Sarah Mirando  |  September 4, 2012

Category: Legal News

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Kaba Faces Class Action Lawsuits Alleging Locks Are Defective

By Kimberly Mirando

 

Kaba E Plex lockKaba Ilco – one of the leading manufacturers of electronic locks – has been hit with federal class action lawsuits in three states claiming its pushbutton combination locks can be opened with a magnet. The class action lawsuit alleges Kaba knew of this defect since 2010, but “took no action to inform suppliers or end-users of the locks, or of the risk of unwanted entry by use of a magnet, until being sued and having numerous related actions consolidated for pretrial purposes by the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation in the Northern District of Ohio.”

The lead Plaintiff in one of the Kaba class action lawsuits, Yosef Davis of Chicago, alleges “the locks contain a serious design flaw. In particular, the locks can be opened by affixing a magnet to the outside of the locks, which manipulates the lock’s internal mechanism – the combination chamber – and allows the lock to be opened with ease and, most importantly, without inputting the necessary or correct combination.”



According to the defective Kaba lock class action lawsuit, “The size of the requisite magnet is small enough to fit in the palm of the hand, thus allowing any petty criminal or other interested person easy access to any area whose access is supposed to be restricted by the locks.”

Kaba advertises its locks as “durable,” “reliable,” “dependable,” providing “security,” being a “tried and true way to protect assets” and providing “unparalleled strength,” the class action lawsuit states, but they do not provide any of these promises. Instead, the defective Kaba locks have deprived consumers of the value they spent to purchase the locks and expenditures to restore the safety they sought in purchasing Kaba locks.

“Locks have one purpose – to provide security to those persons or contents within the room, house or building secured by the Lock. The very purpose for the purchase of a Lock — a valid sense of security — is destroyed when there is any defect in the Lock that causes it to not perform in the intended manner. Thus, Locks are different from almost any other consumer product. When the Lock does not provide the full and expected measure of security, it is essentially without any value or utility,” the Kaba class action lawsuit states.

 
“As a result of that lack of security, the purchasers of the defective Lock have not received the expected value of the Lock for which they paid a premium purchase price.

The Kaba lock class action lawsuit is brought on behalf of a proposed class of all persons who purchased one of the following Kaba locks primarily for personal, family or household purposes, not for resale, in Illinois: Kaba Unican or Simplex Series 1000/L1000, 2000, 3000, 5000, 6000, 6200, 7000, 7100 and 8100 and E-Plex 2000 Series Locks.

It is seeking damages and a Court order requiring Kaba to promptly repair and/or replace all defective locks and related defects free of charge.

A copy of the Defective Kaba Lock Class Action Lawsuit can be read here.

The case is Yosef Davis v. Kaba Ilco Corp., et al., Case No. 12-cv-6962, U.S. District Court, Northern District of Illinois. The Plaintiff is represented by Hunter J. Shkolnik and Steven M Aroesty of the law firm Napoli Bern Ripka Shkolnik.

 

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Updated September 4th, 2012

 

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