The American Association for Justice today released a new report, Worst Corporate Conduct of 2018.
The report examines recent examples of corporate misconduct that negatively affect many of your clients, including:
- Navient’s predatory student lending practices;
- Energy companies’ denial of their role in perpetuating climate change;
- State Farm’s attempt to rig the justice system to avoid accountability;
- General Motors’s and Takata’s slow response in replacing potentially lethal airbags;
- Theranos’s deception of patients and investors with a product that didn’t work;
- Nestlé’s refusal to eliminate child slave labor from its supply chain; and,
- USA Gymnastics’s and Michigan State University’s failure to protect athletes from a sexual predator.
In addition to analyzing these instances of corporate misconduct, the report delves into the art of the corporate apology. Companies spend millions of dollars trying to figure out the best way to say sorry for the harm they caused without facing consequences for their actions. In fact, many of the companies highlighted in Worst Corporate Conduct of 2017 were leaders in saying sorry in 2018. But when corporate apologies are not enough to change behavior, civil justice allows citizens, consumers, employees, and investors to hold corporations accountable when they cause harm and deter future misconduct.
