By the time most Americans hear about a foodborne illness outbreak on the evening news, Ron Simon has often already filed suit. For more than three decades, the Houston-based attorney has built a career — and, his supporters would argue, a measure of public accountability — out of a corner of the law most trial lawyers never touch: representing the victims of contaminated food.
A Niche Most Lawyers Avoid
Simon, the founding and managing partner of Ron Simon & Associates, took an unusual path. Where many personal injury attorneys chase volume in familiar areas like car accidents or workplace injuries, Simon planted his flag in foodborne illness — a field that demands fluency not only in tort law but in microbiology, epidemiology, and the labyrinth of the modern food supply chain. His firm now describes itself as focused exclusively on that work, handling cases involving E. coli, Salmonella, Listeria, Norovirus, Cyclospora, botulism, and Vibrio.
That specialization is more than branding. Winning a food poisoning case usually means proving exactly where a pathogen came from — tracing a strain of bacteria from a hospitalized patient’s stool sample back through a restaurant, a distributor, and often a processing plant hundreds or thousands of miles away. Modern outbreak litigation leans heavily on whole genome sequencing, the same genetic-fingerprinting technology public health agencies use to link sick people to a common source. Simon has argued that the science is what separates his work from general personal injury practice, and why victims are often better served by a specialist than a local generalist when a case spans multiple states.
The Cases That Built A Reputation: A Sampling of Success in the World of Food Poisoning
Over the years his firm has represented victims in a string of the country’s most significant outbreaks. Among the matters the firm and food-safety press most often cite:
1. Peanut Corporation of America (2008–2009):** Simon has called this Salmonella outbreak a watershed in his career, representing families harmed after executives shipped contaminated peanut products — a case that put the human cost of corporate negligence in front of the public and ended in criminal convictions for company leaders.
2. Chipotle (2015 and after):** A series of E. coli and Norovirus outbreaks that, beyond the individual claims, pressured a major restaurant chain to overhaul its food safety practices.
3. Jif and Peter Pan peanut butter Salmonella outbreaks**, and illnesses tied to **Costco berries**, among other national product-based cases.
4. McDonald’s Quarter Pounder E. coli outbreak (2024):** Simon’s firm filed the first lawsuit, including for a teenager who battled kidney failure.
5. Regional outbreaks such as the 2023 Miguel’s Cocina and 2025 Aladdin Mediterranean Café cases in San Diego, and the 2025 August Egg Company Salmonella contamination reported across ten states.
Most recently, in 2026, Simon filed the first lawsuit in the E. coli O157:H7 outbreak linked to beef kofta served at The Kebab Shop, tracing the contaminated ground beef to an Illinois supplier, Olympia Foods. That outbreak sickened nine Californians — six of them children — and one of Simon’s clients, a young child, developed hemolytic uremic syndrome, the severe kidney complication that is the most feared consequence of the infection. The pattern, Simon has noted, is a familiar one: contamination at the supplier level, distributed across a restaurant chain, with children bearing the worst of it.
By the firm’s own count, Ron Simon & Associates has filed the nation’s first lawsuit in seven major foodborne illness outbreaks since 2024 alone — a speed that matters in a field where evidence degrades fast, recalls destroy the contaminated product, and stool samples must be collected within days.
Accountability As Deterrence
The firm reports having represented more than 6,000 victims and recovered over $850 million on their behalf, a figure that has climbed over the years as the practice has grown (some profiles cite totals ranging from $750 million to more than a billion dollars). Simon has said publicly that the dollar figures matter less to him than what they represent: accountability and closure for families, and — more broadly — deterrence. When companies know they will be held financially responsible, the argument goes, they invest more seriously in prevention.
There is a plausible mechanism behind that claim. High-profile litigation has repeatedly coincided with tightened industry practices, and Simon’s firm credits its work with prompting food safety upgrades at large companies. Whether litigation drives reform or simply accompanies it is difficult to disentangle, but the deterrent logic — that the cost of an outbreak should fall on those who could have prevented it — is a well-established rationale in product liability law.
A Public Voice
Beyond the courtroom, Simon has become a recurring presence in outbreak coverage on NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, FOX, and Telemundo, and his firm publishes Food Poisoning News, which circulates food safety and recall coverage to readers around the world. His peers have recognized the work: he has been named a Texas Super Lawyer 21 times, holds the highest AV peer-review rating for legal ability and ethics, and has appeared repeatedly on the National Trial Lawyers Association’s Top 100 Trial Lawyers list.
The Work That Will Never be Finished
Simon himself has acknowledged that the challenges are growing more complex, not less. Global sourcing means an outbreak can begin on one continent and reach American grocery shelves within days. Shifting climate patterns alter how and where pathogens spread. At the same time, the tools for proving liability — genomic sequencing, traceback analysis, digitized inspection records — are more powerful than they have ever been.
Food poisoning will never be eliminated entirely. But the premise of Simon’s career is that a great deal of it is preventable, and that the companies who could prevent it respond to consequences. More than thirty years in, he continues to be, as his own publication puts it, a relentless advocate for the proposition that no family should have to suffer a preventable foodborne illness — and that when one does, someone should answer for it.
