A jury in Duvall County, Florida awarded $900,000 to John Patrick Teehan, a signal maintainer who injured his back after working for the Florida East Coast Railroad for over 25 years.
In the course of his signal maintainer work, Mr. Teehan had to lift batteries that weighed more than 100 pounds in awkward positions, bury wires underneath the railroad tracks by digging through railroad rock by hand, and lift and replace counterweights that were used on the gates at railroad crossings. Throughout the course of this heavy labor, Mr. Teehan sustained a low-back injury requiring a disc fusion. The Railroad took the position that the work did not cause the injury, but that it was simply a part of the aging process and a fact of life for a person in their late 50s.
The case was tried for a week by Jamie Holland, who is a Trial Structure instructor. After nearly four hours, the jury found for Mr. Teehan and awarded medical costs that exceeded what Jamie asked for.
The trial court originally dismissed this case on summary judgment, but Jamie, who works for Harrell & Harrell P.A., a Jacksonville, Florida law firm, earned the right to try the case after the appellate court reversed the trial court’s decision.
Trial Structure’s Charles Bennett also consulted on the case with Jamie to help simplify the case into digestible chunks for the jury that would withstand a complex barrage of medical chaos from the defense. About a month before trial, Jamie and Charles spent two days in Jacksonville working through the Trial Structure on the case.
Jamie says,
“With Chuck’s assistance we were able to significantly simplify the case to its core and put it into a Defense-resistance package. One of the Defense’s strongest arguments that we dealt with up front through the Trial Structure was the existence of surveillance showing our client riding his motorcycle to bike week and working all day long as a parking attendant at the Daytona Speedway.
One of the things that made this case difficult was that the defense claimed it was a chronic injury case happening over a work life exceeding several decades. In over 2 decades of trying railroad cases on behalf of injured railroad workers, one of the most difficult cases to try under the FELA is a chronic injury case. Unlike a car wreck where there is a very obvious mechanism of injury and we know the date and the time; in this case it was less clear. It is very easy for a jury to get confused by the medical causation and find that the wear out from the work is simply the aging process. It is also easy for the jury to get confused that the symptoms of exposure to work are triggers for when a client should know that an injury is occurring thereby killing the case on statute of limitations.
Navigating this mine field to a successful verdict is very difficult and railroads win more of these cases then they lose.
How did we deal with that in this case? We used Trial Structure to simplify the job tasks into only the tasks that were most important and highlighting the dangerous and risky tasks to the jury. We dealt with the symptoms of exposure as predictable excuses that the railroad would use to justify their bad behavior. We took the defense’s “We are a Safe Railroad and this is just part of the work” argument and forecasted it up front in opening statement so the jury could see that this was merely a blanket excuse for bad behavior.”