Walter Sawicki: Fighting the Burger Wars

In 2000, Walter Sawicki got a call from a woman who’d eaten one very bad hamburger. Diagnosed with an infection caused by E. coli bacterium, the woman had been hospitalized with kidney and respiratory failure. For a while, she’d even been in a coma. Sawicki, a personal injury lawyer and shareholder at Sawicki & Phelps, took her case and helped her get a settlement from SuperValu, whose store had sold the tainted beef.

Sadly, Sawicki doesn’t see the woman’s case as isolated. “I don’t think the FDA is doing its job,” he says. “And as long as that’s the case, we’re going to have more outbreaks.”

Part of the problem is in the slaughterhouses, where regulations governing the safety of meat processing aren’t followed to the letter because of budget cutbacks at the FDA during the last few years. Combined with this is an increase in the numbers of animals being killed; since it was first published in 1990, the USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service Annual Slaughter Report has shown a steady increase in cattle processing. Sawicki thinks contamination is slipping through the cracks. “We just had that big recall in California where they had video of sick cows being forklifted into the grinder,” Sawicki says. “It makes you wonder if you want to eat beef anymore.”

Sawicki says many of the large meat-processing companies expect litigation as part of their operating costs. To really make an impact on those offenders, he says, lawyers need to have access to bigger rods of punishment when it comes to damages. This is particularly true for so-called small cases, where physical damage lasts only a day or two and has no long-term consequences.

“The defendant figures a jury will not award that much for such losses and lowballs  offers, figuring most contingent lawyers will not take the case,” he says. This prevents most small cases from ever being brought to court. Unfortunately, Sawicki says, plaintiff lawyers aren’t likely to get bigger judgments anytime soon.

“There’s a trend contrary to punitive damages right now, particularly at the Supreme Court,” he says. “But punitive damages, and statutory penalties, could be the kind of solution we need to really get companies to change.”