When James Brogan, head of DLA Piper’s Philadelphia office, was brought aboard to defend three foreign subsidiaries of Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co. in a wrongful death suit filed in North Carolina state court, he immediately began thinking about how his firm could accomplish what previous counsel had been unsuccessful at removing the foreign subsidiaries from the litigation.
The suit, which had been brought by the parents of two 13-year-old North Carolina boys who were killed in a bus accident outside of Paris, alleged that the accident was the result of tire failure and filed claims against Ohio-based Goodyear USA and its subsidiaries in Luxembourg, Turkey and France.
