Solo practitioner ‘single-handedly set the stage’ for massive GM recall – ABA Journal
By Martha Neil
It wasn’t until the Georgia solo practitioner dug for evidence against the automaker in a wrongful death case that the company recalled almost 800,000 vehicles last month, saying those cars could suddenly shut down if a driver jostled the ignition key or had it attached to a heavy ring of keys. Then Cooper wrote the NHTSA a letter, saying that a number of faulty vehicles hadn’t been recalled. Within days, GM had more than doubled the size of the recall, Bloomberg reports.
“He single-handedly set the stage for this recall,” auto-safety analyst Sean Kane said of Cooper.
Cooper, a 51-year-old Emory University law graduate who works in Marietta, on the outskirts of Atlanta, took on his first product liability case, involving a Ford Bronco II rollover accident, in the early 1990s. Since then, he has settled or tried to verdict some 50 cases, including nine for amounts in excess of $5 million, others in his office told the news agency.