On May 19, 7:45 am, "Stuart A. Bronstein" <spamt...@lexregia.com> wrote:
> Right, New York Post, not New York Times. While I don't practice in
> NY so I'm not an expert on using this site, I went to the NY State
> court website, where they say they have "information about cases in
> Civil Supreme Court in all 62 counties of New York State."
>
> On that site Lorraine Squicciarini comes up as a party in only one
> case. She was a defendant in an uncontested matter filed in 2000.
Bzzt. Lorraine is the _decedent_. She would not be a named party to her own wrongful death case; her heirs are the ones who filed suit. The NY Post article I cited gives the names of her daughters, one of whom is Barbara Squicciarini, and the name of Barbara's lawyer, David Schoen. But I didn't know about the NY Courts website until your post, above, mentioned it.
So, teamwork seems to do the trick. Using your hint, Stu, I went to the NY Courts website, selected their "Web Civil Supreme" option, and searched for cases involving Unilever as a defendant in Kings County (Brooklyn), NY. Zilch, nada. So, maybe they got sued under another name, as I suggested yesterday might have happened.
Then I tried the same jurisdiction searching for cases involving _any_ person named "Squicciarini" as a plaintiff. Bingo. There were only 11 of them listed, most by others who just happened to share the last name, but #9 on today's list (it may change day by day) was Civil Case Number 037453/2005, a suit by Barbara Squicciarini vs. Conopco, Inc. (which I guess is the parent company or successor of Unilever, the maker of AquaNet), in which she is represented by David I. Schoen, as indicated in the NY Post article.
Under "case status", the courts website lists the matter as "disposed", not "active", so the other poster who said the case is still active is apparently mistaken. Interestingly, Barbara Squicciarini is also listed as a plaintiff in 3 other suits filed in Brooklyn Supreme Court, in all of which she was represented by a different law firm, Monaco & Monaco LLP, all of them personal injury cases apparently involving injury to Barbara herself, two of those being car crashes, and one of those cases is still active, which may be the one the other poster was referring to.
In hopes of putting inquiring minds at rest, I clicked on the case number, which conveniently brought up a summary of status, indicating the date of disposition was 1/3/2007. A motion to dismiss that was filed on 1/3/2006 was denied by a short form order on 1/25/06. Since that was just a month after the case was filed (on 12/16/05), my guess is the judge just felt it was too early to dispose of the case since the pleadings apparently at least alleged a proper cause of action, and that factual discovery would be needed to flesh it out and see whether it needed to go to trial.
There is no other indication of the nature of the final disposition on 1/3/2007. Maybe someone more versed in reading the NY Courts website can help out here, but my guess is that means it was simply settled off the record in a confidential settlement between the parties and removed from the docket. That is not uncommon in a product liability suit that challenges the safety of the design or labeling of a company's entire line of products; the company often will want the present case to be settled to get it off the docket and cap their risk of large losses, but they do not want any public record of it so that it cannot encourage or be used a precedent by any other claimants. In this particular case, of course, I have no idea whether that is what occurred, it is just rank speculation. But if it is what happened, it's not surprising that there have been no further news reports about the outcome, since neither side would be making statements to the media in case of a confidential settlement.
I hope that is enough to satisfy everybody and kill this thread.
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