Fred Pritzker: Finding the Culprit

Why take up foodborne illness lawsuits? Because the cases are tough and the research is interesting. If that answer makes Fred Pritzker sound like a bit of a legal wonk, he’s OK with that.

“I really like arcane, complicated cases,” he says. “Once we got the first one, I just got immersed in them.”

Since 1995, when his firm, Pritzker Ruohonen & Associates, first started handling these cases, Pritzker has become one of the country’s leading foodborne illness litigators and a self-taught expert on the bacteria and viruses that hide in food such as hamburgers, spinach salad and undercooked fish. His specialty: Listeria, a little-known bacterium that’s far deadlier than E. coli, killing 25 percent of its victims and leaving others with severe kidney and neurological damage. Pritzker Ruohonen has been involved in every major Listeria case in recent years, including one stemming from a 2002 outbreak on the East Coast that killed 12 people and injured 50.

One of the hardest things about foodborne illness law is proving who dunnit. “The only way you can create liability is to trace it back to a specific source,” Pritzker says. And that gets complicated, involving epidemiology and intensive microbial research that has to be hired out to expert witnesses.

In the 2002 case, the rare strain of Listeria found in slices of ready-to-eat turkey was traced back to two different possible sources. Faced with the near impossible task of proving who was liable, Pritzker used the doctrine of alternative liability, shifting the burden of proof to the defendants and allowing Pritzker’s clients to pursue claims against both companies.

Born in the 1960s out of a California case involving an accidental shooting on a hunting party, alternative liability is a powerful but seldom-used tool, usually applied in cases where there are multiple potential defendants and no way to pinpoint the specific culprit. While it’s been used in foodborne illness cases before, Pritzker says alternative liability can be particularly useful in Listeria outbreaks.

“It has a long incubation period,” he says. “And it’s unreasonable to expect people to remember what specific brands they consumed 30 days ago.”

Judges seem to agree. At both the state-level trials Pritzker handled in New Jersey and the federal trial in Pennsylvania, judges quickly agreed to apply alternative liability.

But sometimes a source for the illness simply can’t be found. “There are always sporadic cases of foodborne illness going around,” Pritzker says. “And the microbiology can’t always figure out where it came from.” He cites a recent instance in Texas in which a 3-year-old boy contracted E. coli. Cases like these are virtually unprosecutable; recognizing them has been a key to the success of Pritzker and his firm.

“We’ve never lost a case,” he says. “That’s because we are very technically savvy and use good experts to make sure there is a case first.”