A Sherman federal judge on Tuesday approved a joint motion to dismiss a lawsuit between Toyota Motor Corp. and a proposed class of hybrid-vehicle owners after the parties reached a settlement involving brake-defects claims.
Lawyers leading the settlement for Toyota included Los Angeles lawyers Michael Mallow and Rachel Straus of Shook, Hardy & Bacon and Sherman lawyer Joe Brown, a former U.S. Attorney of the Eastern District of Texas. Leading the settlement for the plaintiffs were Ontario, California lawyers David Wright, Richard McCune, Steven Haskins and Mark Richards of McCune Wright Arevalo as well as Dallas lawyers Bruce Steckler and Austin Smith of Steckler Wayne Cochran, who served as liaison counsel.
Lawyers on both sides declined to comment.
The plaintiffs sued Toyota in February 2020, alleging Toyota breached its manufacturer’s warranty by concealing a brake defect in Toyota’s Prius, Camry and Avalon hybrid vehicles.
According to the lawsuit, Toyota “will gamble its drivers’ lives and only fix vehicles that have already failed” instead of “proactively recalling and replacing the defective brake parts.
“This sort of risk may satisfy Toyota’s accountants, but Toyota simply cannot ignore hundreds of thousands of vehicles still on the road with a known defect in their brake systems, any of which could fail at any moment with calamitous results,” the plaintiffs’ amended complaint says.
According to the case docket, U.S. District Judge Amos Mazzant III scheduled a hearing over class certification in July and a pretrial hearing in December before he ordered the parties to mediate in October 2021. The lawyers provided a status update last December that they had not reached a resolution but agreed to continue with the mediator, Patrick A. Juneau of Louisiana, to attempt to resolve the matter.
Judge Mazzant agreed to continue the pretrial deadlines the same day. The next development in the case came Friday, when the lawyers filed a joint motion to dismiss after reaching a resolution in mediation. Judge Mazzant granted the motion Tuesday, dismissing all claims with prejudice.
The settlement is at least the second in the last four months that Toyota reached in Texas involving a products-liability case. In December, the world’s largest automaker settled on undisclosed terms a longstanding case brought by a Dallas couple who sued after seat-back failure in their Lexus ES 300 caused permanent brain damage by their two young children during a 2016 rear-end accident. The couple, Benjamin and Kristi Reavis, won a $242 million jury verdict against Toyota in August 2018. The parties settled while the case was pending in the Supreme Court of Texas after a June 2021 decision in Dallas’ Fifth Court of Appeals affirmed the jury verdict.