Candy lawsuit dismissal worth $5K in attorney’s fees
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The question wasn’t how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop, it was how much the 124-year-old Tootsie Roll Industries Inc. should receive in attorney’s fees after the withdrawal of a case alleging it underfilled boxes of its candies.
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Pasadena, California, on Monday awarded more than $5,000 to Chicago-based Tootsie Roll as the prevailing party in a putative class action filed by Ketrina Gordon that alleged the company left too much empty space in its boxes of Junior Mints and Sugar Babies. She argued that Tootsie Roll should either “fill the products' box with more candy to account for the size of the box” or “shrink the box to accurately represent the amount of the candy product.”
During litigation, Tootsie Roll stated that its products were “sold by net weight not volume,” which rendered her case moot. She argued that she should be entitled to attorney’s fees because the wording change on the box was not the relief she sought from the candy company, but the court disagreed. The court’s award, however, was less than half of the $10,709 Tootsie Roll sought in attorney’s fees.
