This article was previously published here: Law.Com on October 21, 2020
As lawyers, our jobs seem simple: hold accountable for the appropriate amount those responsible for hurting one of us. The right-sized settlement or verdict is our goal, for everyone responsible. But actually doing that is often complicated by those who hide the truth, seek to blame others, and refuse to be responsible.
On a hot summer day in Texas, a man working for a company gets in his work truck, a white Ford F-150, to go to a job and check on the job’s progress. He heads across town on a couple of highways, exits, and turns onto a road with a 40 mph speed limit. He crests a hill. The light at the bottom of the hill turns yellow and then red.
Coming from his right is a woman in her car. Her light turns green, and she pulls forward. But the work truck blows through the red light, hitting the woman’s front driver’s side and spinning her car 90 degrees. The white F-150 work truck steers left into oncoming traffic, avoids a couple of cars, and pulls onto a curb and into a bank parking lot where it finally stops.
When the police officer shows up a few minutes later, the man gets out of the work truck and says, “My brakes failed!” The officer looks under the hood and finds the brake fluid full. He gets in the work truck and checks the brakes, which work, and writes a ticket for the man running the red light.
The company tells the woman’s first lawyer the brakes didn’t fail, it was the fault of the man driving the F-150 work truck, just an accident and a mistake. They even blame the woman for pulling out from the green light too fast and try to settle before a lawsuit is filed. The woman’s first lawyer says, “Take the money. It’s the best you’ll ever do here because it seems like the man in the work truck just made a mistake.”
In Alabama, a 21-year-old lady walks into an emergency room (ER) having trouble breathing. The nursing staff records a pulse of 140 and an oxygen saturation of 89. A doctor on his first day working for the emergency room examines the lady for a few minutes and without checking the pulse and oxygen levels, says, “It’s probably nothing, get some rest, and if it doesn’t get better in a couple of days, go see your primary care physician.”
The lady goes home and dies in her sleep that night. The coroner finds she had a rare genetic disorder that caused an abreaction with the birth control pills her OBGYN prescribed.
The emergency room later says the doctor just made a simple mistake on his first day in a new ER and says he probably would not have been able to find the rare genetic disorder or been able to save the lady’s life even if he had looked at the pulse and oxygen levels. They blame the OBGYN for misprescribing the birth control pills and even blame the dead 21-year-old lady for not telling the doctor about the rare genetic disorder she did not know she had.
But who is really responsible?
At trial, the emergency room director testifies that the reason the doctor did not review the pulse and oxygen level was that the doctor did not have access to the computer system on his first day. “He needed to prove himself capable of working in our emergency room before we gave him access to the computer,” says the ER director.
The $9 million verdict against the emergency room was the largest verdict in the state that year.
Back in Texas, the woman hit by the white F-150 work truck refuses to settle with her first lawyer and finds a new lawyer, who gets the truck’s maintenance records in the lawsuit. In a deposition with the man driving the F-150 work truck, the new lawyer finds out the man had told his manager two days before he ran the red light that the brakes on that truck were soft.
The maintenance records show the company had not changed the brake fluid in over 104,000 miles. An expert hired by the new lawyer writes a report that says, especially on hot days, old brake fluid can boil causing brakes to fail, even if minutes later they work again, as the officer found.
The case settles for 38 times what the first lawyer advised the woman to take.
Finding the responsible parties takes hard work and courage. Plaintiffs lawyers spend most of our careers being told by defense lawyers, adjusters, and even judges, that we’re greedy, we’re wrong, we’re overcomplicating simple cases—that we’re not doing justice. But our job is to dig to find the truth from people and companies that refuse to be responsible, that hide from accountability, and that blame anyone and everyone they can, including us. That is doing justice.
Charles “Chuck” Bennett is a consultant with Trial Structure. He has tried cases to verdict for personal injury plaintiffs, criminal prosecution, and criminal defense. Bennett played professional basketball in Europe for eight seasons and brings his work ethic, intensity, and competitiveness for winning from the basketball court into the court of law. Along with the other Trial Structure consultants, Bennett has developed the substructures within Trial Structure that simplify the creation and presentation process and increase the jury’s focus on the defense’s betrayal.
Brett Turnbull is a consultant with Trial Structure. He has embraced the philosophy of keeping clients first in distinguishing himself as a leading trial lawyer, recognized for his jury verdicts and settlements on behalf of clients killed or injured by the negligent and wrongful actions of others. When Brett goes before a jury, he realizes he has one job: to get justice for his client by proving their claims and guiding the jury to award a fair and reasonable verdict. Turnbull has more than a decade of successful courtroom experience in complex litigation, including trucking cases, products liability, automobile defects, pediatric burns, traumatic brain injury, and nursing home malpractice.