General Mills retracts policy on consumer’s right to sue.

The New York Times (4/20, Strom, Subscription Publication, 9.65M) reported that General Mills “on Saturday night announced in a stunning about-face that it was withdrawing its controversial plans to make consumers give up their right to sue it.” In an email “sent after 10 p.m. on Saturday, the company said that due to concerns that its plans to require consumers to agree to informal negotiation or arbitration had raised among the public, it was taking down the new terms it had posted on its website. ‘Because our concerns and intentions were widely misunderstood, causing concerns among our consumers, we’ve decided to change them back to what they were,’ Mike Siemienas, a company spokesman, wrote in the email. ‘As a result, the recently updated legal terms are being removed from our websites, and we are announcing today that we have reverted back to our prior legal terms, which contain no mention of arbitration.’”

        The AP (4/22) reports that the company “had posted a notice on its website, notifying visitors of a change to its legal terms – visitors using its websites or engaging with it online in a variety of other ways meant they would have to give up their right to sue,” and instead, under the new terms, “people would need to have disputes resolved through informal negotiation or arbitration.”

        MarketWatch (4/20, Cheng, 789K) and MSNBC (4/22, 45.1M) also report this story.