OAKLAND, Calif. (Legal Newsline) – Class action lawyers given the green light to sue S.C. Johnson & Son have filed a motion that, if granted, could prove costly for the company.
SAN FRANCISCO (Legal Newsline) – Reasonable consumers expecting 100% natural products could have been misled by S.C. Johnson & Son when it claimed its Ecover cleaning line is made with plant-based ingredients.
That’s the ruling of a San Francisco federal judge who on May 5 refused to grant the company’s motion to dismiss Elizabeth Maisel’s proposed class action over 14 Ecover products. The decision will allow plaintiffs lawyers at the Clarkson Law Firm and Moon Law to continue pursuing the case.
Magistrate judge Thomas Hixson denied all seven of S.C. Johnson’s arguments, notably that a reasonable consumer would not have been misled by its claims because he or she could read the ingredients list on the backs of the products and find whether they have synthetic materials in them.
SAN FRANCISCO (Legal Newsline) – A class action lawsuit that S.C. Johnson & Son misled customers when it said its ecover cleaning products are made “with plant-based ingredients” fails to identify a single lie, the company argues.
S.C. Johnson filed a motion to dismiss March 3 in San Francisco federal court against the class action being pursued by the Clarkson Law Firm of Los Angeles and Moon Law in Palo Alto. In a January complaint, those firms targeted the ecover line – which includes laundry detergent, dishwasher tablets and toilet cleaner.
The suit claimed ingredients like coconut and palm oil are subjected to “substantial chemical modification and processing” that creates an entirely new, synthetically created ingredient.”