Make sure your next attorney comes equipped with the latest safety devices

Someone should invent a Brake-Counsel Override (BCO) – for those rare cases when a plaintiff’s attorney gets stuck going forward with a lawsuit that really has no merit and ought to be halted.

Wouldn’t you think a responsible law firm would equip all of its attorneys with such devices, just to be on the safe side? How can a responsible firm offer attorneys to the public, knowing full well that they may not stop when they should?

Surely, they should at least warn prospective clients, defendants, and judges about this problem and advise them on how to respond to unimpeded, accelerating litigation.

The attorneys pursuing a class action suit against Ford Motor Co. in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of West Virginia in Huntington might benefit from BCOs, since they seem to be exhibiting the very defects they ascribe to the manufacturer’s vehicles.

The attorneys are suing Ford for not having Brake-Throttle Overrides (BTOs) in their cars and for not telling customers that its cars lacked such devices. Ford asserts that it didn’t install BTOs in its cars because the cars didn’t need them, and that there was no point in telling customers that the cars lacked something they didn’t need.

No Ford owner has suffered injury as a result of the absence of the superfluous part.

Nevertheless, the attorneys, unequipped with BCOs and unable to stop themselves, hurtle onward.

Their latest ploy is a motion to force Ford to issue a consumer advisory warning that its cars lack an unnecessary part and that pressure must be applied to the brakes to make the vehicles stop.

With Ford denying the existence of any problem, and the attorneys having yet to offer any evidence thereof, it seems premature, at best, to expect the company to issue an advisory about it.

If an advisory needs to be issued, it could come from law firms responsible for housing defective attorneys.