"Tough" is a word that Ford Motor Co. likes to use in marketing its popular pickup trucks, as in "Built Ford Tough." The term could also be applied to Ford's take-no-prisoners style in defending itself against product liability suits.
Some judges who have heard cases involving Ford from Mississippi to Michigan to California have used far stronger language to describe the automaker's courtroom conduct:
"Totally reprehensible."
"Disgusting."
"Blatantly lied."
"Almost borders on the criminal."
In recent years, Dearborn, Mich.-based Ford has been painted in courtroom after courtroom as something of a renegade, accused by judges of hiding or misrepresenting evidence.
Ford is hardly the only big company to be cited for such behavior. Others, from automotive rival General Motors Corp. to British American Tobacco, also have been sanctioned for failing to produce relevant documents. Yet Ford appears to have a special knack for antagonizing judges.
"Why is it that Ford has this attitude that they don't have to comply with a clear order" to give up certain documents? U.S. District Court Judge T. John Ward asked at a July 2001 hearing in Texas. "You can take it back to Dearborn: This court is not impressed with the ... lack of candor that I find from Ford's counsel."
Early last year, Ford was forced to pay more than $700,000 in Michigan after exhausting its appeals of sanctions for failing to produce test reports in the case of a seat belt failure that left the victim a quadriplegic.
Last summer, a Mississippi judge tossed out a verdict in Ford's favor and ordered a new trial in the case of two students killed in the fiery wreck of a Ford Explorer. Ford had waited until the trial began to turn over thousands of pages of documents -- a "willful and blatant" violation of court rules, said Hinds County Circuit Court Judge Winston L. Kidd. For good measure, he ordered Ford to reimburse more than $200,000 in plaintiffs' trial expenses. Ford has appealed.
Ford's problems in this area aren't new. In the early 1980s, prior to introduction of the Bronco II SUV, Ford's office of general counsel took the unprecedented step of collecting documents on the handling characteristics of the rollover-prone vehicle. Court cases later revealed that 53 of 118 crucial documents snagged in the roundup were lost or destroyed.
In 1996, Marion County Circuit Court Judge David L. Rimstidt in Indiana called the disappearance of the records a "sanitization" at best, and "at worst ... an outright fraud."
