"Every week, more than 127 million customers visit Wal-Mart stores, supercenters, Neighborhood Markets and Sam's Club locations across America." "Wal-Mart employs 1.8 million associates worldwide, including 1.3 million in the United States." Those statements appear on Wal-Mart Stores Inc.'s news releases and its Web site.

Unfortunately for the world's largest retailer, some of those employees and customers sue for amounts small and large over wrongs real and perceived.

The company is battling what could become the largest U.S. class-action lawsuit ever, with billions of dollars at stake. At the same time, it faces new lawsuits every day from people who slip and fall in Wal-Mart stores, get robbed in its parking lots or believe they were wrongfully accused of shoplifting.

In May, Wal-Mart will fill the pages of the Connecticut Law Review with material drawn from a symposium in October at the University of Connecticut School of Law titled "Wal-Mart Matters." The symposium covered topics ranging from the potentially history-making Dukes vs. Wal-Mart Stores Inc. sex discrimination case and immigration law to anti-trust issues.

Wal-Mart is in the legal and political spotlight "probably because of the symbolic role that it plays as a company that has avoided being unionized," said Richard Vedder, an Ohio University economics professor and a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, which champions limited government and private enterprise.

"Being the largest retail corporation in America of course adds to its visibility," said Vedder, a panelist at the symposium.

Wal-Mart officials quit talking publicly several years ago about the number of cases pending against the company. It likely exceeds 10,000, based on numbers the company confirmed in 2001.

A sampling of new lawsuits in recent months offers a glimpse at the range of Wal-Mart's legal battles.

In Michigan, Julie Roehm, Wal-Mart's former high-profile advertising executive, sued for wrongful termination after she was fired, claiming she is owed hundreds of thousands of dollars.
She says in her lawsuit that Wal-Mart gave no examples of misconduct, then "made false and malicious statements to the media." In Indianapolis, a family sued Wal-Mart after a mirror in one of its stores fell on their 3-year-old son, killing him.

In Kentucky, a judge certified a class-action lawsuit by workers who claimed they were forced to work through breaks and meal periods. Pennsylvania Wal-Mart workers won a similar lawsuit in October, and several more are pending in other states.

In Iowa, a man sued Wal-Mart after he was charged with stealing a jacket. The charge was dropped when he produced a receipt for the jacket, which he'd bought at another Wal-Mart store.

John Simley, Wal-Mart's spokesman for legal matters, said each case is evaluated by lawyers at company headquarters, although cases are farmed out to hundreds of lawyers across the country. He declined to provide information about the number of lawyers Wal-Mart employs or cases pending against the company.

"It's not public information, so we don't provide details on that," he said.

THE BIG ONE

Among the current legal threats to Bentonville-based Wal-Mart, none stacks up to Dukes vs. Wal-Mart Stores Inc.

Filed in 2001 in California, the suit alleges that Wal-Mart discriminates against female employees by paying less-qualified men higher wages than women and promoting less-qualified men to management positions ahead of women.

Initially estimated to include a class of about a half-million women, the number may have grown to 2 million by now as employees come and go at the evergrowing company. All current or former female Wal-Mart workers since Dec. 26, 1998, are potential members of the class.

"There are none that are bigger than this one," said Joseph M. Sellers, co-lead counsel for the plaintiffs.

A federal judge certified the case as a class-action lawsuit in June 2004, a decision Wal-Mart appealed. A three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals heard arguments in August 2005 and has yet to rule.

"It's certainly a long time from the perspective of those of us who are awaiting a decision," Sellers said.

Depositions in the case have been on hold since 2003 while the certification issue is argued. Sellers, however, is seeking court approval to take former Wal-Mart Vice Chairman Tom Coughlin's deposition, citing his frail health.

Wal-Mart opposes the move. A hearing on the issue is set for Feb. 14.

Wal-Mart contends that female workers must sue local stores in state court because pay and promotion decisions are made at the store level.

Melissa Hart, an associate professor at the University of Colorado law school, has studied the Dukes case and finds the plaintiffs' arguments believable. Her areas of emphasis are employment discrimination, legal ethics and civil procedure.\

Particularly harmful to the company's case, she said, is a 1998 company-funded consultant's report that found a lack of equity between the sexes in management and recommended ways to address stereotyping. The plaintiffs argued the report was largely set aside and no changes were made.

As for potential damages, she said, "They'll be massive, whatever they are, when you have a class that size." Among the plaintiffs' arguments are that, in 2001, 67 percent of hourly workers and 78 percent of department managers were women, but only 36 percent were assistant managers, 14 percent store managers and 10 percent district managers.

In an article on the case, Hart contends that Wal-Mart stores have always looked to Bentonville for directives.

"Although Sam Walton is long dead, the tightly controlled, highly centralized culture that he created remains integral to the superstore's structure," she said.

WAL-MART FIGHTS BACK

Simley, the Wal-Mart spokesman, said he couldn't comment on the company's potential liability beyond what Wal-Mart said in its annual report nearly a year ago.

If Wal-Mart ultimately loses the Dukes case, the report notes, "the resulting liability could be material to the company." It adds that company officials "cannot reasonably estimate the possible loss or range of loss which may arise from the litigation."

Sellers, the plaintiffs' lawyer, also declined to speculate on potential damages. As for negotiations with Wal-Mart, he said, "They've given us no indication whether they're inclined to settle this."

In its appeal of the certification, Wal-Mart argues that evidence presented to the judge showed that "any pay disparity was localized in fewer than 10 percent of the stores nationally" and that the plaintiffs' statistics do not establish that members of the class suffered a common injury.

The judge's certification of the class action lawsuit, Wal-Mart says, stripped the company of its right to show that no discrimination occurred at individual stores or against individual plaintiffs and that "the district court simply ignored Wal-Mart's actual companywide policies, which prohibit discrimination and encourage equal opportunity."

The judge altered substantive law "solely for the purpose of certifying the largest employment class action in history," Wal-Mart argues.

Roger Pilon, vice president for legal affairs at the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington, called the Dukes case an example of "one of the more abused areas of our law today." "Are we to believe that Wal-Mart has discriminated against 2 million people?

This is discrimination law run amok," he said.

The lawsuit can't be separated from the constant political pressure on Wal-Mart from union-funded groups, Pilon contends.

"The hypocrisy that surrounds this is all but boundless," he said.
"Whenever Wal-Mart opens its door and advertises for help, all the, quote, little people, unquote, for whom these groups pretend to be speaking are lined up to apply for these jobs, and they are shopping at Wal-Mart because of the lower prices."

TAKING ON THE GIANT

At a less visible level, Nashville, Tenn., lawyer Lewis Laska continues to work a niche he carved out several years ago.

Although he says he has never sued Wal-Mart, he sells the how-to kits after studying the company's litigation tendencies.

He concedes that his Web site, www. wal-martlitigation.com, has become a bit dated, but says he plans to spruce it up this year.

"It's turned out to be a much more difficult project than I imagined," he said, adding, "It's safe to say that I get e-mails every day from disgruntled employees, injured customers, vendors, all seeking specific information or global kinds of information."

For a modest price, as law work goes, he sells packets of information on the different types of lawsuits Wal-Mart typically faces: ice in parking lots, causing injury; debris in parking lots, causing injury; unknown substance on floor, causing injury; merchandise falling off shelf, causing injury; customer hit by employee-pushed carts, causing injury.

And the not-so-typical: assault by employee; employee falling on customer; exploding merchandise.

Wal-Mart has a history of not settling lawsuits, Laska said, and historically has been viewed favorably by most people.

"At one point, it was extremely difficult to get a judgment against Wal-Mart," he said.

He sees that changing with verdicts such as the Pennsylvania case, in which the company was found guilty of forcing off-the-clock work by employees.

"There is an increasing awareness in the public, particularly people that sit on juries, that Wal-Mart is not always the good citizen that it claims to be," Laska said.