Roy T. Willey IV is a South Carolina-based trial attorney whose firm represents individuals in a proposed class action lawsuit against the J.M. Smucker company following a recall of its peanut butter. He shares strategies on how to navigate page limits and walks through how he researches the facts and crafts a well-supported complaint to illuminate key documents for the court and the public.
Let’s start by learning more about you and your law firm.
I am a partner and trial lawyer at Poulin | Willey | Anastopoulo, LLC, based in Charleston, South Carolina. The firm now has about a dozen locations across the country. We focus exclusively on plaintiffs' civil litigation, everything from catastrophic injury, wrongful death, and single event work to consumer class actions and mass torts.
I’m licensed in South Carolina and Kentucky, although I currently have cases in a few dozen states and frequently travel to prosecute cases. In locations where we’re not licensed, I work with local counsel or seek admission to practice pro hac vice.
Recently there was a massive recall of Jif peanut butter. Your firm represents plaintiffs in a proposed class action lawsuit. Can you tell us about the case and how your firm got involved?
We learned about the massive recall of peanut butter, like everyone else, on the news. Like many others, we eat a lot of peanut butter at my house, so I texted my wife and said, check our peanut butter and see if it's in this affected lot. And it was, so we didn’t eat more from that jar.
Our firm started to receive hundreds of phone calls from former clients and people who had heard about the recall and know the kind of work we do. To vet the cases, we take a two-pronged approach: first, we have an economic loss class which seeks to get people their money back for buying a product that wasn't what they thought it was. Then we have the injury cases in which we represent a number of people who ate affected peanut butter and were diagnosed with Salmonella or were hospitalized as a result.
What was your process for gathering and organizing the initial evidence?
The first part is client selection. In a classic case like this, we ask the client to send us a photograph of their product with the label where we can see the lot number. All that information goes into our system for our lawyers to review. Software is beneficial during the review process for class action lawsuits.
In addition, we do pre-litigation research to understand the situation better. We look at what the company says about its product and gather first-party sources from the company’s website and marketing materials. Here, the materials from Jif include messaging along the lines of, we sell a safe product, we sell a healthy product, we sell a nutritious product.
What is your approach to wrangling all those documents and writing about the facts in the initial complaint?
To make the facts tangible to the reader, we add images directly to the complaint. For example, we always want to be able to show the court and the other side that whoever is named as the putative class representative is actually included in the class that they seek to represent. In this case, we need to show that they actually had the product.
A picture leaves nothing to doubt: the lot number is right there.
The complaint also serves the public interest. For cases with wide-reaching impacts, such as the Jif peanut butter recall, we may include access to the complaint and other legal filings on a website.
A complaint with photographs and screenshots of the evidence supporting each factual allegation allows a person to determine whether they have an affected product and what type of information they need to protect themselves.
Court filings are not just for a trained legal audience; as lawyers we write for the public, too. Clearbrief creates an interactive version of briefs directly from Microsoft Word that I can then share with clients, the court, or the public. All of the evidence is at their fingertips with just a click.
Is there any strategy around how long a complaint should be?
Page limits can be a challenge in federal court. However, the initial complaint is not subject to page limits, and FRCP 10 allows plaintiffs to refer back to the complaint in future briefing. While a bare-bones complaint might pass pleading standards for consumer class action litigation, our practice is carefully crafting the initial pleading and including more evidence, such as quotes from the company’s website. That way, we can refer back to the information contained in the complaint and avoid exceeding page limits that apply to later briefing.
Front end thinking can be helpful on the back end because the most difficult part of legal writing, in my view, is to keep it succinct and focused while not leaving out anything important.
What's your approach to working with clients?
Our firm manages a large volume of single event, personal injury work with a national reach. When an incident like the peanut butter recall appears in the news, people come to us looking for information and to figure out what to do next. Other times we learn about cases when people bring a study or situation to our attention about which we are better situated to investigate and advise.
We try to maintain goodwill even after an individual case is over so that we can serve people and be a resource to them.
When we represent people, they tend to seek our advice for anything legal they may need in the future. For example, past clients call us when they want to adopt a child or explore dual citizenship. We do our best to connect them with lawyers who practice in those areas.
What are frequently asked questions about the peanut butter recall?
People generally want more information about how they can ensure they’re protected. One concern people raise is—isn’t this peanut butter in other products? Jif has issued a rolling recall, and to date, there have been more than 65 different products—candies, fudges, peanut butter-filled pretzels—recalled that you would not know contains peanut butter from a specific lot number.
We can provide some of that information to folks, which is part of the reason we set up the website www.JifRecall2022.com. It shows precisely where to look on the label to find if their family’s product is impacted.
Thank you, Roy!
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