The lawyers who took on the big US tobacco companies, and won, have now set their sights on the food industry. Newsnight's science editor, Susan Watts, asks one of them why he has chosen this particular fight.
Don Barrett likes his opponents powerful, and rich. He is the lawyer whose decade-long battle to force the tobacco companies to admit they knew cigarettes are addictive and pay the medical costs of victims was depicted in the film The Insider.
He and his colleagues eventually forced a settlement that cost the industry more than $200bn (£124bn). The lawsuits made Mr Barrett a very wealthy man. But he says it is not the potential for another big pay-out that is now making him target "big food".
Mr Barrett is one of more than a dozen lawyers who has filed cases against some of the US food industry's biggest players.
Mr Barrett's case against Big Food is that companies are misrepresenting their products, promoting them as "natural" or "healthy", when in fact, he says, they are no such thing.
1 comment:
:-D the minute you come to the conclusion that there's NOTHING good about lawyers, one goes and does this.... too bad he's as old as he is, and won't have time to go after the diet industry when he's finished with BigFood -- but maybe there's a younger member of the firm who can follow his footsteps!
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