My New Firm is All Over This Romaine Lettuce E. Coli Outbreak

As regular Reader(s)™ of this erstwhile blog may know, I have joined a new law firm—OFT Food Safety & Injury Lawyers—with Ryan Osterholm, Brendan Flaherty, and Lindsay Lien Rinholen.

One of the many things I'm excited about in this new venture is that it will give me occasion to visit Minneapolis (OFT World Headquarters) more than every couple of years. Now it will be more like every couple of months. I even saw Mr. Gillette there last week, in the flesh. Sparks flew.

It may also give me occasion to blog a little more. Not to blog for reader(s) necessarily, but at least to potentially seed the Internet with backlinks to my new firm's website in the hopes that it may convince Google that the new venture is indeed a real thing. (See numerous links above.) Given that this is one of the more prestigious blogs I've ever been a part of, it seems like this should definitely work.

As you know, Mr. Gillette, the focus of the new firm is on food safety. Basically, when people get sick from eating food, we try to get them compensation for their suffering. Unfortunately people get sick from eating food quite a bit in our country, and it seems that the producers and sellers of food tend to treat this as a cost of doing business. As long as that cost is low enough, they're going to keep making people sick. So we're trying to make them pay. Hopefully they'll stop making so many people so sick.

Almost immediately after we started the firm, dozens of people all over the country got sick with E. coli infections. The outbreak has been traced back to romaine lettuce from Salinas, California, and it seems to have caused at least three different clusters of cases. One of them is in Wisconsin and Minnesota, related to a product sold by Fresh Express, Inc. called "Sunflower Crisp Salad Kit." We've filed an E. coli lawsuit on behalf of a college professor who became gravely ill and was hospitalized for weeks. Other lawsuits have been filed in Illinois and Iowa. More will surely come.

This seems to happen every year with lettuce and leafy greens. It will probably keep happening—but maybe we'll make them pay enough so that the people who can actually prevent these outbreaks do what they need to do.