Late last month, General Motors issued a recall for nearly 1.4 million of its compact cars, including the Cobalt, citing issues of failed airbags and key-ignition troubles.

According to the company, there had only been 12 deaths in 34 collisions, however, a report from the Center for Auto Safety revealed that U.S. safety regulators recorded 303 deaths from airbags that failed to deploy.

In the recalled vehicles, the key could shut off the vehicle's engine and disable the airbags while traveling at high speeds.

Keeping up with inconsistency, the automaker began making headlines across the nation earlier this month as it was found out that GM had known about the problems with the ignition switch since 2001, according to Al Jazeera America.

To compensate and quell the issue, GM allegedly began issuing service bulletins with suggested solutions to auto dealers across the nation in 2005.

The recommendation was for the dealers to advise owners to remove "unessential items from their key chain."

According to the New York Times, the automaker's engineers suggested a solution, but GM executives declined to conduct the recall then because of the "cost and effectiveness."

GM had learned in September 2005 that the company's 2005 Chevrolet Cobalt had been the cause of a fatal accident, killing 16-year-old Amber Marie Rose. Regulators had found that the vehicle's engine had shut off at the time of the impact and didn't deploy the airbags.

That's when GM's lawyers opened their own file on the case. Almost nine years later, some of those lawyers are wondering now if they are now "part of the story" as attorney Lance Cooper put it when speaking with the Times.

Cooper was the attorney for the parents of Brooke Melton, a 29-year-old who lost her life while driving her Chevy Cobalt. He had been trying to seek retribution from GM for three years until the company quietly settled last September.

According to the Times, the law firm King & Spalding, which represented GM during Cooper's case, is now tasked with investigating GM.

GM Chief Executive Mary T. Barra asked the firm along with Jenner & Block look into why the company went more than a decade without notifying its consumers and regulators about the problem.

Cooper raises an interesting point that King & Spalding attorneys now need to ask themselves whether or not they advised GM to recall the vehicles upon first learning about the defect.