CHICAGO (Legal Newsline) - The lawyers suing a maker of children's school uniforms ignored their lack of evidence when they filed their case and must be punished.
That's what The Children's Place, Inc., wrote in a motion for sanctions filed Sept. 28 in Chicago federal court in a lawsuit brought by plaintiff Angala Garland and her lawyers at Aylstock, Witkin, Kreis & Overholtz and Bradley/Grombacher.
The case concerns chemicals known as PFAS, which are found in firefighting foam and consumer products and have made their way into the bloodstreams of virtually every American.
Lawsuits blame the chemicals for a variety of health problems, some of which were linked by a health study that was part of a settlement with DuPont. But others say the science on how PFAS affect the human body is incomplete.
They have been dubbed "forever chemicals" because of the human body's inability to rid itself of them. Lawyers have jumped on the chance to sue dozens of companies, with some scoring contingency-fee contracts with government officials and others pursuing consumer protection claims.
The motion by Children's Place says the complaint against it was based on testing of only two of 21 garments purchased by the plaintiff. Test results showed that one of them was PFAS-free and the other showed extremely low, trace levels of one member of the PFAS family. That result was flagged with two indicators the test was unreliable, Children's Place said.
Both garments had been worn and washed for once. Many water districts have sued companes like DuPont and 3M for PFAS in water.
"Plaintiff's counsel should have continued its investigation - but they did not," the motion says. "At a bare minimum, they were obliged to retest the one item to remove the qualifiers that their own lab said made the rewsults unreliable and test a new version of the item that had not been repeatedly washed or exposed to months of contamination.
"Instead, based on nothing more than an acknowledged suspect test result for one worn shirt containing a barely detectable amount of one type of PFAS chemical, Plaintiff and her counsel filed a complaint broadly disparaging all of Defendant's 'School Uniforms' - i.e., disparaging over 1,500 products including the one that tested PFAS-free."
Children's Place isn't happy with the lawyers' public statement to the media during back-to-school shopping.
Sanctions requested are the dismissal of the complaint and compensation for fighting it in court.