How Do I File a Food Poisoning Lawsuit?

At least a few times each year, a high-profile food poisoning or food-related illness seems to make headlines in America. The Chipotle E. coli crisis of 2015 is one notorious example, in which hundreds of customers were ill and 43 Chipotle locations shut down. The media doesn’t publicize all cases of food poisoning to such a degree, but that doesn’t mean they don’t significantly harm the victims. If you’re interested in filing a class action or individual lawsuit against an entity for food poisoning injury, here’s what you need to know.

Contact a Personal Injury Attorney

The first and most important step in filing a food poisoning lawsuit in Texas is to contact a personal injury attorney. An attorney will listen to the details of your case and determine whether you have grounds for a lawsuit. If you do have a case, the attorney will name the defendant(s), write and file a claim for you, and walk you through the claims process. The defendant will have a certain period of time to answer your claim, after which the discovery phase will commence.

During discovery, both parties will find out as much as possible about the alleged food poisoning. Your attorney will keep you informed throughout the process, building your case accordingly. Proving liability in food poisoning cases takes an investigation into the circumstances of your illness, the producer of the product in question, and if there are any similar complaints against the same company.

Learn How to Prove Liability in Food Poisoning Cases

If food poisoning has made you ill, the circumstances of your case will affect how easy it will be to make a claim. A government-issued food recall due to an outbreak of food poisoning would make pinpointing the source of your illness easy to prove. An individual case, however, with time delays between food consumption and the onset of sickness, will be more difficult. Proving a certain food caused your illness requires a plaintiff to show two main elements:

1. Something contaminated the food you ate.
2. You became ill because of the contamination.

Proving these two main elements is possible with scientific testing of the food you ate and/or analysis of a stool sample specifically for food poisoning. Scientific evidence will greatly strengthen your case, especially if there is no government health agency warning. If an agency has already traced an illness back to a certain food, you only need to prove that you consumed this food and it caused your illness.

Understand the Three Theories of Liability

There are three theories of liability that may come into play during a food poisoning case, all of which relate to the broader category of product liability: strict product liability, negligence, and breach of warranty. Under the laws of product liability in Texas, you don’t have to show how a food manufacturer or distributer was negligent, nor do you need to know what contaminated the food. You only need evidence of the contamination and proof that it caused your illness.

You may instead base your case on negligence if you can prove the defendant was careless in the manufacturing or supplying of the contaminated product that made you sick. If you can prove the defendant failed to exercise reasonable care during production, such as failing to enforce worker sanitation rules, your food poisoning case may succeed under the theory of negligence.

An attorney may also use the theory of breach of warranty to support your claim. In this case, the manufacturer or distributor had a legal duty to abide by minimum quality standards and failed to do so. The minimum expected standards are implied warranties, and the contamination of a food product is a breach of this warranty. Thus, the victim may have a case on these grounds depending on the circumstances.