Legal List

Verdict maintains a Legal List of current developments on its website that Verdict thinks may ripen into legal issues worthy of further analysis or Research Reports. The Legal List is open to all visitors to the website, but Verdict’s analysis of the issues raised by the Legal List is restricted to  subscribers on annual retainers because the analysis is published in Research Reports.

The stigma of product recalls is less severe than 10 or 20 years ago; but, some things have not changed: the cost, the amount of effort consumed, the distraction of management, the length of time it takes to get new products into the market are more complicated and time consuming than companies’ initial estimates.

United Airlines is temporarily grounding 96 of its Boeing 757 jetliners on Tuesday and into Wednesday (2/15/11 & 2/16/11) in order to perform checks on earlier modifications to air-data computers on those planes.

Johnson & Johnson has recalled about 70,000 syringes of an injectable formulation of Invega after discovering cracks in the syringes, which could potentially lead to infections or reduced efficacy in users.

Intel’s problems (aka manufacturing defect) with the Series 6 chipset known as the Cougar Point used in HP and Dell computers were initially estimated to cost $1 billion and a solution was expected in mid-April. Recalls of defective products always take longer to fix and cost more than originally estimates.

The scope of recall problems are never understood when management announces the recall or the modification of a product with United’s 757s. When the defect is in a component part of another company’s product (Intel), the company undertaking the recall of the component part has to satisfy its and the customer’s management as well as its own. Since the customer has the right to replacements at no cost and full payment of damages resulting from the defect, the negotiations are frequently complicated, lengthy and exponentially more expensive than initial estimates.