California Lawyers Say Ford Is Retaliating With Lawsuit

As Ford Authority reported this past May, Ford recently sued a number of California-based law firms, alleging that they were using lemon laws in an illegal manner for their own financial gain. That lawsuit claims that a number of lawyers engaged in a sophisticated fraud scheme to collect upwards of $100 million in “phantom legal fees” via the Song-Beverly Consumer Warranty Act, or California’s specific lemon law, working more hours on these types of cases than they actually did. However, those same lawyers are now firing back.

According to Car Complaints, the lawyers named in this lawsuit – Ford Motor Company v. Knight Law Group LLP, et. al, which was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California – are claiming that Ford’s actions are retaliatory, and argue that the case should be thrown out. Knight Law Group, the Altman Law Group, and Wirtz Law are all accused of over-billing Ford by at least $100 million dollars over five years, as well as violating the Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act.

On the flip side, the law firms claim that Ford is only going after them because they’ve had success against the automaker in court previously, and that it’s attempting to “chill its litigation adversaries – law firms, lawyers, and staff who represent consumers harmed by Ford’s defective vehicles.”

“As one court put it, if litigation activities could serve as a basis for a RICO claim, ‘almost any lawsuit could spawn a retaliatory action, which would inundate the federal courts with procedurally complex RICO pleadings, engender wasteful satellite litigation, and spawn ad infinitum litigation with each party claiming that the opponent’s previous action was malicious and meritless,’” Knight Law stated in its motion to dismiss.

Interestingly, Ford notes that it has evidence of lawyers billing it for working more than 24 hours in one day – in one case, an attorney who sued Ford worked a “physically impossible 57.5-hour workday in November 2016,” according to the filing.