G.M. Seeks to Fend Off Lawsuits Over Switch - NYTimes.com:
by Hillary Stout and Bill Vlasic
General Motors moved on Tuesday to prevent future safety lapses by expanding its oversight of problematic vehicles even as the automaker continued to take an aggressive legal posture in dealing with its past missteps.
General Motors has asked a federal bankruptcy judge to dismiss dozens of potentially costly lawsuits filed against the company over its handling of a defective ignition switch in millions of cars, and to bar similar cases in the future.
The legal filing, which was made late Monday in the Federal Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York, asked the judge who approved the company’s 2009 restructuring agreement to explicitly enforce a provision that shielded the “new” company from liability for incidents that took place before July 10, 2009, the day the agreement went into effect. Most of the cars in the recall were manufactured before 2009.
Though the motion was merely asking Judge Robert E. Gerber to reaffirm a protection that already existed in the agreement, it was seen as a shrewd tactic to get the cases dismissed in one move, saving the company enormous amounts of time, personnel and money that would come from fighting to dismiss each case one by one.
“They’ve gotten a lot of bad publicity, and the sooner they can get this literally off the front page the better off they will be,” said Walter W. Miller Jr., a bankruptcy law professor at Boston University. “If the judge is going to make a ruling up front, you’re likely not going to have endless disputes with each case as it comes along.”
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