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Scaling Legal Impact for Chickens to make factory-farm cruelty a liability
Please help scale Legal Impact for Chickens to make factory-farm cruelty a liability!
LIC sues companies and executives that abuse animals on factory farms. Since receiving a generous ACX grant in 2021, LIC has filed its first two lawsuits: the widely publicized Costco shareholder derivative case, Smith v. Vachris; and a cruelty suit against KFC-supplier Case Farms for carelessly trapping and crushing newborn chicks.
We also got the Rural King chain store to institute random animal-welfare audits for the chicks it sells, got a caterer to remove foie gras from its menu, got permission to file an amicus brief at the sentencing of a slaughterhouse, and more.
As a relatively new organization, LIC has already received a highly-sought-after recommendation from Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE), indicating that we have potential to do a great deal of good for animals.
LIC's work is hard because the legal system wasn’t built with animals in mind. But we also see glints of promise. Like successfully forcing Costco’s board to create a chicken-welfare committee to investigate our claims of neglect. Or showing that animal-welfare groups can weigh in to ask for a harsher punishment when an animal-abusing company gets sentenced for a crime—even if the crime itself wasn’t animal cruelty.
We’re developing new legal avenues which we hope will ultimately make pro-animal litigation so easy that companies realize they must clean up their act when it comes to animal welfare. We have already seen interest from other lawyers, law professors, and law students, for instance, in the duty-to-act-lawfully animal-neglect shareholder derivative strategy that LIC pioneered. That is, using a shareholder derivative suit to hold company executives accountable for violating their fiduciary duty to act lawfully when the executives make their company neglect animals. While the Costco case was dismissed on factual grounds, the judge seemed to accept our clients' contention that, if executives make a company commit illegal animal neglect, the executives are violating their fiduciary duty to act lawfully. We thus see our experience with that case as support for our thesis that shareholder derivative cases based on the duty to act lawfully are a promising avenue for future pro-animal litigation.
Now, LIC seeks to scale our work by taking on more lawsuits at once. And that’s important because LIC’s litigation strategy is all about shots on goal: Most pro-animal lawsuits fail. But the ones that win can go a long way toward improving animal welfare. For instance, a single chicken meat company may kill hundreds of millions, or even billions, of chickens per year. And successful suits can also light a pathway for future pro-animal suits to ultimately help America's 9 billion chickens who are slaughtered annually.
We will always be grateful to ACX and ACX readers for getting LIC started.
http://legalimpactforchickens.org
LIC seeks $90,000 to ensure that we have enough funds to hire specialist contract attorneys for all our outside counsel needs, in order to enable LIC to work on approximately five new and existing lawsuits over the course of the year. LIC currently has three full-time litigators on staff, as well as a full-time legal operations specialist. We handle the bulk of LIC’s litigation work, including developing new lawsuits, writing the first draft of all major briefs, and negotiating with opposing counsel. LIC also benefits from numerous volunteer attorneys. In addition, LIC also relies heavily on paid contract attorneys who fill specific one-off roles in our various lawsuits. For instance, in each lawsuit LIC brings, LIC must hire a local counsel who is barred in the state where LIC plans to litigate and familiar with the local courts. When LIC brings a lawsuit in a specialized area of law, such as shareholder derivative law, LIC also hires a contract attorney who specializes in that particular area and can advise us on it. And so on. LIC can do our best work on each case if we can afford to hire excellent contract attorneys to fill all the particular needs that come up in that case. The cost of contract attorneys for a given case varies greatly, depending on factors such as how specialized the area of law is, how long the case goes on, and whether we can find pro bono help. LIC estimates that, on average, we will tend to spend approximately $18,000 in contract attorney fees per case per year. Since we aim to work on approximately five new and existing cases in 2024, we expect to need about $90,000 for contract attorneys.