Considering all the times you’ve eaten food in your life so far, you’ve probably got a pretty good track record for avoiding stuff that will make you sick. But if you’ve ever been unfortunate enough to get food poisoning, you can probably recite all the gory details, even after all these years. You might have been “lucky” to get by with just fever, vomiting, abdominal cramps or diarrhea, but each year, many people experience food-related organ failure, coma or even death. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that every year about 1 in 6 Americans get sick from a foodborne illness, which also hospitalizes about 128,000 and kills 3,000.

Food safety lawyers represent people who have become ill due to foodborne illnesses, and they sometimes advise food businesses about regulatory compliance. Some of their largest cases have been the Jack in the Box E.…