Monsanto Retains Leading Plaintiff Lawyer to Represent the Company in its PCB Indemnity Litigation
Monsanto announced today that it has retained Mark Lanier, founder of the Lanier Law Firm, a leading plaintiff law firm, to help the Company enforce indemnity agreements that its former PCB customers voluntarily agreed to in 1972 and have breached to date. Monsanto previously filed a lawsuit pending in Missouri against Magnetek, General Electric, Paramount Global (formerly Westinghouse), KYOCERA AVX Components Corporation, Cornell Dubilier Electronics, and The Gillette Company that seeks to require these former customers to honor their contractual obligations and cover Monsanto’s PCB-related legal costs.
“Mark Lanier is a well-known and successful plaintiff attorney who is ideally suited to help us recover legal costs from sophisticated former PCB customers who contractually agreed to fully defend and indemnify Monsanto for potential legal claims arising out of its manufacture and sale of PCBs,” the Company said. “To date, these former customers have broken their contractual promises and refused to meet their legal obligations and have left Monsanto largely alone to defend claims which arise from their own manufacture, use or disposal of PCB-containing products.”
“This is a classic case of businesses failing to hold up their end of a bargain, and I look forward to helping Monsanto recover costs that its customers plainly agreed to pay” Lanier said. “These former customers benefited financially from the products they purchased from Monsanto and contractually agreed to fully defend and indemnify Monsanto for future legal costs. Now, when the time has come to honor their commitments, these corporations are trying to escape their legal obligations.”
Monsanto is aggressively defending PCB cases across the country including a number of environmental and/or building impairment cases and personal injury cases. The indemnity litigation filed by the Company is an element of its strategy to mitigate the legal and financial risks of this litigation. Based on available sales records, the defendants in the indemnity case were the top six purchasers of PCBs during the period leading up to Monsanto’s decision to cease PCB production in 1977, and purchased more than 90% of all PCBs sold by Monsanto during this time.