgment for the Quinteros upholding the December jury's damage award of $7,718.61 and granting the maximum civil penalty allowed - $15,437.20 - twice the damage award.
In a brief filed last month, Ford counsel Andrew Chang argued that plaintiffs' counsel and their expert Anthony Micale "violated pretrial orders, engaged in trial by ambush, made inadmissible, irrelevant, and prejudicial arguments and comments to the jury about Ford and its counsel, and abused and contributed to several errors of law."
Chang further argued that the goal of plaintiffs' counsel - including attorneys at Knight Law Group and Altman Law Group, both of Los Angeles, as well as Rosner Barry and Babbit of San Diego - was to distract the jury from the facts and claims in its "weak" case by implying to jurors that numerous injuries and accidents were caused by purported defects without necessary proof, to introduce elements of fraudulent concealment despite summary judgment in Ford's favor, to exacerbate that issue by forcing Ford to repeatedly object and create the impression that Ford was trying to hide information from them.
"Ford is not alone in reaching this conclusion about Plaintiffs’ trial conduct," Ford argued. "During trial, this Court repeatedly warned and chastised Plaintiffs’ counsel and Mr. Micale regarding their misconduct, but denied Ford’s repeated mistrial motions.
"Plaintiffs should not be permitted to benefit from their misconduct and Ford should not suffer for it."
Ford has been fighting "lemon lawsuits" alleging power shift transmissions in certain Fiesta and Focus models are prone to delayed acceleration and downshifting and that some vehicles have crashed. Birotte presides over consolidated litigation at the Central District of California.
In total, tens of thousands of complaints have been filed against the auto industry in California claiming violation of the state's "lemon" law - the Song-Beverly Consumer Warranty Act - and each year since 2015 the number has grown. Ford Motor Co. has been hit with the most lemon law suits with more than 9,000 since 2015.
The Knight Law Group and Altman represent many of those claimants.
Last month, Ford settled approximately 760 MDL cases with the law firm Consumer Legal Remedies (CLR).