Hi.
I'm attorney, Neil Woods with Woods and Woods Lawyers.
We're here today to talk about the Ford F-150 class action lawsuits.
What has happened is 2013 to 2018 Ford F-150s have potential brake failure that can lead
to some pretty serious injuries.
So here's what's going on with the Ford F-150 braking systems.
The master cylinder in the break is potentially a defective part.
What that means is when the master cylinder fails, the brake fluid can leak out and that
results in a loss of hydraulic pressure in the braking system.
Well, what that does then is that means that the driver no longer has control over their
vehicle because they can no longer stop.
In 2016 the Ford F-150 brake problems began with an investigation by the National Highway
Safety Transportation Agency.
Ford basically admitted a recall, but they only admitted a recall in vehicles from 2013
to 2014.
That left vehicles from 2015 to 2018 with a potentially defective part on it that could
result in brake failure loss.
Here's the other catch to the brake recall.
The recall may not have even fixed the parts that Ford actually replaced.
What a lot of people believe Ford did is they replaced the master cylinder in Ford F-150
braking systems with an equally defective master cylinder.
What that means is Ford just came in, took out the old part, put a new one in and said
"Hey, these things are fixed and now they're gonna work right."
That is part of this lawsuit and part of what is being investigated here by Ford.
There's a lot of things you should look for in these cases.
How to identify that maybe an accident came from one of these F-150 brake failures.
The first thing is if a crash occurred and there were no skid marks.
If there were no skid marks on the road then potentially may not have ever been any braking
power in the F-150, therefore no skid marks appeared on the road because the driver may
have hit the brake, but it just didn't do anything.
You'll see these particularly in a lot of unexplained death cases.
What that means is you have one car that crashes and it's not known why that truck crashed.
What we suspect has happened out there a lot is families lost one of their loved ones in
an accident, in a Ford F-150 with a defective braking system.
In a lot of these you're not gonna see skid marks on the road, and you're going to have
just one car wreck.
Now that is going to leave a lot of families questioning how this accident happened and
why their loved one is now dead.
We think a lot of these cases that are death cases from F-150s are going to be because
there was a defective brake in it.
Now, the person who is in the wreck is no longer around.
So they can't say, "Hey, the brake didn't work.
I pressed it in and I still got in this accident."
In these cases there's a lot of questions about what kind of compensation is going to
be available to the victims of the F-150 accidents.
First and foremost, a car repair.
So if you got in an accident and it was due to a defective F-150 braking system, you could
receive some money for your car repairs.
Now if you missed time from work because of an accident in an F-150, you may be able to
receive money for lost wages.
Lost wages, that's gonna be the money that you would've been earning the whole time you
were working had you not been in the accident.
Some people may even be eligible for lost wages if they are no longer able to go back
to work due to the accident.
The way the court's gonna do that is kind of looking at an expectation of what your
lifetime earnings would've been and there's some kind of complicated formulas on how the
court may come up with a figure on that.
The other one is pain and suffering.
Going through these type of ordeals is really, really hard on people.
Not just the family members, but the actual victim in the wreck.
The law allows pain and suffering damages to those who are hurt in personal injury claims.
Medical bills.
This is going to probably be a large part of a lot of the settlements because when a
Ford F-150, a roughly 5,000 pound vehicle is going down the street at 60 miles an hour
and it loses all braking power and it crashes into something, it's very likely that these
are ... crashes are going to result in death or very serious injuries.
Both of those can often cause serious medical bills, long stays in the ICU, long periods
of rehabilitation, corrective surgeries.
There's a lot that goes into calculating the medical bills in these type of lawsuits.
The other kind of compensation if you're family lost a loved one, the law allows for you to
recover because you lost a family member from a defective product.
In this case that's going to be the Ford F-150.
So one of the questions that we've been getting from clients is "Why is this a class action
suit?"
Class actions suits kind of have a bad wrap because of some of the things done in the
past.
Class actions today are a lot different.
In this particular kind of case, the reason it's a class action is because a class is
a large group of plaintiffs that share the same injury or the same type of injury.
What you're going to see in these cases is a large group of people that were injured
by defective brakes on Ford F-150s.
What they're doing right now is compiling a very large number of cases into the Eastern
district in Michigan.
Right now where the litigation is is everyone that's involved is just trying to reach out
to people that may have been hurt in F-150s from defective brakes.
Right now we're just getting all these clients together.
There's investigations going on.
There's several law firms working together.
But the suit has been filed.
Now, I wanna warn you, you only have a limited amount of time to join these lawsuits.
Most states have a statute of limitations that run up to two years.
What does that mean?
That means that if the accident was within two years you were eligible to file suit.
If it's longer than that you wouldn't have time to file suit.
Now that doesn't mean you shouldn't call us if it was longer than two years ago.
Each state is different.
These are being taken on a nationwide basis.
There are sometimes some exceptions that you can get around to file a suit after the statute
of limitations has ran.
What we're doing right now is we're just recommending that anyone who was hurt in a F-150 from a
potentially defective braking system just to give us a call here.
What we're gonna do is we're first gonna take some just basic information from you and just
see if you qualify for this class action lawsuit.
If you do qualify for this class action lawsuit, we're not gonna ask for any money upfront.
The way that the fees work on this is you actually pay the lawyer only if they win and
if they win the fee is a percentage of the settlement and case expenses.
If you don't win the Ford F-150 class action lawsuit, there is no fee to you.
You will pay nothing.
So if you have any questions reach out to Woods and Woods.
We'll be more than happy to talk to you about this and see what's available to your family.