The Georgia law firm that first exposed the General Motors ignition switch problems has won a second settlement for the victim’s family after alleging that GM had committed fraud during its original investigation.
Lance Cooper, a partner at the Cooper Firm, reached the undisclosed settlement with GM for 29-year-old Brooke Melton, who died in a 2010 crash when her Chevy Cobalt’s ignition switch shut down the engine and electronic safety features, including the airbags. In a statement, Cooper said “GM lied under oath” when several employees—including head switch engineer Ray DeGiorgio and others later identified in GM’s internal audit—were deposed by his firm in the spring of 2013. At that time, GM had been settling with other victims’ families for the same problem but never issued a recall, despite technical service bulletins, hundreds of complaints on stalling, a secret part redesign, and internal testing that revealed the problem starting in 2001.
GM first settled with the Meltons for $5 million in late 2013, a number revealed in the company’s internal audit intended to prove that senior GM lawyers, such as now-retired general counsel Michael Millikin, never knew of the case since only settlements above $5 million needed his approval. Cooper told Car and Driver that the evidence—from documents later released by the switch supplier, Delphi, and from various Congressional testimonies—made it “clear that the GM lawyers and engineers knew much more about it” and “chose to cover it up.”
“There’s no doubt that GM engineers did not tell the truth about the change on the ignition switch,” he said. “They knew the defect had to do with safety.”
When reached by phone, GM declined to comment for this story.
After GM recalled 2.6 million cars for the defect and the problem went global, the Meltons decided to sue GM again for fraud and offered to return the $5 million last April, Cooper said, but the company refused. Only in January did Kenneth Feinberg, the lawyer managing the company’s victim compensation fund, work with the Meltons out of court for a settlement. The Meltons never filed a claim with the fund, or else their case would have been ineligible.
The smoking gun was DeGiorgio’s statement that “we certainly did not approve a detent-plunger design change.” In addition to digging up internal GM documents proving otherwise, Cooper hired mechanics to x-ray two GM ignition switches from different model years, both stamped with the same part number, and found two different springs attached to the plungers. The shorter spring, like the one from Melton’s Cobalt, was weaker and did not have sufficient torque to keep the ignition key in the run position unlike the newer switches with longer springs, which DeGiorgio himself redesigned without publishing his changes.
In addition to forcing GM to admit negligence and recall millions of vehicles for safety problems it otherwise might never have addressed, the Melton case has fast-tracked other wrongful death lawsuits, much of them lumped into a multi-district litigation that will begin trial in January 2016.
- GM Internal Audit: One Ugly Mess
- Inside NHTSA: What Happened With GM Recalls Could Easily Happen Again
- GM Closes Ignition-Switch Victim Fund, Still Feverishly Blocking Related Lawsuits
To date, the GM fund has paid out wrongful-death settlements to 67 families and injury settlements to another 113 families. The fund, which GM estimates will total up to $600 million, has 1492 claims under review. Other ignition-switch lawsuits for economic harm at the class-action level, a criminal investigation by the Department of Justice, investigations by nearly all state attorneys general, and separate lawsuits that have yet to be combined into multi-district litigation that could total in the billions.
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