No. 5-99-0830 IN THE APPELLATE COURT OF ... - Appellate.net

panoply of 30,000 parts are affected.” C. 23923A.
Even plaintiffs’ own witnesses grudgingly conceded on cross-examination that
universal conclusions could not be drawn from a nonrepresentative sampling of dissimilar
parts. For example, Ryles admitted that evidence that a hood made by one manufacturer was
inferior would not prove that other parts made by that same manufacturer were inferior, let
alone that any parts made by other manufacturers were inferior. R. 4905-06. Similarly,
Griglio — who acknowledged that OEM part quality varied over time — admitted that it
was inappropriate to judge parts from one year based on parts from an earlier year. R. 5413-
14.
Only Clarke attempted to defend plaintiffs’ methodology of deriving universal
conclusions from nonrepresentative samples. But his reasoning actually proves State Farm’s
point. He testified that, in instances of “mass production” (i.e., by a single manufacturer at
a single factory), “all of the parts should be of a fairly consistent quality” “[s]o, you can,
with reasonableness,” derive conclusions about all the parts by examining an “individual
part.” R. 5595-96. But non-OEM parts as a category are not “mass produced” by a single
manufacturer at a single factory. Thus, the fact that one company might produce a bad hood
says nothing about whether different companies produced a good fender or good plastic
parts.
The circuit court also erred in allowing plaintiffs’ experts to introduce into the case
the emotionally-charged issue of safety. Despite the fact that they had never tested a single
non-OEM part for safety and lacked any qualification to opine on that topic, plaintiffs’
witnesses repeatedly asserted that non-OEM parts were likely unsafe. Anderton, for
example, testified that non-OEM parts presented a “safety concern” (R. 5761) and that non-
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